Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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August 30Thirsting for God and Striving to Think as He Does, 22nd Sunday (A), August 30, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
August 30, 2026
Jer 20:7-9, Ps 63, Rom 12:1-2, Mt 16:21-27
To listen to an audio version of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.30.26_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided today’s homily:
Anyone who prays the Liturgy of the Hours loves today’s Psalm. It’s the one the Church has us pray every other Sunday morning and during Morning Prayer on any Solemnity or feast. It describes the most fundamental human desire and is an essential characteristic of every Missionary of Charity: thirst for God in response to his thirst for us. We pray, “O God, you are my God whom I seek. For you my flesh pines and my soul thirst like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water. Thus have I gazed toward you in the sanctuary, to see your power and glory, for your kindness is a greater good than life. … My soul clings fast to you; your right hand upholds me.” Last Friday, we celebrated the feast of St. Augustine, who famously wrote at the beginning of his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” His young life, as we know, took many detours. He looked for God in various ancient philosophies, in oratorical brilliance, in the pleasures of the flesh, but he didn’t find what he was seeking. He wrote in the Confessions, “In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you. … You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” St. Augustine wrote what he did, among other things, so that we could learn from his mistakes. He wants us to grasp that we’ve been made by God for God and that even the best things of the world, apart from God, will ultimately never satisfy. God wants to pour his living water to quench our existential thirst.
For us to act on that fundamental desire for God, no matter how many years we’ve lived as a Christian and the public promises or vows we’ve made, most of us need some level of conversion. St. Paul talks about the new life we need in today’s second reading, when he tells the ancient Christians in Rome and Christians in every era: “Do not conform yourselves to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” And that renewal of our minds is meant to lead to the renewal of our hearts and the renewal of our whole life. That is pointed to in the dramatic scene in today’s Gospel. Last Sunday, Jesus called Simon Peter “the Rock” on whom he would build his Church and promised that “the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” Today, Jesus calls Peter, “Satan,” and tells him, essentially, that the gates of Hell are prevailing against him. Why? Because Peter was refusing that Jesus would suffer, be killed and be raised: “God forbid it, Lord!,” he shouted. “This must never happen to you!” We might think that this was just the concern of a friend trying to prevent Jesus from suffering harm, but Jesus, the Lord, saw something much deeper. The reason why he called him “Satan,” was because Peter at that moment was, without realizing it, playing the part of Satan the tempter, effectively trying to steer him away from doing his Father’s will of giving his life out of love to save ours. The reason why Jesus said, “Get behind me!,” is because Peter was trying to lead Jesus rather than to follow him, and no creature can ever do that to the Creator, and no disciple can ever do that to the Master. Jesus very directly summed up what was the cause of Peter’s fall: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Peter needed a renewal of his mind, to grasp how the way of the Cross was not a contradiction to the will of God but the culmination of that divine plan. Likewise Peter, the other apostles, and almost every Christian since, has needed a renewal of the mind with regard to what Jesus said immediately after. It was tough enough to accept “the way God thinks” when that meant that the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” was going to undergo great suffering and be crucified. But Jesus said that if we wanted to be his disciples, we would need to do the same. “If anyone wishes to become my disciple,” Jesus tells us forthrightly at the end of today’s Gospel, “he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” We obviously desire to be the Lord’s true disciple and have by now sought to be for decades. We pray for and want our fellow priests and religious, our family members and friends, and all those we serve to be true disciples of Jesus. But we and they cannot be Jesus’ disciples unless we do what he indicates — deny ourselves rather than affirm ourselves, pick up our Cross daily, and follow Jesus rather than doing our own thing, which means thinking as he thinks, willing as he wills, choosing as he chooses, serving as he serves and loving as he loves. Jesus’ words lead us to come face-to-face with one of the most important issues in the spiritual life: Do we think as other human beings do and conform ourselves, our thought patterns, our way of life, to the customs and expectations of the world and of our age? Or do we conform ourselves to God’s thoughts, ways and holy will?
This challenge is especially true about the Cross. St. Paul says his words about not conforming ourselves to this age immediately after he urges us, by God mercies, to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, our spiritual worship. Spiritual worship is an insufficient translation of the words St. Paul uses in his Greek original, “logike latreia,” something that is better rendered “the only worship that is logical,” “the only adoration that makes sense.” The sole response to all that God has done for us is to give of ourselves wholly and entirely. Our worship, as Pope Benedict wrote back in 2006, is meant to be a “total self-offering … [that] includes and transfigures every aspect of life.” The worship God wants of us is not simply making time for prayer, acts of charity and not breaking the commandments. The only worship of God that makes sense is for us to offer all we are and have to God, to deny ourselves anything we selfishly desire, to die to our ego, and to follow Christ freely along a path of total self-giving, of making of ourselves a holy, pleasing, living sacrifice to God and in him to others. It’s to live a cruciform life. When we begin to think as God does, this is what a Christian thirsts to do.
This is a huge challenge in every age. 2,000 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, we are not shocked as St. Peter was when Jesus gave the first of three prophecies of what would happen to him on Good Friday, because we know that it turns out well three days later. But most of us are still shocked when Jesus says to us that in order to be his disciple we must deny ourselves, die to ourselves through the Cross and follow him along the path to death in order to live. And we’re even more shocked when Jesus asks those we care about to follow him along the path of suffering. We are tempted to say, “God forbid, Lord, that any such thing as pain and suffering, of the Cross, happen to me or my loved ones!” Because we struggle to think as God thinks, we’re tempted to water down what Jesus says are preconditions to being his follower. Jesus’ first listeners would never have missed what he was saying when he mentioned that the only way they could follow him is through denying themselves to the extent that they would pick up their Cross. It would be as if he said to us today, “Strap yourself into the electric chair!,” because in the ancient world, the cross was used exclusively for the gruesome capital punishment of crucifying someone. For Jesus to say that they needed to pick up the Cross and follow him meant that they need to die to themselves on the Cross just like Jesus did on his. As St. Paul, who picked up his cross every day after his conversion and followed the Lord, once wrote: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:19-20), Jesus wants us to be able to say the same thing. It’s only when we have denied ourselves and affirmed God, it’s only when we have in fact died to ourselves so that Christ may live, it’s only when we’ve “lost” our life for the sake of Christ and his Gospel, that we will “save” our life and be able to follow Christ to the joyful risen existence he suffered and died to give us. This is certainly not man’s wisdom, but it is God’s wisdom! Teresa of Calcutta wanted you, Sisters, to live by this wisdom. As we ponder her at this time of year in which we celebrate her earthly birthday (August 26), her eternal birthday (September 5) and the inspiration God gave her to quench his thirst and be his light (September 10), it’s important for us to ponder even more her thoughts on the Cross where Jesus thirsted in his divinity and humanity. In your Constitutions, she wrote and you live, “The Cross will be for us as it was for Christ: proof of the greatest love. Jesus alone, God made man, could fully understand the meaning of sin and suffer from it. The force with which Chirst was drawn to the Cross in expiation for the sin of mankind must urge us as spouses of Jesus Crucified to accept voluntary nailing with Christ on the Cross, in a spirit of love, obedience and reparation for our own sinfulness and that of the world, especially our poor.”
