August 13th - Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

This past week I saw the film, Oppenheimer. I’ve been waiting for this film for a year, so I was very excited to walk into the theater, not to mention the fact that I have not been to the movies since before the pandemic (last movie I saw was The Way Back, a great portrait of addiction). Concerning Oppenheimer, there are many things to talk about, we can talk about the morality of the atomic bomb, the sin of adultery (and frankly the issue of nudity in cinema), we can even talk about the basic connection between faith and science. However, what may be overlooked is the simple fact that the film is three hours long.

When I walked into the theater, I was shocked to see that every seat was full (on a Tuesday night). People made the decision to spend three hours of their life watching a film about the creation of the atomic bomb. I can imagine that most were not physicists, most were not historians, maybe most did not even know anything other than the fact that Christopher Nolan directed it, and Cillian Murphy starred in it. Yet they came.

For many Catholics, the primary criticism of the Church is, the mass is boring, and too long. Many arrive every Sunday because they know that they are commanded to, and yet many sleep in and never experience the liturgy. I gladly paid to see Oppenheimer even though it was a three-hour film, because I know that in addition to my love of history, I knew that I would be entertained. When we come to the liturgy, it is not enough to be entertained (many of the aspects of the liturgy go beyond our human senses). We do not come to the liturgy because it is entertaining or fun. We come to the liturgy because for that one hour a week we are lifted out of our moral world in order that we can encounter the Divine. We do not come to see famous actors, we come to reenact the passion of the Son of God, so that we may witness the love which the God of the universe has for us. We ought not to count the minutes until the liturgy is over, instead we ought to thank God that he loves us so much that he makes Himself present to us.

As St. Padre Pio said so beautifully, “It is easier for the Earth to exist without the sun than without the holy sacrifice of the Mass.”