This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death, a woman who passed away due to a severe auto accident on May 12, 1998. In light of today's gospel and a particular letter I received last week, I was thinking about own my mother and the issues that she kept close to her heart that I wish to share with you today.

Zaira Zelinda Cosenza was born in Italy in the year 1930. She was born in Calabria, Italy; if Italy looks like a boot, then Calabria is represented by the toe that is punting the "football" of Sicily. Because she was born in the 1930s, many in her Italian village considered my mother the "black sheep" of her family because, unlike other Italians her age, she was not married in her teenage years (this was very common back then).

In the mid-1950s, my mother was sent to the United States in search of a husband and a new life. She came to this country as a single, olive-skinned woman who felt the pains of discrimination that were very evident during a turbulent time in our country's history. As she would tell me, the way she was treated, upon which she was looked, made her become twice as tough as others around her, because she felt as if she needed to be in order to get through that very difficult time of life.

As a result, my mother championed many causes during her lifetime on behalf of others that she felt were being mistreated or against whom were discriminated. She dedicated her life to taking care of cultural groups in the areas in which she lived. She went to nursing homes and took the residents out to lunch at restaurants or at our house out of Christian love. She dedicated her life out of love and made sure that those who were treated the lowliest, in her opinion, were treated in the same way that the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel implores us to live: When you loved the least of my brethren, it is then that you loved me.

I guess I have picked up that passion from my mother on behalf of those who have been mistreated in society. When I see an injustice, unfortunately, I am not subtle in my anger that boils within me because I know, from personal experience, how hate and discrimination blind the good person who does bad things. When I see this kind of hate taking place in the world, I can understand what the words of our first reading mean in reference to these actions:

"Do not judge from… appearance or from… lofty stature, because I have rejected (them). Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart."

Over the last few weeks, I have received a couple of letters that, unfortunately, have made my blood boil, not because I wish to live as an angry person, but because these letters violate the greatest of theological virtues, the virtue of love in God's name. I would like to quote an excerpt from one letter:

The St. Pat's neighborhood I grew up in no longer exists. It is primarily made up of Hispanic and African American families, not third generation Irish. The sad fact is that while it is happening there now, in five or ten years it could happen to (everyone else), too. (Some areas of Joliet have) been blessed to have families that pay the tuition and are multicultural by choice; that difference alone could keep the rest of us alive.

How do you respond to such blatant racism? How do you respond to someone who does not look at every individual as born in God's image and likeness, as someone who is sacred in the eyes of God because God made that someone? If my mother were alive today, she would implore me to do as Jesus did - to defend those who are considered defenseless in society. It is the more difficult path and certainly the more dangerous one, but it is the path that models the life of Christ, a model that will ultimately unite us with Christ on the last day in heaven.

I came to a conclusion in my life that I would rather fall on a sword than compromise the equality of the people I serve. Similar to my mother, I came to find out that if I feel that someone's safety is compromised, if their character is assassinated, then I have an obligation to defend that person in the name of love, to replace the hate in the world with the presence of God. The reason we celebrate a Season of Lent is to remind ourselves that Christ came down to this earth for that specific reason. In the first century, discrimination and ridicule were rampant all throughout Galilee and the surrounding regions. Samaritans were disparaged; Gentiles were cast off as people not worthy of the faith. Women were considered second class citizens. Discrimination was at a very high level.

Christ came down to the world in order to remove those barriers and specifically serve those who were mistreated. He elevated the role of women to an equal position. He came to the world not for the righteous but for the sinner. As an example of faith, our Lord constantly referred to the redeemed lower class faithful of the region as the models of faith from which we all should model our lives.

And what was the result of this love? What did our society do to a man who came to redefine the manner in which we treat and love each other? In today's gospel passage, the Pharisees became furious because the Lord performed an act of love on the Sabbath. They grew in hate out of an act of love. And as a result, the Pharisees and Sadducees slowly began to plot our Lord's death for doing nothing more than elevating the virtue of love by feeding the hungry, by giving sight to the blind and by loving those who were not loved by others. In the scriptures, a group of zealots began to incite a riot to rid themselves of this man who was not like them, a man who caused a type of change that rocked the apple cart. And as the riot built steam, they tried to smear the reputation of the Savior. They condemned him falsely with sin in their hearts. They hung this man on a cross in a great act of hate and justified their actions by saying he was not like them, he was vastly inferior, and that he deserved to die.

If we can learn nothing else in today's society, we must learn that the Season of Lent is a time of forgiveness and repentance, of love instead of hate. On Ash Wednesday, we were implored to turn away from sin and to believe in the gospel. In today's reading, we are implored Do not judge from… appearance or from… lofty stature, because I have rejected (them). Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart.

In this homily, I ask all of us, I implore all of us, to learn how to not just accept the people who live in our community but to embrace them, not as people who are black or white, Catholic or Protestant, but as brothers and sisters created in God's image and likeness. I implore that all of us treat the people in this room as Christ would want us to treat them, in a spirit of Christian charity, to love them and protect them and to give their lives to them in a spirit of Christian charity. For when we do, we are able to look into the hearts of others as God is able to do. In this act of love, we receive the spiritual vision of God that can see the goodness of every person present, even if the person present cannot see the good that is in their own hearts.

In the last year of her life, I remembered my mother returning back to high school and college, formally pursuing a goal of her own after spending her entire life serving everyone else in God's name. For me personally, I have tried to model that example from my mother. I have tried, often with failure, to model the life of Christ. Let us all try to do the same, to model this life of love and forgiveness by offering this love to everyone we meet, both great and small.

This is our prayer.