Father Jose Vicente became my home parish pastor when I was in my High School junior year. He helped me discern the call to be a priest. I recalled some of my conversations with him this week as I reflected on today’s gospel reading. Father Jose Vicente would occasionally tell me about Don Camillo, a fictional character in humorous stories by the Italian writer Giovanni Guareschi.

Don Camillo is an Italian village priest who does not hesitate to confront the local Mayor, Peppone, who is always looking for a fight. The fictional story takes place after World War II. On one occasion, Peppone came up with a considerable amount of money to build a community center. Don Camillo wanted to know exactly where the money had come from.

One day, Don Camillo was walking through town when he saw a recently deceased man that he had buried. Don Camillo was puzzled. He began to reconstruct the potentially fabricated story of the man’s death to make sense of what he had seen.

Don Camillo recalled that the man had a head wound and Peppone had put him in the former German headquarters which was in a commandeered house. After the Germans vacated it, Peppone made it into his office. Coincidentally, the British made that house their headquarters that same day. The wounded man was pronounced dead that evening and when Don Camillo went to pray for him, he was already in a tightly sealed coffin.  

What people did not know was that the Germans had left a treasure buried in the house and Peppone was afraid the British would take it. So, Peppone fabricated the death to immediately move the treasure out of the house and cash it for the benefit of the town before the British discovered it.  

Having solved the mystery of the money, Don Camillo went to Peppone and demanded he give him 30 percent of the funds for a church project. With that money, Don Camillo was able to finally build a parish children’s recreation center that he had dreamed of and prayed about for years.

Each time I hear the Lord’s saying, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”, I recall Father Jose Vicente telling me about Don Camillo.

I recently preached about fairness as one of the best motivators for coming to Mass on Sundays. I said that the hour of the Mass is a period that belongs to God alone and that we cannot give it to anyone else or use it for anything else but for the Mass. We are to render God what belongs to him.

Now, the fact that I am talking about the one hour a week that is due for Mass does not mean that this is the only time of the week that belongs to God. In fairness we need to give back some of the time of each day to God in prayer and in service. We need to spend some time in prayer with God as we begin our day. That prayer can take on many forms. The method we use is not as important as taking the time to do it.

We need to make prayer a priority in our daily life. Many people live their lives being so busy that they find it hard to make some room for God. When we are extremely busy, one of the first things that we sacrifice is our time for prayer. On this issue, the advice of Saint Francis de Sales is clear, “Everyone of us needs half an hour of prayer each day, except when we are busy - then we need an hour”. One more area in which people often fail to render God what belongs to him is giving God the portion of their treasure or financial resources that belongs to God.

Let us humbly ask the Lord to grant us his grace to be fair to him in all circumstances.