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You may be wondering who is sitting in the sanctuary whom you have not met before and his name is Michael Tirnen, his family is from Southern California, a couple of years ago he got his degree from Franciscan University in Stuvenville which is I think the finest Catholic University in the country, one of the finest in the world and Archbishop Chaput has assigned him to us, he is going to be with us for the next six months, he is a prospective seminarian and he is here and the Archbishop wants him to be here to discern should he study for the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Denver. He is a great blessing to have with us in the parish; he is going to be in the school a great deal working with our young people, with the youth Mass, with the youth rallies we have on Sunday evenings, and a great deal else. He will be taking classes this fall and so I’m very excited about him being with us and I encourage you to introduce yourselves to him and we welcome Mike to our parish.

Before I give this homily I want to tell you what I’m talking about next week. Just give you a ‘preview for coming attractions’. Next Sunday I’m going to be talking about money, I do that once a year, and so I’m going to give my annual ‘sermon on the amount’. And so I’m just going to be, in my homily next weekend, tying in with pastors across the entire Archdiocese of Denver whom Archbishop Chaput has requested that we preach on Hearts on Fire, which as you know is the program of giving in a stewardship way weekly to your parish. And I just want to next week thank you for your generosity which makes possible the works that we do.
I don’t know if you realize, but by the end of this year we will have spent a half of a million dollars on upgrading our parish facility, did you realize that? Between the church that has just been finished, the gymnasium that has just been entirely renovated and as you know we are building a library-media center and more classrooms in the north end of the school building which will be done by Christmas. All of that has cost about a half a million dollars and has been saved over the last couple of years because of your generosity. We haven’t had to have a special appeal, which really is extraordinary if you think about it. So next week what’s my purpose; to thank you for your generosity, to ask you in your week to week giving to be as generous to this wonderful parish as you possibly can. It is your giving that makes possible the wonderful works that are done for God’s honor in this place. So, now you know my sermon for next week.

Many of you know very well by now that one of my favorite saints is Saint John Vianney, the pastor of the little town of Ars at the beginning and middle of the nineteenth century. One of the most beautiful gifts that I’ve ever received is a little relic of Saint John Vianney, a tiny piece of his bone. I keep that in my room as a constant reminder to intercede for you and to ask his intercession for our parish family of Saints Peter and Paul.
He is really a wonderful story, he barely got through the seminary and he had to take his exams for courses over and over and over again; he kept failing his exams, he would draw a blank and it never seemed as if he could possibly pass through the seminary and be ordained. And he didn’t really have any gifts in particular, he was a poor speaker, his classmates considered him very ugly, he was really not much that anyone would look at twice. But one thing he had, and he had a great deal of it, oh how he loved God! He loved God so much, and after he was finally ordained later than anybody else the Bishop sent him to a tiny little wide space in the road called Ars. The kind of town that if you blink twice you pass without noticing. They figured that he wouldn’t get into much trouble there and he was assigned there in the years following the French Revolution. The French Revolution had become a bitter attack against the Church and the people’s faith in France. The French were killed by the hundred of thousands and by the end of  the revolution Catholic France laid in ruins and the faith of the people of France seemed to be lost forever.
But in the years following that terrible revolution word slowly spread about a remarkable priest in a tiny little town named Ars. And this priest spent long hours hearing confessions and in the confessional, it was told, he was able to read your soul. And people walked out of his confessional, their lives changed for ever. God was using this little priest in order to bring deep forgiveness to people who had seemed to long ago forget about God. Saint John Vianney, it was told, was hearing confessions sixteen hours a day, seven days a week and all of France was coming to his confessional in order to receive the Lord’s forgiveness. God brought this tiny little priest to this tiny little town and then he brought all of France to that place, so that through this priest God might bring France back to Himself.
There was a priest in a town just next to Ars, and he was a very talented man, he was a brilliant speaker, he was canon of the Cathedral, he was very talented, and yet everyday all the long lines of pilgrims passed right by his church, his Cathedral; they didn’t come in to hear him preach, instead they went on to Ars. Day after day he saw the pilgrims pass him by and go to Saint John Vianney. What made it specially hard for this priest was that he was in the seminary with Saint John Vianney. He was the top of the class, Saint John Vianney failed every thing. And this priest considered Saint John Vianney completely unworthy to even be a priest. So one day he wrote Saint John Vianney a letter, and this is what he said: "Lets be honest you and I, you are a charlatan, people are coming to you because you are the biggest trickster in France. For the good of the Church stop this at once. Send the people away, for you are completely unable to take care of them." What he was saying of course was: "send them to me, I’ll do a much better job than you."
Saint John Vianney received the letter, he opened it up and read it, and read the signature at the bottom, and you know what he did? His face lit up and he was filled with great joy, because Saint John Vianney loved the people that came to him across France, but how he hated the praise. They were all singing his praise but Saint John Vianney knew he had nothing to do with it, it was the Lord not him. So he wrote back a letter to the priest and he said: "At last I found someone who knows the truth about me, would you consent to be my confessor?" Isn’t that amazing?