What this is all about is that if we’re going to live as a Christian, if we’re going “to discern God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect,” we need to grasp and live the meaning of Christian suffering. Those who are conformed to the world do not understand suffering. They thinks it’s exclusively an evil to be eliminated in the pursuit to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, but a Christian looks at suffering not simply as pain but as suffering that can redeem us and others. The world looks at the Cross as a way of abnegation, of giving up good things, of losing out on good experiences, but a Christian sees it not so much as a path of renunciation and agony, but a way to unleash love, to make us humble and form us to be Good Samaritans when we see others suffering. The way of the Cross is fundamentally a yes, not a no .Just as by Christ’s stripes we were healed (Is 53:5), so by our own stripes, our own crosses, we can make up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings for the sake of his body the Church (Col 1:24).
Jesus — great teacher that he is — sums up the contrast between God’s wisdom and man’s when he says, “For what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” So many in our day and in our city strive after money, power, pleasure and prestige. Jesus is telling us that even if we were able to have all of these in abundance and more, it wouldn’t be worth it if in the process we squandered our soul. This is the great “Faustian bargain” — to use the image from the 19th century German poet Goethe — the quintessential temptation of the devil. Just as Satan tried to tempt Jesus in the desert when he took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and said, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me,” so Satan tries to do the same with us. Jesus’ response then is what he wants ours to be now, “Away with you, Satan, for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him alone’” (Mt 4:8-10). That’s the reason why Jesus called Peter “Satan,” because Peter was tempting Jesus to put his physical health and temporal well-being ahead of his and our eternal well-being, to live for the present rather than forever — just as Satan tried to do to Jesus in the desert. Jesus makes plain that it profits a person nothing to gain everything the world can offer if he forfeits his eternal life in exchange. Rather than hungering and thirsting for mammon, for power, for pleasure, for fame, the Christian says, in the words of today’s Psalm, “My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord, my God,” “for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts like a dry weary land without water.” We recognize that God is the pearl of great price worth selling everything else we have to obtain, worth even enduring the Cross to embrace.
But making the choice to embrace the Cross is never going to be easy. This summons to become like God can sometimes be bitter. We see that bitterness in the first reading. The Prophet Jeremiah, as you remember, was called as a teenager to be the prophet of the Lord. He tried to get out of it by saying he was too young, but God told him he wasn’t to young and lacked eloquent, but the Lord told him, “Say not, ‘I am too young.’ To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak. Have no fear before them, because I am with you to deliver you.” Then he placed his words in Jeremiah’s mouth. But as soon as Jeremiah starting calling God’s people in Jerusalem and Judah to conversion, he suffered for it. People mocked him. Some even tried to kill him. He felt like there were people set out to entrap and harm him on every side. He gave witness to it in today’s first reading, complaining, “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped. … All day long I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me. … The word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the way.” If we choose to unite ourselves to Christ, live fully as a Christian, and share the Gospel by words and example, we will, just as Jesus promised, similarly experience some suffering. That suffering, or even the fear of it, may tempt us to stay silent, sit on the sidelines or even be tempted to abandon Jesus’ way. Jeremiah was tempted in that direction. But then we see what happened to him. He recognized he couldn’t. He wrote, “I said to myself, ‘I will not mention him, I will speak his name no more,’ but then it became like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned within my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.” We see that in his life, as he continued to proclaim God’s word. We see it in St. Peter’s, who, after being called Satan and summoned to conversion, ended up giving the supreme witness to Christ and the Gospel. We see it in the life of St. Paul, who after persecuting Christians spent the rest of his life trying to make Christians, once exclaiming, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” We see the same thing in so many saints, both the famous ones we celebrate in the liturgical calendar (like the one we’ll celebrate on Saturday) as well as the saints next door, who are intrepid witnesses to the integrity of the Gospel and true love of God and neighbor. The Lord today wants to make our bones burn with a desire for others to come to know God, to thirst for him, to seek his will and to live it.
This path of the renewal of our minds so that we might begin to think as God thinks, this way to satiate Jesus’ thirst and ours, this path of self-denial, assumption of the Cross and following Jesus even and especially when it’s hard, is something we cannot just think about or hope happens to us. It’s something for which we need to prepare and something we have to choose freely, something for which we thirst like a desert for water, and burn for within our bones. Just as Jesus, looking ahead to what would happen to him on Calvary, said in his Good Shepherd Discourse, “No one takes my life from me; I freely lay it down,” so each of us is not supposed to be a “victim” of the Cross but someone who eagerly and freely lays down our life in accordance with divine logic for God and for others.
And the way we are helped to grow in making what Pope Benedict called “total self-offering that includes and transfigures every aspect of life” is here at Mass. It’s here that God seeks to renew our minds with the holy Word of God. It’s here that we offer our bodies to God as sacraments of our entire being, body and soul. The prayers of the Mass are explicit elaborations of the “logike latreia” that St. Paul mentions. During the offertory, the priest prays that “this sacrifice, yours and mine, will be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.” Later the priest asks God the Father “to bless, acknowledge and approve this offering in every respect [and] make it spiritual and acceptable” (EP I) as we offer him “in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice” (EP III). This points to the truth that it’s through this Eucharistic self-giving together with Jesus that we’re strengthened to live our life in conformity to Him rather than to the world. It’s here where we gain the strength to choose him over every other thing in the world combined and to have his very own life ignite us from within like fire in our bones to go with him and help him save the world.
Let us ask God the Father today to give us all the help he knows we need to think the way he thinks, to discern his holy will and do it, to be willing to sacrifice everything for him, so that we may not be called “Satan” but “beloved sons and daughters,” as we seek to meet his thirst with our thirst, and to give him here at Mass and throughout the liturgy of our life the only worship that makes sense, the total holocaust of ourselves to him and for others in response to his love in giving himself totally for us and our salvation. This is what it means to conform ourselves to the way God thinks. This is the way of true and thorough renewal. This is the means by which we gain more than the whole world.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
JER 20:7-9
You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;
you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.
All the day I am an object of laughter;
everyone mocks me.Whenever I speak, I must cry out,
violence and outrage is my message;
the word of the LORD has brought me
derision and reproach all the day.
I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 63:2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9
R/ (2b) My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
O God, you are my God whom I seek;
for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts
like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water.
R/ My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
Thus have I gazed toward you in the sanctuary
to see your power and your glory,
For your kindness is a greater good than life;
my lips shall glorify you.
R/ My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
Thus will I bless you while I live;
lifting up my hands, I will call upon your name.
As with the riches of a banquet shall my soul be satisfied,
and with exultant lips my mouth shall praise you.
R/ My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
You are my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I shout for joy.
My soul clings fast to you;
your right hand upholds me.
R/ My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.
Reading 2
ROM 12:1-2
I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God,
to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.
Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.
Gospel
MT 16:21-27
Jesus began to show his disciples
that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly
from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him,
“God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”
He turned and said to Peter,
“Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
Then Jesus said to his disciples,
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world
and forfeit his life?
Or what can one give in exchange for his life?
For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory,
and then he will repay all according to his conduct.”
