Fr. Brian Soliven Sermons

Go to confession my friends! 

On January 15th, 2019, a horrible scene unfolded in the popular DusitD2 hotel and commercial complex in Nairobi, Kenya. Muslim terrorists detonated a suicide explosive vest in a packed cafe and began 20 hour siege, killing anyone they came across. The first one to respond to the carnage was a British special forces soldier and devout Catholic was a man named Chris Craighead. Before Craighead entered the complex, before the rifle was raised and before he crossed into the corridors where terrorists were hunting innocent people, he paused to pray: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…”

To some, those words might seem almost impossibly small beside what awaited him. Yet the Catholic knows that Heaven has never despised small things. A few words, sincerely spoken, can contain an entire theology of human dependence upon God. Craighead was about to enter a place where his training could tell him what to do, but could not promise him that he would survive doing it. So he prayed.

And there is something profoundly Catholic about that sequence: prayer, then action; surrender, then courage. The Hail Mary is, among other things, a prayer for the hour of death. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Those words are usually said in the ordinary rhythm of Christian life. But imagine hearing them inwardly when death is no longer an abstraction, when the possibility of meeting it has become immediate. Now. And at the hour of our death.

The Rosary teaches the Catholic to live precisely in that tension. Its mysteries repeatedly lead the soul into places where fear, suffering, sacrifice and redemption meet. The Joyful Mysteries lead us to the Incarnation; the Sorrowful Mysteries to Gethsemane, the scourging, the Cross; the Glorious Mysteries beyond death to Resurrection and triumph.

The Catholic Church calls fortitude a cardinal virtue because courage is not merely a temperament. Fortitude is the strength to endure hardship and to persevere in the pursuit of what is good, even when doing so involves danger, suffering, or death. Craighead knew what a rifle could do. He knew what grenades could do. He knew that the people inside the complex were not abstractions but vulnerable human beings. His training did not make the danger unreal. It made him more conscious of it. Yet he went in. This is where Catholic charity enters the story.

Charity, in the Christian sense, is not simply kindness or affection. It is love of God above all things and love of one's neighbor for God's sake. It seeks the good of the other, even at a cost to oneself. There is therefore something deeply Christian in the willingness to enter danger for people one does not know. The civilians inside the complex had no claim upon Craighead's personal affection. They were strangers. He did not enter because they belonged to his family.

He entered because they were human beings. And Christianity has always insisted upon the astonishing dignity contained in those words. Each of us bears the image of God. The stranger behind the door is not merely someone else. He is a person for whom Christ died. 

That harrowing day of death, long planned by those cowardly terrorists, was thwarted by a faithful son of the Catholic Church, who knew where to turn in his hour of need. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you…”  He charged right in out of love. Christian love of the highest order. That day, he would save over 700 hundred lives. 

To produce good fruit, we must do this one thing. 

Beauty is not merely an ornament placed upon religion, as one might put flowers upon a table; it can be a signpost pointing beyond itself. A beautiful thing awakens in us a longing that no earthly object quite satisfies, as though the world were whispering that its loveliness comes from somewhere deeper. This is one reason Catholicism can appear so profoundly beautiful: in its churches, its music, its art, its liturgy, its sacramental imagination, and its reverence for the created world, it refuses to divide the visible from the invisible. The candle, the stained glass, the incense, the chant—all can become reminders that creation is not God, but is capable of bearing His glory. Catholic beauty at its best does not ask us merely to admire beautiful things; it teaches us to look through them, until the beauty of creation awakens our hunger for the Beauty who made it.

On January 15th 2019, the world saw the horrific scene as a group of heavenly armed Muslim terrorists attacked a hotel and commercial complex in Nairobi, Kenya. The sole goal -- kill as many Christians and non-muslims as possible. Unbeknownst to them, a SAS British forces solider was charging to the scene. After donning on his tactical vest, rifle and knife, he set out to engage the terrorist. But before he entered the hotel, he said a prayer. It's the only prayer that came to his mind at the specific moment... 

Last weekend, I had the great privilege of presiding over a wedding at St. Joseph’s, my old parish. The groom had once been one of my altar servers: a shy, quiet, somewhat awkward eleven-year-old boy. Now, more than a decade later, he stood before me as a young man in his mid-twenties, a competitive bodybuilder, and a bridegroom. And he had asked me to be the priest who would witness his wedding. How could I possibly say no?

I said yes gladly. For this is one of the great and hidden joys of being a priest: to watch a human soul grow. We meet people at one chapter of their lives and, if God is kind enough to let us remain, we sometimes get to see the next. We baptize children who later kneel at the altar. We teach young men and women who eventually stand before us as husbands and wives. We plant seeds whose flowering we may never see.

And sometimes, God allows us to see the flower. But there was another familiar face at the wedding. The groom’s older brother was there—a man I had not seen since I left St. Joseph’s in 2016. Both brothers had once served Mass with me on Sundays. They had stood beside me at the altar, close to the Holy of Holies, in the presence of that great Mystery where Jesus Christ gives Himself to us in the Eucharist—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. But somewhere along the way, his older brother began to drift. It did not happen all at once. Perhaps it rarely does.

He had questions. The same questions that have troubled generations of young people: Does God really exist? Why do I have to go to Mass on Sunday? Why does any of this matter? What if the Church is wrong?

Questions are not the enemy of faith. But questions can become doors, and every door may open either toward God or away from Him. Eventually, the questions became too heavy. The boy who had once served Christ at His altar walked away. He left the practice of the Catholic faith and followed the current of the world, where so many bright things glitter upon the surface of the water. And yet the human heart is a strange thing. It can possess much and still hunger.

It can taste pleasure and still thirst. It can win applause, accumulate success, pursue power, seek romance, entertain itself endlessly and still, when the noise finally ceases, hear the same ancient question whispering from somewhere deep within: Is this all?

