5th Sunday After Pentecost (2025)

Sermon of Father John A. Perricone on the 5th Sunday After Pentecost given Sunday, July 13th, 2025 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Jersey City, New Jersey. Father transports us to a heavenly glimpse of the Church's enduring glory by recounting the sacred ordinations of 68 young men—including a beloved former altar server—who embraced the cassock and tonsure to become warriors for Christ the King. Media courtesy of Cantantes In Cordibus. Please like the video, subscribe to the channel, and share with your Catholic Friends! 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.

Would you allow me this morning to bring you to heaven?

For me to do that, I must ask you to go to the churches of San Michele e Gaetano in Florence, Italy, 2 weeks ago, where the Institute of Christ the King, that traditional order of priests, had their ordinations to the minor and major orders of priesthood. There, in that glorious Florentine baroque church, the Institute of Christ the King, elevated to those minor and major orders over 68 candidates. Among them, our own Joseph Ventura.

Joseph was only the height of Matthias when he began to serve my masses at St. Anthony’s many years ago. What joy it brought to my heart to see him now advancing to the altar of God as a seminarian.

These major and minor orders of mother church, I thought I should bring to your attention because they are literally, if you were there, are like the unveiling of paradise.

The youngest of the candidates, and among whom were Joseph Ventura, at the beginning of this glorious ceremony, walked down the middle aisle of that church. And the first ceremony was the clothing of the Roman cassock.

If you watch closely, you would have seen that 13 or 14 young men, the youngest of them in the seminary, were coming to the altar dressed in the apparel of the world. Their jackets, their white shirts, their ties, and then there was the dramatic moment when each one individually stood before the bishop and he unloosened their tie and set it aside.

He unbuttoned their white shirt and set it aside.

He then took off their jacket and set it aside, and then the moment of great transcendent drama, the bishop took the Roman cassock and placed it over the head of the candidates, buttoned it, set his sash comfortably, gave him the white Roman collar, and then blessed him.

After that, those same candidates again ascended the altar and knelt before the bishop for the solemn first order of tonsure.

The candidate then knelt before the bishop and lowered his head. The bishop took a golden scissor and cut five locks of the candidate's hair in the shape of a cross.

In the Middle Ages, the candidate would have the entire crown of his head shorn of hair. This was a glorious and moving symbol that the young man now renounced all the vanities of the world.

I hope each and everyone at that ceremony recognized that it was redolent of an ancient Roman ceremony, when the head of a Roman household would receive a new slave. The slave would kneel before him, and the Roman head of the household would shave his entire head of hair as a sign that the slave no longer belonged to himself. He belonged to that Roman household.

And so the candidate for priesthood, after the tonsure, he knows he is no longer his own property. He is now the property of Holy Mother Church.

If you were there and actually witnessed these ancient ceremonies, it almost seemed as though the earth were moving beneath your feet.

You saw these young men clothed in the cassock like warriors about to go into battle for Christ the King. You looked at these young men in their black cassocks, and you saw the triumph of the cross, you saw the victory of the Holy Catholic Church, and your hearts would swell with pride.

Each and every time that young man wears the cassock, or any priest wears the cassock, as he should every day of his life, everywhere that he is, the cassock is like a sermon to the world, beckoning them to the world of the supernatural.

I brought you to heaven this morning because I know that all of you with me suffer each day at the hands of the enemies of the church outside her gates, but especially we suffer on the enemies of the church within the gates of the church itself.

And just to think that the Institute of Christ the King, two weeks ago, raised up 68 men to the minor and major orders to be warriors of Christ, should thrill you, should make you walk with a surer step when you leave church this morning, because you know now, even as we continue to choke on the dust of battle, that heaven has not abandoned us.

God bless you.