The post Thirsting for God and Striving to Think as He Does, 22nd Sunday (A), August 30, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
23 min
August 09Getting Ready to Take the Leap Toward Greater Faith, 19th Sunday (A), August 9, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
1 Kings 19:9.11-13, Ps 85, Rom 9:1-5, Mt 14:22-33
August 9, 2026

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.9.26_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
God’s love for us is often expressed in surprising and very challenging ways. In the first reading, we see how the Lord came to the Prophet Elijah on Mount Horeb. For the previous 40 days and 40 nights, Elijah had been fleeing for his life across the desert, escaping from the murderous intentions of Queen Jezebel, who had sworn an oath to see him executed. At the end of the journey, taking refuge in a cave from the brutal heat, Elijah complained to God. “I have been most zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life.” He thought working for the Lord should have brought him blessings but instead it seemed like he had only encountered hardship and persecution. God told him, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will be passing by.” God was going to give him a manifestation of his presence to strengthen him. God began with the three theophanies he had used with Moses on the top of the same mountain, which was also called Mount Sinai. A ferocious storm came, something that would have been an obvious exhibition of the Creator’s power over nature, but God wasn’t revealing himself in the tempest. Then there was an earthquake, perhaps an even more impressive display from the One who had created the foundations of the earth, but God wasn’t there either. Third, there was a big fire, which would have been a fitting sign of God’s presence a month and a half after God had shown his power by coming in a fire to consume Elijah’s drenched sacrifice in his showdown with the priests of Ba’al near Mount Carmel. But God didn’t reveal himself that way either. He came in a tiny whispering sound, like a gentle breeze flowing through the leaves of a tree.
God revealed himself to Elijah, therefore, not in a huge spectacle or massive display of force as Elijah might have expected, but rather in a very quiet way, to show that he’s with us, passing by us, speaking to us, through ordinary, daily, humble occurrences rather than mainly or exclusively through extraordinary demonstrations of power and might. The lesson is that God doesn’t come always how we expect him to, or when we expect him to. He comes as he wants and as he knows we need. We see this obviously in how he entered the world, being born not in a royal palace but in a poor stable. We see it in how he triumphed, not amid jubilant fanfare but among jeers dying ignominiously on the Cross. We see it, too, in how he helps the apostles grow in faith and trust in today’s Gospel. He gave them a startling crash course in Christian trust that is far more surprising, even more jolting, than anything he did with the Prophet Elijah. What the Lord did with the apostles, and especially St. Peter, to help them confront and overcome their primal fears and transition from fear to faith helps us to see how he often deals with us in order lovingly to help us grow in faith and trust as we confront our fears of failure, abandonment, struggle, sickness, pain, the past, the future, death, the possibility of hell and anything and everything else, too. Let’s enter into the drama of the scene, the main elements of which highlight key aspects of the loving trust and total surrender that are part of the spirit of the Missionaries of Charity and that are supposed to be repeated in one way or another in the life of every disciple.
In the scene right before today’s Gospel, the multiplication of the five loaves and two fish, Jesus had had everyone sit down on the green grass, so we know that it must have taken place between mid-March to mid-April in the Holy Land, because the grass begins to get sun-scorched by the end of April. At that time of year sunset happens in Galilee about 6 pm, which is the time, therefore, the apostles got into the boat to begin the journey across the top of the Sea of Galilee for a five-to-six-mile journey that should have taken a few hours. The storm began to rage, St. Matthew tells us, when they were in the middle of the Sea, so about an hour or two along their trek. Jesus came to them in the “fourth watch of the night” — the period stretching from 3-6 am — which meant that by that point, they had been in the boat 9-12 hours, battling a ferocious storm, fatigued, soaking wet and fearing for their life. Jesus was placidly praying on the mountain as they were struggling for hours not to drown to death. Why did Jesus — who probably could hear and see them from his prayerful promontory on the mountain — wait so long when his friends believed they were in peril? It brings us back to the other time that the apostles were afraid for their life on the Sea of Galilee, as Jesus was asleep in the bow of the boat while they thought they were about to perish. In both cases, Jesus waited to act — and the reason was to increase their faith. Jesus was introducing them to a central truth of the spiritual life: that in order to be able to abandon ourselves to God, we must first feel what appears to be total abandonment by God. I want to repeat that sentence because it’s so counterintuitive and crucial for us to grasp: in order to be able to surrender ourselves to God with loving trust, we must first feel what appears to be total abandonment by It’s only then, when all human means have been exhausted, when even God seems to be absent, when we’re not even sure that he cares, that we’re able to make the supernatural leap of faith to believe in him and in his providential concern and love.
One of the clearest illustrations of this truth happens in the life of prayer. When a Catholic finally makes the commitment to serious prayer every day, like a half-hour meditation or a Eucharistic holy hour, the Lord normally floods us with graces. We basically love to pray. We feel strengthened and full of peace and joy. And that continues for a while. But eventually, out of love for us, God takes away all the consolations and even the sense of his presence. We begin to feel nothing, like happened in the darkness St. Teresa of Calcutta experienced over the last fifty years of her life. This is all a grace to help us to make a transition of faith from coming to pray for the consolations of God to coming to pray for the God of consolations, seeking Him solely for the purpose of being with Him whom we know in faith is present even when we sense nothing. We really can’t take a quantum leap in the progression of faith God wants to give us in prayer unless we continue believing and praying even when we feel we’re amid a dark cloud.
Let’s return to the scene. After hours of struggling for their life, Jesus comes walking along the white caps of the churning sea. Their first reaction was to think they were seeing a ghost — after all, no one had ever seen a man walk on water before, not to mention “surfing” the waves without a surfboard. There was also a superstition that there were monsters at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee and likely that played into their alarm. Jesus, however, said to them across the howling winds, “Take courage! I am! Do not be afraid!” Jesus used those words, “Ego eimi” in Greek, “I am,” which were those God employed to describe himself to Moses from the burning bush, and Jesus used when he told the Pharisees, “Before Abraham was, ‘I am.’” In the context of the apostles’ anxieties during the storm, they were an expression of divine accompaniment, meant to help assuage their fears and give them courage. We see the first fruit of those words in Peter. “Lord, if it is you,” he said, “bid me to come to you across the water.” He refers to the supposedly walking “ghost” as “Lord,” but then he qualifies it by saying, “if it is you.” He was hovering between belief and incredulity. But at the word of Jesus, “Come!,” he did what he had precisely been trying to avoid over the previous 9-12 hours: with great faith in Jesus and his word, with loving trust and total surrender, he went overboard. The time fearing for his life had made him that much more desirous of being with the Lord Jesus. He wanted to get to him as soon as he possibly could. The whole scene in some way summarizes the mystery of the Incarnation: as Jesus comes into our stormy world walking toward us, we’re all called to get up from where we are, to overcome our fears and insecurities, and head out to meet him. That’s what Peter did and what God wants us to do.
Lifted temporarily by faith, Peter’s density in some sense changed. He was lighter than water and capable of walking above it. Then something happened. St. Matthew tells us that Peter “took account of the winds.” He took his eyes off Jesus. He began to focus on the human impossibility of what he and Jesus were both doing; then the negative buoyancy or downward force of gravity, corresponding to the downward glance of his heart, overwhelmed him. He began to sink amid the waves. Though an expert on that sea and a good swimmer (as we see in John 21 when he jumped into the Sea of Galilee and swam one hundred yards to meet Risen Jesus on the shore), Peter began to fear for his life. The words from Psalm 69 perhaps began to take on new meaning for him: “Do not let me sink. Rescue me from … the watery depths. Do not let the floodwaters overwhelm me, nor the deep swallow me.” In response to Peter’s cry for help, the Lord reached out to save him. The Greek word is that Jesus “gripped” Peter in his arms. The storm was still raging. The winds were still blowing. The waves were still swirling all around and the Sea was still 140 feet deep. But Peter was safe. Jesus had saved him in his grip of love.
