Sunday Sermons

“EAST NEW YORK CATHOLIC CHURCH:
Sermon by Father Carroll”
The Brooklyn Eagle, June 20, 1870

The Rev. Father Carroll delivered a sermon yesterday in his church in East New York, taking for his text the parable of the invited guests, St. Luke, xiv chapter, 16th to 24th verse. He spoke in substance as follows:

Our Divine Lord proposes this parable, the drift of which is: The Banquet or Supper is the Kingdom of Heaven, the Owner Almighty God, and the servant he had sent out to invite the guests, Jesus Christ, and after him the Bishops and Priests of the Church. The people invited are all men: Jews, Christians, and all other from the highest to the lowest rank in life, are invited without distinction to share in His Kingdom. But we are told that the guests excluded themselves on many pretenses, and we see how He was offended at the replies received from them, when He said, not one of the guests invited shall taste of my supper. The feast is the Kingdom of God, that place prepared for all human beings stamped with His likeness, and it is incomparably great on account of the Being that has prepared it great on account of the delicacies there prepared for those that are just, for God has promised us nothing less than the enjoyment of Himself, and great on account of its length, for as long as God is God this banquet prepared shall be set to His faithful children. Still, notwithstanding the greatness of the supper, there are men found to make excuses for absenting themselves in our own time. Those outside the Catholic Church have a thousand excuses, but if we analyze them they are either the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, or the pride of life, for they know that if they come to the Catholic Church they must trample on those wicked ties that would separate them from Jesus Christ. There are may who would enter the Catholic Church to-day, but for the idea of what the world would think of them. Now is it human respect that keeps them outside the Catholic Church, and by the advice of friends they are kept away from entering it. Then again they will lose their situation if they become attached to the true fold of Christ, and to avoid these they will make excuses similar to those made by the invited guests in the parable. They cannot come, they are ashamed of the poverty of Jesus, they are afraid to lose the applause and opinions of man in order to receive the congratulations of God. Of these Our Lord has said that not one of them shll taste of the Divine supper. He will banish them forever from His sight. He then exhorted his flock to hearken to the Divine call, and concluded with the words, “Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God.”

Father Martin Carroll (1838-1902) was born in Ireland, grew up in Brooklyn, and was ordained a priest in 1865. From 1869 to 1872 he was Pastor of St. Malachy Church in Brooklyn’s East New York section. St. Malachy’s was founded in 1854 and closed in 2009.