Our Lord Jesus spoke to the twelve apostles in today’s gospel and He tells them that He is going to die and rise. And as they all walk as a group behind our Lord they are all talking; what are they talking about? Our Lord asks them: "What were you discussing on the way home?" At this they fell silent for on the way they had been arguing about who was the most important. They were so filled with the sin of envy that it was not enough for them to be with the Lord, they had to have the highest place with the Lord at the expense of everyone else.
Saint James says: "Where do conflicts among you originates? You envy and you cannot have, so you quarrel and you fight." Boy, does that sound familiar, right? And we can be envious about everything. We can be envious of another person’s possessions, of their looks, of their personality, of their good fortune, of their bank accounts. We can be envious even of their holiness. There are a lot of times that we have spiritual envy towards another person’s holiness and their relationship with the Lord.
Mark Twain once said, tongue in cheek that he met a man who was so envious, he was so envious; how envious you ask, so envious that he wished to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Now that’s envy.
The problem is this: Envy is forbidden by the tenth commandment and even more, it is forbidden by the great commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
And envy is the silliest sin, because it leads to hatred. The very first sin ever committed was the sin of envy. Satan looked at the beauty of God, at the power of God, at the wisdom and the omnipotence of God and he was filled with such an envy that that envy was turned to hatred, and he says to God: "I would rather reign in hell than serve You in heaven."
The very first murder on earth was committed by who? Who committed the first murder? Cain, why? He was envious of his brother Abel.
Why did the high priest turned Jesus over to the Romans to be killed? Envy! The crowds loved the Lord but not him. And so he turned over the Lord to be crucified.

Envy destroys families. How often have we heard someone say: "Mother always liked you better than she liked me."  How many families have been destroyed because the will was read and one member perceived that another got more than they did. How often a family has been destroyed by envy?
Envy destroys communities. How often a family that seems to be wealthier than us or have better fortune or whatever than us seems to be more blessed by the Lord than us, becomes an object of envy and an object of hatred.
Envy even brings about wars. How often do nations go to war against another because they perceive that that other nation has more than they might have.
Even parishes are destroyed by spiritual envy. The envious person, far from being joyful when they see the spiritual blessings of another becomes angry at the blessings of another. And the reason why envy is so silly is that it doesn’t bring any happiness. If we are envious of another person and they become impoverished (whom we are envious of), does that make us richer? If they become unhappy, will I be happier? If they sin, will I become holier because of their sin?
Envy destroys joy and leads to all kind of sin, not the least of which is gossip. How we love to gossip against somebody whom we are envious of. If we hear anything negative about them, how we love to gossip. And if we don’t have anything negative, well, we’ll make it up anyway.

What do we do if we are honest? We have all heard ourselves described in this definition of envy, haven’t we? To one degree or another, everyone of us are guilty of the sin of envy. There is somebody or some situation that we envy where we are saying: "Dear Lord You are not doing a very good job, why don’t You give me what they have, and in the mean time let me continue to despise them more and more."

What is the cure for envy? (and with this I close). A daily prayer of thanksgiving.
You and I, each day seek to be grateful to God in our prayers. Why? God gives us everything. He gives us nothing less than His very own Son. God gives us Himself, what more could He give? When we pray daily our hearts become grateful. And a grateful soul is incapable of envy.
The second cure is the practice of generosity. Generosity with our material things, with our time, with our service of others. When we are generous our Lord is able in a powerful way to heal the sin of envy.
You and I, there are times when we want to be the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral. We want to be the center of attention and when those times come we ask the Lord for the gift of a grateful heart and a gift of generous hands for our Lord and for our neighbor.