It’s so important for all of us to have the experience of faith Peter did. We call Jesus Savior not simply out of piety or because it’s a nice title to bestow upon him. We call him Savior because he has in fact rescued us from the depths of sin just like he rescued the prophet Jonah and here Simon son of Jonah from the depth of water. It was crucial for Peter to have had this experience of fear and abandonment to appreciate even more the Lord’s loving care. Likewise for us, it’s important sometimes to have been in very difficult circumstances for us to experience God’s saving interventions. Many have told me over the years that they took God for granted until they got cancer and needed his help, until they were lost and needed to get back on right track, until they had hit rock bottom and recognized that the only One whom they could still rely on was God. Even though none of those difficult experiences would be labeled good or fun, they turned out to be profound graces, just like the ferocious storm on the Galilean Sea proved to be for the apostles.
Today, August 9, the Church remembers St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, the Jewish convert Edith Stein, who was martyred 84 years ago today in Auschwitz. The summit of her theology, in my opinion, are her thoughts in her famous Science of the Cross on uniting ourselves to the crucified Christ. That’s what she did when she was arrested in the Netherlands because of her Jewish blood, going with her sister Rosa to die for her people, for whose salvation, like St. Paul in today’s second reading, she was willing to give her life. That’s what she urged all of us to do. For her abandonment wasn’t just resignation to God’s will, but actively placing our will, our lives, our all in the loving hands of God. With trust she echoed St. Peter’s words to Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,” and she trusted in him until the end. We ask her intercession today to do the same.
The words Jesus said to Peter as he gripped him are highly significant. “O you of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” The verb translated “to doubt” here really means in St. Matthew’s Greek “to be of two minds.” Peter was divided. Part of him believed, but part of him doubted. Part of him trusted in Jesus enough to go overboard in faith, while part of him attributed more power to the wind and the waves. In order to live by faith, however, to imitate Jesus and Mary in loving trust and total surrender, we can’t really “half-trust” in God. That’s what this whole crash course of faith on the Sea of Galilee was meant to train Peter and the apostles to grasp. Peter would be of two minds elsewhere as well. He would confess Jesus to be the Messiah and Son of God but then would forbid him to suffer in fulfilling his mission. He would swear during the Last Supper that he would never betray the Lord even if he should have to die for him, but then he would swear an oath denying him three times in the high priest’s courtyard. The Lord was trying to help him to become of one mind. This is an important lesson for us to grasp, because many are tempted to be “of two minds” in our living the faith as well. Some hear Jesus’ words about storing up a treasure in heaven, about selling all they have to obtain the pearl of great price, and they partially act on them, but they still hold on tightly with the other hand to our mammon as an insurance policy in case Christianity turns out to be fools’ gold. Others hear Jesus’ words about the need to forgive others 70 x 7 times, about turning the other cheek, about praying for our persecutors, and part of us knows that this is the path to peace, but the other part wants to strike back and knock the person’s whole set of teeth if he’s loosened one of ours. Others hear Jesus’ call to acknowledge him before others, to bring the Gospel to all creatures and everyone they know, but they hesitate to do so because they’re eaten alive by worries that doing so may get them labeled and teased and maybe even lead to losing friends or jobs. Peter’s experience on the Sea, as difficult as it was, helped him to confront and overcome his spiritual schizophrenia. The Lord allows us to experience various storms, too, in order to help us get over our own and to convert to him with our whole mind — and soul, heart and strength as well.
The last part of this scene takes place when Jesus — still gripping and carrying the grown man Peter as if we were a small child across the waves — enters the boat. It’s only when Peter and Jesus are back in Peter’s boat that the storm dies down. We learn a valuable lesson: that storms often die down only when we return to the Church symbolized by Peter’s barque. And it’s to that boat of the Church that Jesus, gripping us, wants to lead us. The Church is a life raft founded by Jesus, a fulfillment of Noah’s Ark, as several fathers of the Church emphasized. When Peter returned to the boat, he and the other apostles, St. Matthew tells us, fell down and worshipped Jesus as they called him not just the Messiah but “The Son of God.” The culmination of the whole experience led them to faith understood not as a cold belief in a set of truths but a trust in Jesus as someone having power over the wind and the waves. It led them to an act of worship, which is a combination of love and prayerful faith-in-action. Likewise, as Jesus seeks to grip us and bring us to Church, when we recognize all that he’s done for us, we, like the first apostles, can’t help but fall down to adore him. Just like with the apostles, Jesus has created us not to drown in fears and anxieties, but to live by faith, to immerse ourselves in the depths of his love, to adore him on land and on sea, to be strengthened by him in trust and abandonment and to know that we’ve got nothing to fear because he is with us, even if we’re in the midst of ferocious storms.
The same Lord Jesus who walked on water to save and strengthen the faith of his beloved apostles comes to meet us here at Mass. He wants us not to stay where we are but jump overboard with trust to go meet him. Like those in the boat on the sea, we here will soon drop to our knees and adore Jesus as the Son of God, asking for the grace to keep our eyes always on him, begging him for his help to be of one mind and heart with him, and imploring his assistance to remember that no matter what tempests we’re experiencing, he’s with us, trying to grip and save us, and help us grow in faithful union. As we prepare to behold him not looking like a “ghost” but under the humble appearances of bread and wine, as he’s lifted heavenward after the consecration, he wants each of us to hear him whispering, “Be not afraid! It is I! Be strong!” Like the apostles in the boat, we will bow down in adoration before him in gratitude and say in prayerful unison: “Save us, Savior of the World, for by your Cross and Resurrection, you have set us free!” Jesus will grip us from the inside as we receive him so that his courage may fortify us from within to overcome all our fears, both primal and personal, and hop overboard with him to go in search of others who are trying to face the storms of without him. God tells us today not to go outside and stand on a mountain for the Lord to pass by, but to stay inside for the same Lord not just to pass but to enter. And as he speaks to us he does so not in the gentle whisper of a soft breeze rustling through leaves, but in the hushed words of consecration, saying, “This is my body given for you!,” a manifestation far, far greater than hurricanes, earthquakes and forest fires, one that daily helps us to live our whole life as Mary and Jesus did, as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and St. Teresa of Calcutta did, with more loving trust, greater total surrender, and sustained joy. Let’s get ready to jump!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 Kgs 19:9a, 11-13a
At the mountain of God, Horeb,
Elijah came to a cave where he took shelter.
Then the LORD said to him,
“Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD;
the LORD will be passing by.”
A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains
and crushing rocks before the LORD—
but the LORD was not in the wind.
After the wind there was an earthquake—
but the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake there was fire—
but the LORD was not in the fire.
After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound.
When he heard this,
Elijah hid his face in his cloak
and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 85:9, 10, 11-12, 13-14
R. (8) Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.
I will hear what God proclaims;
the LORD — for he proclaims peace.
