The Holy Spirit is alive in the Church. That's a very good thing, but also creates a huge challenge for us, because the Spirit is always making "new wine." As the parable Jesus tells in today's Gospel (Lk 5: 33-39) reminds us, you have to be caareful when you're dealing with new wine. It is easy to see the Spirit at work, if we look for it. Consider Church doctrine. It has not remained unchanged for 2,000 years. It has grown and evolved and changed to reflect changed circumstances. Perhaps the most recent example is Church teaching on the death penalty, which the Church now tells us in no uncertain terms is never to be used. Historically, of course, the Church not only tolerated the death penalty, it ordered executions. But our thinking changed over time and Pope St. John Paul II came very close to banning the death penalty. Pope Benedict did the same, and finally Pope Francis has said the death penalty is wrong. Or consider the Church's teaching on slavery. Slavery is in the Bible, and the Church owned slaves, even during the Civil War. Catholic institutions like Georgetown University are struggling with how to deal with the reality that they were built with money from slavery, now that the Church teaches so clearly that slavery is wrong. We struggle today with issues of sexual expression and orientation, and matters of gender. We study the issues of whether there should be women deacons and married priests. We are confronted with the effects of climate change on vulnerable populations, leading to huge increases in migration. The list goes on. There is always "new wine," and, as I said, that's a good thing because if there weren't, the Church would be dead. But, as jesus points out, you can't put new wine into old wineskins, and what the Church has, almost by definition, tends to be old wineskins. So what to do? Let's start by now rejecting things just because they are new, which I see in some quarters, and by not advocating for things just because they are old. Sure, there are wonderful aspects of old music and old liturgical forms, but let's not say they're better, or should be used by everyone, just because that's what we did 400 years ago. We need discretion, prudence, and balance. We need to follow the Spirit, but discern when what seems like the Spirit is just a fad. We need to pray, and reflect, and be open. There's an art to handling new wine. I think Pope Francis is doing a great job of being the master of the new wine-- challenging us to consider why we do things, opening the Church up to new ideas, and giving us new eexamples, while still holding to old traditions that need to be respected. The task for us is to do the same, finding that place when the new and the old can co-exist. It isn't an easy task.