The wedding was the first time my old altar server had stepped inside a church in years. I was, of course, delighted to see him.During the homily, I made fun of his long hippie hair. Afterwards, he returned the favor by making fun of my male-pattern baldness. But then he said something that I have not been able to forget. Referring to the homily, he said: “Now that’s how you get people back into church!” I do not know precisely what struck him. I do not know which word, which idea, or which buried memory stirred within him.

Perhaps it was something I said about marriage: that it is not merely a human arrangement but part of a divine design. That God created us male and female for a reason, and that the mystery of our bodies points beyond itself toward something greater. That we were made for a love which is not merely emotional or pleasurable, but total, faithful, fruitful, and sacrificial. And that the deepest form of love does not culminate in the possession of another, but in the gift of oneself. Which is precisely where marriage finally points us—to Jesus Christ. For the Cross is the place where Love reveals its true face.

There, the One who could have demanded everything instead gives everything. There, the Bridegroom gives Himself for His Bride. There, we discover that the strange hunger within the human heart is not an accident or an evolutionary inconvenience. It is a clue. Perhaps something in my old altar server's heart was pierced that day. What was it? I can only speculate.

But I am certain of this: the human heart was made for more than this world can give. There is a thirst in us that no earthly cup can finally satisfy. We spend our lives reaching for things which promise happiness. We pursue success, admiration, wealth, pleasure, romance, influence, beauty, experiences, and every glittering thing the world places before our eyes. And for a little while, they satisfy us. Then the satisfaction fades. So we reach again. And again. And again. Why? Because finite things cannot fill an infinite longing. There is a hollow place within us that creation itself cannot occupy. There is an ache for meaning, a homesickness for something we cannot quite name. But perhaps the ache is not the disease. Perhaps it is the invitation.

And this is the astonishing truth of the Gospel: we are not the only ones who thirst. God thirsts for us first. The One whom we have spent our lives seeking has been seeking us all along.

The Father waits for His children. Christ calls to the wandering heart. And the Holy Spirit continues to stir within us that ancient desire for something greater than the passing treasures of this world. So, my friends, I want to invite you on October 1st to the Well. Come with your questions. Come with your doubts. Come if you have been away for years. Come if you no longer know what you believe. Come if you have tried everything the world has offered and have discovered, perhaps quietly and painfully, that you are still thirsty. For the answer to our deepest questions is not ultimately a proposition, an argument, or an idea. It is a Person. The God who thirsts for us first. COME TO THE WELL. 

From the very beginning, God spoke of the Woman whose offspring would crush the serpent’s head: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers” (Genesis 3:15). In the fullness of time, that prophecy shone forth in the Blessed Virgin Mary, the humble handmaid whose “yes” opened the way for the coming of our Savior. Through Mary came Jesus Christ, the One who conquered sin, death, and the ancient serpent. No wonder the devils despise her: they see in her the humble Woman whom God chose to oppose their pride, the Mother of the One who destroyed their dominion. Mary does not draw hearts away from Christ—she leads them to Him.

(Stayed tuned at the end of the homily for a hymn from a Traditional Latin Mass wedding at St. Mary's)

Have you ever wondered why relationships are so dang hard?  The answer is easy – human relationships are hard because God has placed sinners beside sinners, so that we might learn the strange art of grace. We come seeking love and find ourselves confronted with pride, impatience, selfishness—and, most painfully, our own. The faults of another can become a kind of divine mirror, showing us what we would rather leave unseen. Yet this, too, may be mercy. For God is not merely interested in making us comfortable with one another, but in making us holy. He uses the friction of imperfect love to uncover the hidden chambers of the heart, teaching us to confess where we have sinned, to forgive where we have been wounded, and to receive mercy where we have failed. Thus the difficult person may become, by God’s providence, an unwelcome but faithful instrument of our sanctification.

When Christ says, “If your brother sins against you,” He speaks to the very condition of life in a fallen world: wherever sinners dwell together, there will be wounds, offenses, and the daily necessity of forgiveness. But the Gospel does not merely teach us how to endure one another; it calls us to participate in the very love by which God has redeemed us. At the Cross, Christ did not wait for us to become worthy of His love—He gave Himself for us while we were still sinners. Thus, when we love the neighbor who has wounded us, we are not simply practicing moral restraint; by grace, we are being conformed to Christ. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” means that the other’s good must become a matter of our own concern, even when love is costly. For love “does no evil to the neighbor”; indeed, it fulfills the law because the whole law finds its deepest meaning in the self-emptying love of Christ. The answer to the friction of human relationships is therefore not withdrawal, retaliation, or the keeping of accounts, but the Cross-shaped freedom to forgive, to seek the good of the other, and to love as we ourselves have been loved.

The wisdom of the world often teaches us to trust what we can measure, master, and explain; but Scripture invites us into a deeper wisdom, one that begins not with the exaltation of man, but with the revelation of Christ. The world says that wisdom is found in possessing answers; Christ shows us that true wisdom is found in knowing the One who is the Truth. What appears foolish to the world—the Cross, surrender, humility, obedience—becomes, in the light of God, the very doorway to life. For the wisdom of Scripture does not merely make us clever; it makes us new. And when the brilliance of human thought has reached its limits, we discover that the ancient words of God were not behind us at all, but were pointing us home.

Mother Teresa reminded us that poverty is not found only in places where people lack food, shelter, or material possessions. She spoke of a deeper poverty that can exist even amid wealth—the poverty of loneliness, indifference, and feeling unloved. Her message challenges us to look beyond statistics and borders and recognize the human need for compassion everywhere. True richness, she suggested, is not measured by what we possess, but by how deeply we care for one another.