Near indeed is his salvation to those who fear him,
glory dwelling in our land.
R. Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.
Kindness and truth shall meet;
justice and peace shall kiss.
Truth shall spring out of the earth,
and justice shall look down from heaven.
R. Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.
The LORD himself will give his benefits;
our land shall yield its increase.
Justice shall walk before him,
and prepare the way of his steps.
R. Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.
Reading 2
Rom 9:1-5
Brothers and sisters:
I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie;
my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness
that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart.
For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ
for the sake of my own people,
my kindred according to the flesh.
They are Israelites;
theirs the adoption, the glory, the covenants,
the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises;
theirs the patriarchs, and from them,
according to the flesh, is the Christ,
who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
Alleluia
Cf. Ps 130:5
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I wait for the Lord;
my soul waits for his word.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mt 14:22-33
After he had fed the people, Jesus made the disciples get into a boat
and precede him to the other side,
while he dismissed the crowds.
After doing so, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.
When it was evening he was there alone.
Meanwhile the boat, already a few miles offshore,
was being tossed about by the waves, for the wind was against it.
During the fourth watch of the night,
he came toward them walking on the sea.
When the disciples saw him walking on the sea they were terrified.
“It is a ghost,” they said, and they cried out in fear.
At once Jesus spoke to them, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.”
Peter said to him in reply,
“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
He said, “Come.”
Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus.
But when he saw how strong the wind was he became frightened;
and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught Peter,
and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”
After they got into the boat, the wind died down.
Those who were in the boat did him homage, saying,
“Truly, you are the Son of God.”
The post Getting Ready to Take the Leap Toward Greater Faith, 19th Sunday (A), August 9, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
26 min
August 06Sowers of Peace and Joy, Conference for Priests, August 6, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Murray Hill Conference Center
Workshop for Priests of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross
“Sowers of Peace and Joy”
August 6, 2026
To listen to an audio recording of this conference, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.6.26_Sowers_of_Peace_and_Joy_1.mp3

The following outline guided the conference:
Introduction
On this Feast of the Transfiguration, we ponder together Jesus’ divine glory shining through his sacred humanity. This was a revelation of what was ordinarily concealed on earth, but something we hope to gaze upon forever in the beatific vision. That concealed glory is something we have ever before us in the Holy Eucharist as God-with-us remains with us always until the end of time.
In the theologians of both east and west, Jesus’ transfiguration is always linked to his resurrection, to his ascension, to his perpetual state in heaven.
Josemaria preached a homily for the Ascension, which involves not just Jesus’ physical return to the Father’s side, but also the great commission, entrusting us, together with the Holy Spirit, to complete his mission. St. Josemaria used the occasion to describe basic vocation and mission of a Christian as “spreading of good, ‘infecting’ others with a desire to love, sowing peace and joy.” He went on: “There is no doubt that this apostolate will produce spiritual benefits for all: more justice, more understanding and a greater mutual respect among men. There are many souls all around us, and we have no right to be an obstacle to their eternal happiness. We have the obligation of leading a fully Christian life, of becoming saints, of not betraying God and all those who expect a Christian to be an example and a source of truth.”
So he defined the essential Christian apostolate, and ours in the Work, as spreading good, infecting others with a desire to love, and sowing peace and joy.
Today we meditate in particular on that last phrase, to sow peace and joy.
Josemaria used this phrase often.
In Furrow 59, in a chapter on Cheerfulness, he said, “May no one read sadness or sorrow in your face, when you spread in the world around you the sweet aroma of your sacrifice: the children of God should always be sowers of peace and joy.”
In Furrow 92, he added: “Every Christian has the duty to bring peace and joy to his own surroundings on earth.”
Again, in Furrow 864: “The task for a Christian is to drown evil in an abundance of good. It is not a question of negative campaigns, or of being anti On the contrary, we should live positively, full of optimism, with youthfulness, joy and peace.”
In the Family:
In Christ is Passing By 30, he used the expression in a homily on the Christian vocation of marriage and family. After describing the families found in the New Testament and how they lived in union with Christ, he said that they were “centers for spreading the Gospel and its message. Families no different from other families of those times, but living with a new spirit, which spread to all those who were in contact with them. This is what the first Christians were, and this is what we have to be: sowers of peace and joy, the peace and joy that Jesus has brought to us (CIPB 30).
In Work:
Friends of God 70: “Therefore, everyone, in his job, in whatever place he has in society, must feel obliged to make his work God’s work, sowing everywhere the peace and joy of the Lord. ‘The perfect Christian is always a bearer of peace and joy. Peace, because he realizes he is in the presence of God; joy, because he sees himself surrounded by God’s blessings.’”
In suffering:
In Christ is Passing By (168), in a homily on finding peace in the heart of Christ in the midst of sufferings, he focuses our attention on Christ on the Cross, mentions that suffering is part of God’s plans, and how the supernatural acceptance of suffering is “the greatest of all conquests.” This victory is something Christ wants us to experience and help others to experience. He commented on this apostolic dimension: “In the name of this victorious love of Christ, we Christians should go out into the world to be sowers of peace and joy through everything we say and do.” He said that peace and joy is the result of a “fight of peace against evil, against injustice, against sin.” Not only is the peace and joy not incompatible with fighting the good fight, but it’s a condition of it.
In the face of fear and death:
Friends of God 141: “It is Jesus who has invited you to follow him like a good disciple so that you can journey through this earthly life, sowing the peace and joy which the world cannot give. Therefore — and let me emphasize this once more — we have to walk without fear of life and without fear of death, without shrinking at any cost from pain and sorrow which, for a Christian, are always a means of purification and a chance for showing that we really love our fellow men, through the thousand and one circumstances of ordinary life.
So sowers of peace and joy.
The first step, since we can only give what we have, is becoming men of peace and joy.
Jesus came into the world to give us both. To be united to him is to experience both.
Peace
Jesus is the long-awaited Prince of Peace.
At his birth, the angels announced, “Peace on earth to people of good will.”
Jesus told us during the Last Supper, words he reiterates through us every day at the altar: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” (Jn 14:27).
On the night of the resurrection, he wished the startled apostles twice, “Shalom,” “Peace be with you.”
Shalom means wholeness, completeness, prosperity and well-being. It means to make something whole, to complete whatever is missing. In a word, it means that he’s wishing every spiritual blessing in the heavens, or, even more simply, wishing himself.
Augustine, in City of God 19, defined peace as “pax omnium rerum tranquillitas ordinis”: The peace of all things is the tranquility of order: the positive, harmonious state that results when every part of creation, society and the soul, is in its proper place and right relationship under God.
Jesus wants us to have that peace, his peace, to have him as our great treasure, pearl of great price, better part, one thing necessary.
He wants to help us to be in right order with him and, in him, in right order with others and all creation.
Joy
Jesus likewise wants to fill us with joy, which is a fruit of that peace.
In John 15, after the Parable of the Vine and the Branches and Jesus’ words about his love for us and how to remain in it by loving others as he has loved us first, said: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” He wants us to share his joy, to abide in it, to have it perfected.
He wants for us to find in him what the angels announced in Bethlehem, “Good news of great joy for all the people.”
Like with the Parable of the Talents, he wants to say to each of us, “Come, share your master’s joy.”
