 to say please be seated for the sermon. You know, a special thanks to Bishop Jeffrey Monford, the Bishop of the Diocese of Steubenville for his welcome here. He left me with a nice note in my room to President Father Sean, and of course, Father Nathan. Thank you. Father Nathan, thank you. He's been really. If you want someone who knows hospitality, Father Nathan. And of course, I'm especially indebted to Amy Roberts. Amy Roberts is here on the faculty at the University of Steubenville. But you think that's where she got her fame? No, it was in Knoxville. It was in the Diocese of Knoxville. There you go, where I was the Bishop there for eight years. So you don't mind me bragging a little bit. So we're told that Frank Sinatra recorded 17,810 songs. I know this because it's on the internet. And of all the songs that he recorded, a number of them are very famous. By the way, I'm not going to sing any. However, I am going to read you a little reflectively the lyrics of the songs that I've been thinking about for a long time because it so captures songs that did that. But I'm going to recite, I got to be me. Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong, whether I find a place in this world or never belong, I got to be me. I've got to be me, whatever can I be. But what I am, I want to live, not merely survive. And I won't give up this dream of life that keeps me alive. I got to be me. I got to be me. The dream that I see makes me what I am. That far away prize, a world of success, is waiting for me if I heed the call. I won't settle down. I won't settle for less. As long as there is a chance that I can have it all, I'll go for it alone. That's how it must be. I can't be right for somebody else if I'm not right for me. I got to be free. I've got to be free, daring to try to do it or die. I've got to be me. I'll go it alone. That's how it must be. I can't be right for somebody else if I'm not right for me. I've got to be free. I just got to be free, daring to try to do it or die. I've got to be me. Are you glad I didn't sing that? Now, Jeremiah would have nothing of what I just read. Would want to be free. Jeremiah would not want to be a false self. He wouldn't want to live life pretending to be someone he's not. The difference is the Frank Sinatra song. Those of you who are Frank Sinatra fans, in fact, please don't tell my oldest sister I gave this sermon. She loves what was he called big old blue eyes. Yes, some of you love them too. I see that. Words that he spoke or sang, they put him right in the center of his world. Thank God for all of you coming to this catechetical workshop because you know that your destiny is about God's plan and that you come each year and some of you have come multiple years because God's plan needs our whole lifetime to uncover. I'll be mentioning an example of some. No, Jeremiah heard from the word of God that God had a plan from him from the very moment in which he was in the womb of his mother. There was a plan and that plan he resisted. He said, I am too young. Many of you may remember that St. John Paul II in the book that he wrote, I think it was gift and mystery. It recalled his 50th anniversary as a priest. So I don't have the math. I think it was, well, I shouldn't even have guessed when it was. It was sometime in the 1990s. And in it, he lamented the fact. He told the story that when he was, I think, 37 or 38 years old, he was appointed as an abyssin. And he complained to, I guess, the cardinal in Krakow or Warsaw. He said, I'm too young. And the cardinal said to him, that's a defect that will soon be corrected. It's in his book. It's a beautiful statement. Not a beautiful statement. Think back to when that first tug of your heart occurred when you first felt that your destiny was not your own. I go back to my 10th grade in Catholic high school in the chapel. I'm not sure what drew me there. I'm not sure why I felt the call to become a priest. No priests or sisters or anybody in my family. They were good people, but there were nobody from a religious vocation. But somehow it must have been like Jeremiah. I hope it has been in your life where God somehow touched his heart. Oh, there is resistance. Jeremiah says, I'm too young and you and I have our own words for resisting God's call. But it's much more than the vision of Frank Sinatra. It's a brand of freedom that truly and lasting makes us free. It's not the kind of freedom that has us seek joy and it's always around the next corner. But rather it's a freedom that leads us to serve others. There's a beautiful book that I just finished reading so you'll be a victim of it. It's by Surveys Pinkars. He's a Dominican. He died about 10 years ago. It's called The Spirituality of Martyrdom to the limits of love. And it's a beautiful book, The Spirituality of Martyrdom to the limits of love. They say that Father Pinkars, a moral theologian, was probably very influential to St. John Paul II when he did the encyclical Splendor of Truth. And in it, he says this. He said, no one starts out. In fact, let me read the first words. No one, it seems, spontaneously desires to suffer martyrdom. In other words, no one starts out life thinking, I wanna be a sacrificial hero. But yet, if they are open to God's plan and God's destiny, he'll reveal himself. You know, it was I think in this June that Maximilian Colby, exactly 75 years ago in 1941, took a step forward in a concentration camp of Auschwitz. I'm thinking of it, because I leave for Poland on Saturday. I'll be, I'm blessed to be one of the catechists for World Youth Day. And Father Colby, St. Maximilian Colby, when I read his biography, was a holy man. He was a devout man. Someone just gave me a little piece of cloth, a little relic of him and devotion to speak. So a very holy man. He was a journalist. He did many things creatively and he probably thought at one time, well, I'm on my path of life. This is what God wants me to do. And then 1941 came. He finds himself in Auschwitz and there was a man, a husband and a father who was designated to die. And who cried out, please don't kill me. I have a family. And something moved his heart. The spirit that moved Jeremiah centuries and centuries before that made him say, I'll stand in his place. The theme of the spirituality of martyrdom, the book says that martyrdom is not really understood as a brave act of giving of life, but rather it is seen as a humble path of witnessing in our words, but also in our behavior. We are so much taken up by the love of Jesus Christ in our life and think of nothing other than to give back. The way we can give back, the way we treat the person in front. And so Maximilian Colby did just that. The gospel reading talks about a parable. It's a parable of nurturing the gifts and it's got a sad part to it, doesn't it? I tell young people when I'm in the process of getting them ready for confirmation. I say that if I were a coach and I was beginning a baseball team during the summer, certainly I would look to see if there were some people who had a little talent. The second thing and maybe the more important thing I would look for is who shows up for practice? In fact, I tell them that there are people who've been given musical talents and have squandered them because they've never developed them. They fell on rocky ground. No, you come to this catechetical conference precisely because you want the ground in which the seed of faith is planted to be fertile, to be rich so that not so much you bear grapefruit, but rather Christ bears grapefruit through you. Bishop St. Apollonaris is known very little in the church. I looked him up though and I found that there's a high school named after him in California and I also found that in the second century, he was an apologist. He was a catechist and when Marcus Aurelius, the emperor had the law of the land, it was Apollonaris who bravely stood up and witnessed to his faith in Jesus Christ. It wasn't because he wanted to become a bloody martyr. It was simply because he was so much in love with the one who has first loved him that he couldn't do otherwise than generously witness to the faith. It's not so much, no, I gotta seek God's plan so that I can be the best with his grace.