He tells us the joy of praying and having our prayers heard and answered by God: “Until now you have not asked anything in my name; ask and you will receive, so that your joymay be complete” (Jn 16:24).
He prays out loud so that we might have confidence in his praying for us, saying, during his great priestly prayer, “But now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely” (Jn 17:13).
Today we mark the 48th anniversary of the death of St. Paul VI. I think his two greatest documents help us to focus on joy. The first is his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (1975), which we’ll mention soon. The second is his exhortation Gaudete in Domino from December 1975, in which he talked at length about Jesus’ natural and supernatural joys and how that’s supposed to impact the joy of a Christian. Let’s listen to his eloquent meditation on Jesus’ joy, the joy he wants to permeate his entire Mystical Body.
“Let us … contemplate the person of Jesus during His earthly life. In His humanity He had experienced our joys. He has manifestly known, appreciated, and celebrated a whole range of human joys, those simple daily joys within the reach of everyone. … He admires the birds of heaven, the lilies of the field. He immediately grasps God’s attitude towards creation at the dawn of history. He willingly extols the joy of the sower and the harvester, the joy of the man who finds a hidden treasure, the joy of the shepherd who recovers his sheep or of the woman who finds her lost coin, the joy of those invited to the feast, the joy of a marriage celebration, the joy of the father who embraces his son returning from a prodigal life, and the joy of the woman who has just brought her child into the world. For Jesus, these joys are real because for Him they are the signs of the spiritual joys of the kingdom of God: the joy of people who enter this kingdom return there or work there, the joy of the Father who welcomes them. And for His part Jesus Himself manifests His satisfaction and His tenderness when He meets children wishing to approach Him, a rich young man who is faithful and wants to do more, friends who open their home to Him, like Martha, Mary and Lazarus. His happiness is above all to see the Word accepted, the possessed delivered, a sinful woman or a publican like Zacchaeus converted, a widow taking from her poverty and giving. He even exults with joy when He states that the little ones have the revelation of the kingdom which remains hidden from the wise and able. Yes, because Christ was “a man like us in all things but sin,” He accepted and experienced affective and spiritual joys, as a gift of God. And He did not rest until “to the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation…and to those in sorrow, joy.” The Gospel of Saint Luke particularly gives witness to this seed of joy. The miracles of Jesus and His words of pardon are so many signs of divine goodness: all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by Him, and gave glory to God. For the Christian as for Jesus, it is a question of living, in thanksgiving to the Father, the human joys, that the Creator gives him.”
“But it is necessary here below to understand properly the secret of the unfathomable joy which dwells in Jesus and which is special to Him. It is especially the Gospel of Saint John that lifts the veil, by giving us the intimate words of the Son of God made man. If Jesus radiates such peace, such assurance, such happiness, such availability, it is by reason of the inexpressible love by which He knows that He is loved by His Father. When He is baptized on the banks of the Jordan, this love, which is present from the first moment of His Incarnation, is manifested: “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you.” This certitude is inseparable from the consciousness of Jesus. It is a presence which never leaves Him all alone. It is an intimate knowledge which fills Him: “…the Father knows me and I know the Father.” It is an unceasing and total exchange: “All I have is yours and all you have is mine.” The Father has given the Son the power to judge, the power to dispose of life. It is a mutual indwelling: “…I am in the Father and the Father in me….” In return, the Son gives the Father immeasurable love: “…I love the Father…. I am doing exactly what the Father told me.”He always does what is pleasing to His Father: it is His food and drink. His availability goes even to the gift of His human life; His confidence goes even to the certitude of taking it up again: “The Father loves me because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.” In this sense He rejoices to go to the Father. For Jesus it is not a question of a passing awareness. It is the reverberation in His human consciousness of the love that He has always known as God in the bosom of the Father: “…you loved me before the foundation of the world.” Here there is an uncommunicable relationship of love which is identified with His existence as the Son and which is the secret of the life of the Trinity: the Father is seen here as the one, who gives Himself to the Son, without reserve and without ceasing, in a burst of joyful generosity, and the Son is seen as He who gives Himself in the same way to the Father, in a burst of joyful gratitude, in the Holy Spirit.”
This is the joy Jesus wants to perfect within us.
Sowers
Let’s turn now to the apostolic dimension. We are called to be sowers of peace and joy.
The proclamation of the Gospel was described by Jesus in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. The Word of God is not just the words of God, but it’s also the Word made flesh, the incarnate prince of peace and the enflesh good news of great joy to all the peoples.
There is of course the first three soil samples, but we’re called to sow regardless. To sow Jesus is to sow his kingdom, to sow his peace, to sow his joy.
When Jesus first sent out his apostles, he told them to wish houses peace and told them that if a peaceful person does not live there, “your peace will return to you.” They’re supposed to be in peace as they go out. Even when they experience rejection, they’re supposed to dust it off and move on with peace and joy.
As we see to sow peace and joy, we recognize that there is an enemy who sows weeds, who sows disharmony, who sows criticism and unhappiness. We need to be alert.
The question is what do we sow? Do we see peace? Do we sow joy?
Jesus called his disciples to be “peacemakers.” “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” That’s the way they will be true children of God. Not peace-wishers. Makers. Builders. Artisans. So it’s not just a wish, but a relationship with Christ we’re bringing and hoping they will enter.
Sent us out to say, “Peace to this household.” “Your peace will return to you.”
Pope Leo began his pontificate with this peace, saying last May 8:
“Peace be with you all! Dear brothers and sisters, these are the first words spoken by the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for God’s flock. I would like this greeting of peace to resound in your hearts, in your families, among all people, wherever they may be, in every nation and throughout the world. Peace be with you! It is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering. A peace that comes from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally.”
Likewise with joy. We’re supposed to be catalysts of joy.
We’re supposed to be, as Pope Francis said, joyful messengers of challenging proposals. Brimming with joy. How intentional are we in sharing this joy?
Or St. Paul VI in Gaudete in Domino:
“The disciples and all those who believe in Christ are called to share this joy. Jesus wishes them to have in themselves His joy in its fullness. … This joy of living in God’s love begins here below. It is the joy of the kingdom of God. But it is granted on a steep road which requires a total confidence in the Father and in the Son, and a preference given to the kingdom. The message of Jesus promises above all joy—this demanding joy; and does it not begin with the beatitudes?”
Or Evangelii Nuntiandi:
EN 80. Let us preserve the delightful and comforting joy of evangelizing, even when it is in tears that we must sow. May it mean for us — as it did for John the Baptist, for Peter and Paul, for the other apostles and for a multitude of splendid evangelizers all through the Church’s history — an interior enthusiasm that nobody and nothing can quench. May it be the great joy of our consecrated lives. And may the world of our time, which is searching, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with hope, be enabled to receive the Good News not from evangelizers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervor, who have first received the joy of Christ, and who are willing to risk their lives so that the kingdom may be proclaimed and the Church established in the midst of the world.
Models — St. Paul VI focused on various models for sowing joy and peace.
Mary
Queen of Peace, whose contemplative heart always held things in proper order, relating them to God’s promises even in the midst of swords piercing it.
Cause of our joy whose heart ever rejoiced in God our Savior.
Martyrs
Kept peace because their whole life was ordered to God and joyful because they know that suffering and death is not the end, but the beginning.
How can we not recall those who had that joy to the end:
Lawrence whose feast is on Monday. Assum est. Versa et manduca.
Maximilian, who kept his peace in the starvation bunker.
Chi Zhuzi, an 18 year old who was preparing for baptism, who refused to worship idols and cried out, “Every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood, will tell you that I am a Christian.”
Saints
They had peace and joy because they put their treasure in God and the things of God. They were full of God’s love and sought to love with that love.
Philip Neri. When will we start to do good?
Joseph Cupertino. Brought joy and peace to everyone, because he radiated it.
Francis of Assisi. Pax et bonum, Pace e bene. He risked his life to reconcile warring family members, rival Italian city states, even Crusaders and Muslims. He who could recognize God’s presence even in animals could recognize his far greater presence in other human beings whom he believed were made in God’s image and likeness and to whom he knew the only worthy response was love. It’s not without reason that the religions of the world have regularly met in Assisi to pray for peace.
Teresa of Calcutta, Nobel Peace Prize, loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness as lived by Jesus and Mary in the Gospels.
John XXIII. Peacefulness. Sense of Humor.
It’s your Church, Lord, I’m going to bed.
How many work in the Vatican? About half.
Not long after he was elected pope, Blessed John was walking in the streets of Rome. A woman passed him and said to her friend, “My God, he’s so fat!” Overhearing what she said, he turned around and replied, “Madame, I trust you understand that the papal conclave is not exactly a beauty contest.”
“I’m not admiring your crucifix. I’m admiring Calvary.”
Substance of sowing
Christ, the peace and joy incarnate. Also his words about peace and joy.
Ourselves, when we’re living with peace and joy.
Prayers
Peacemakers
Address conflicts and misunderstandings, the causes of lack of peace and understanding.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation. (Rondine, Citadella della Pace. 1998. Arezzo. 15 conflict theaters.)
Reconciling estranged friends and family members.
Standing up for those treated unjustly
Seeking fair solutions rather than judging.
Apologizing first
Practice humility, because so many conflicts come from pride.
Confessors
Acts of charity — listening attentively, speaking kindly, helping someone in need, visiting the lonely, showing patience with the difficult.
Guarding our speech. Avoiding unnecessary arguments. Helping them form bonds and friendship.
Loving, even one’s enemies.
Prayer attributed falsely to St. Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; injury, pardon; doubt; faith; despair, hope; darkness, light; sadness, joy.
Joy makers.
Joy is a fruit of life according to the Spirit, a fruit of God’s indwelling.
Therefore to be a joy-maker, we need to live in union with God.
We need to give thanks in all circumstances.
We need to put love into our interactions and service of others.
We need to bring hope, encouraging people when they feel defeated, reminding others of God’s faithfulness, speaking words that build up rather than tear down, helping people to see possibilities, not just problems.
Summary of formation
In forming people for missions in general, Aparecida document gave a five-step program. Insofar as we are being formed and seeking to form others to be sowers of peace and joy, we can re-read this with those aims:
Encounter with Christ — Can’t be taken for granted. Need to encounter his joy and his peace. Do we ponder his joy? Do we meditate upon how he brought peace into every situation he was in, including tense ones, including Calvary?
Conversion — We need to turn with Christ in peace and joy. To confess what robs us, and to begin to do the things that will help us to grow.
Disciple — We learn from Christ about peace and joy. Not just to know what he teaches but to practice what he imparts. Don’t let your hearts be troubled.… Why do you worry? … Rejoice and be glad on that day …
Communion — He wants to bring us into communion with him and each other. Meant to be a source and expression of peace and joy. When things are truly focused on him, that’s what they become. Our parishes are supposed to be places that radiate both. We need to contribute to it. “Let us offer each other a sign of peace…” Some refuse that as if it’s somehow not a priority.
Mission — Go out and do it, not just individually but together. We don’t sow alone. Gregory the Great’s thoughts about Jesus’ sending them out two-by-two.
Conclusion
Eucharist
Peter’s words: Good, Lord, we are here.
Jesus here is the source of our peace. We meet him risen from the dead. He reiterates the word peace. We wish each other at the beginning of Mass, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” We wish each other that the peace of the Lord be with each other always. We turn to the Lamb of God and ask him, “grant us peace.” We are sent forth in peace with God’s peace, glorifying the Lord by our life.
Here he likewise feeds us with himself. St. Josemaria used to smile when giving Holy Communion because he was giving God, he was giving joy, happiness to others. Jesus rejoices that we are here. He wants to give himself to us to perfect our joy.
To use St. Josemaria’s words, here he infects us with a desire to love by his standard, sowing peace and joy
The post Sowers of Peace and Joy, Conference for Priests, August 6, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
36 min
July 31The Courage to Defend the Faith, 17th Friday (II), July 31, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Defending the Faith Conference, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio
Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Loyola
July 31, 2026
Jer 26:1-9, Ps 69, Mt 13:54-58

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.31.26_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
At the beginning of this conference dedicating to Defending the Faith, the Church providentially gives us, in the three readings from the Word of God and the prayers and person of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a nutritious four course meal to strengthen us in the virtue of courage we will need to persevere faithfully, joyfully, serenely, intrepidly and fruitfully in that defense. We asked God the Father in the Collect or opening prayer of the Mass to give us the help he knows we need to imitate St. Ignatius in “fighting the good fight” of faith on earth so that we may merit with him an imperishable crown in heaven. Let’s see together how the Lord wants to prepare us to fight that fight, finish the race of human life, and keep, defend and pass on the treasure of that faith.
The first, big and obvious lesson today is that sharing the faith, and defending it, will seldom be easy. In the Gospel, we see that it wasn’t easy for Jesus. After a lengthy journey in which he worked several stupendous miracles and preached and taught with an authority that astonished and amazed many of those who heard him, he returned to his hometown synagogue of Nazareth to announce that the long-awaited Kingdom of God, the fulfillment of the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah as son of David, was at hand. Immediately before his return, he had given us eight parables about the Kingdom of God and the response to it, and we see in his interactions in his hometown illustrations of all of those parables. As he sowed the Word of God in language and in his person, he encountered some with fruitful soil, like in his Mother and foster-father, but in far more he found superficial rocky soil that immediately responded to his words with astonishment before quickly turning to doubts and worse, as well as those with hardened soil who couldn’t believe that someone who grew up among them not only could possess great wisdom and work mighty deeds, but be the messiah to whom those words and deeds pointed. They were the ones who would see but not understand, hear but not listen. Among the Nazarenes there were wheat and weeds growing side-by-side, good and bad fish caught in the same net. There were some who were willing to sell all they had to obtain the pearl of great price and the buried treasure who is God and others who didn’t recognize the value of that Pearl and Treasure speaking to them live in their own synagogue. There were some with the faith of mustard seeds that would grow large and others whose small faith would actually shrink, for to the one who had more would be given and to the one who had not, even what he had would be taken away. There would be some who, hearing Jesus, would become like the head of the household taking from the storeroom of treasures things both old and new and others who would joylessly draw from that storeroom only what was stale. All of this would be seen when Jesus returned home. At first, he was received with astonishment, but that soon passed to offense, and as we know from St. Luke’s account, it would then turn to homicidal thoughts and attempted murder as they sought to toss him off of a Nazarene cliff. “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house,” Jesus would say, foretelling the opposition, the suffering, the rejection and sometimes even the martyrdom of God’s ambassadors and defenders. St. John’s words in his prologue, “He came to his own, but his own did not receive him,” can be applied not only to the Light incarnate who was rejected by those who preferred darkness, but in some way to every prophet, every apologist, every defender. And sometimes the greatest resistance modern apostles will face will come from their family, their circle of childhood friends, their neighbors, even sometimes their parish or group of fellow believers. Jesus promised us later that whatever they did to him, they will do to us. That we will have some welcome us and others oppose and reject us. But that everything will lead to our being able to give witness, and sometimes the most compelling testimony we will give is fidelity when we suffer opposition, ridicule and even persecution and death. Sometimes our greatest defense may be to imitate Christ on Golgotha. This is what we learn from the martyrs. This is what we learn from the saints.
We see this challenging, grown-up truth on display in today’s first reading as God sent the Prophet Jeremiah to the Temple to proclaim a message of conversion and extend an offer of mercy. Jeremiah said to the people of Judah assembled in the house of God that if they would listen and turn back, each from his evil way, God would not allow them to suffer the consequences of the destructive choices they were making, but “if you disobey me, not living according to the law I placed before you and not listening to the words of my servants the prophets, whom I send you constantly though you do not obey them, I will treat this house like Shiloh, and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth shall refer when cursing one another.” Shiloh, you may remember, was where the Ark of the Covenant had been kept for 369 years until the Philistines captured it. Now that Ark was in the Temple and God was telling them that just as Shiloh lost the Ark and was eventually destroyed, the same thing could happen to the Temple in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, the Holy City, rather than being a word of spiritual aspiration, could become a word worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. Upon hearing those words, “the priests and the prophets” — the leaders of the people, those who were expected holy, to be closest to God — grabbed hold of Jeremiah and said words that foretold what would be heard in Pilate’s praetorium 639 years later: “You must be put to death!” In order to suppress the message, they would extinguish the messenger. In God’s house, where his glory abided, his ambassador and his word were not only unwelcome but marked for extermination.
We learn from what happened in the lives of Jesus, Jeremiah and so many of the other prophets and apostles two key lessons. The first is always to be listening to those God sends, especially if they’re people we know whom we might be tempted to dismiss because we think we know their history, like those in Nazareth had categorized and conquered Jesus. God will send us plenty of prophets, some of whom will preach in pulpits, some of whom will give us fraternal corrections, others of whom will come to us in manifold ways. We should never think we’re “fully formed” and no longer need to heed what God might be saying to us through those we encounter, especially the true prophets who come in God’s name. The second is that, in living and spreading the faith, we must always be prepared for rejection. This was very hard for the young Jeremiah initially to accept. He didn’t know why God had chosen and sent him out just to be rejected, imprisoned, beaten, publicly mocked and thrown into a muddy cistern to die. But God consoled, encouraged and strengthened him for his mission. Jesus is strengthening us, and, like Jeremiah, and like Jesus, we need to be ready to give witness out of season, because as Jesus ultimately says, they’re not rejecting us but him and the One who sent him. Rejection is never easy as a human phenomenon but it is a means for greater union with Jesus, for witness to our faith in him, and ultimately to show others that Jesus and his Gospel are treasures worth suffering for and that the conversion and salvation of others, even those who oppose us, are worth dying for.
Today we celebrate the feast of someone who shows us how to heed God’s message of conversion given through the prophets and the saints and to persevere through rejection for God’s greater glory. Until he was 30, Iñigo Lopez, the future St. Ignatius of Loyola, vainly sought worldly treasures and honor on the battlefield. But then, in the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, he had his right leg shattered by a cannonball. While he was convalescing, because there were no books on knights’ tales and romances in his castle, he was left only with Sacred Scripture and a Spanish book on the lives of the saints. He quickly was pierced by his own shallowness in compared to the substance of Christ and the saints. He was particularly moved by the saints’ valor and heroism, especially in the face of opposition to the Gospel. He grasped that they were fighting the good fight in the battle that counted most. He thought that they had sought and seized the most valuable treasure and achieved the only honor that would ultimately last. And he asked one of the most important questions in the history of hagiography: “Why if I should do what Saint Francis [of Assisi] or Saint Dominic did?” He knew that they were men just like him, but men who said yes to God, men who gave God permission to employ them for what he needed most. There would have been hundreds of other saints he could have named from the preceding 1,500 years, but I think it’s important to notice that among all the saints whose stories were told in the various books lying around the castle, he chose Francis and Dominic, the two 13th century mendicants who not only extravagantly gave up so much of what the world treasured in order to obtain a much more valuable fortune but who formed bands of brothers who joined themselves to them to help the entire world rediscover those hidden riches. Francis and Dominic, and the religious families they founded, were those who suffered a great deal from among the family and friends, from among many of those in the Church at the time, for their radical style of life that to the lukewarm and worldly seemed so fanatical. Francis’ father thought he had lost his mind. The great Dominican Thomas Aquinas’ parents locked him in the dungeon in their castle because he wanted to become a member of the Order of Preachers rather than a Benedictine. Inspired by the total commitment of the saints, Ignatius made the commitment to serve the true King and sacrifice everything to seize his kingdom. His transformation was arduous. The price was steep. He spent nine months in a cave in Manresa praying, turning his wish into a firm will, allowing God to do the difficult work of melting his worldly ways into clay that could be reformed. The interior struggles he went through as he pondered his sinfulness and Christ’s beauty eventually became his famous Spiritual Exercises, the most popular and influential retreat manual in history. That was just the start. He knew he would need an education to be of much use, so, in his 30s, in a move that would bring on him great ridicule, he literally returned to grammar school with young boys to learn Latin before going for advanced degrees in universities. It was at the famous University of Paris that he met the other first Jesuits, including his roommates, the future St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Favre, and helped them to become truly courageous disciples, as together they formed the nucleus that God would use to help to call the whole Church back to fidelity after the scandals that led to the Protestant Reformation. The Company or Society of Jesus then formed and sent out waves of teachers and missionaries all across the globe, many of whom, like the North American Martyrs in the United States and Canada, gave the supreme witness to Christ for God’s greater glory. St. Ignatius’ famous Suscipeshows us the spirituality of a prophet and the spirituality of so many of the great Jesuit heroes across the centuries: “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.” He knew that the Lord’s love and grace are sufficient and are a greater treasure than all of the world’s accolades. He knew that the Lord’s love and grace were worth all of the sufferings he and his spiritual brothers and sons might endure.
Today on his feast day, it’s important for us to ask ourselves, “What if I should do what Saint Francis and Saint Dominic and Saint Ignatius have done?” Each of them had 46 chromosomes, just like us. Each of them had recourse to the power coming from the Sacraments of Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, and confession, just like us. Each of them had access to the lives of the saints and the Word of God, just like we do. But none of them frankly was blessed like we are to have access to resources like the St. Paul Center, the Augustine Institute, Word on Fire, or Ascension Press and Dynamic Catholic, like we do. Today God wants to fill us with courage to dare to do what they did, without fear of the cost or sufferings. God wants us to make the choice that will help us to become true defenders of the faith, in just in terms of apologetic competence, but also in terms of existential witness and example. One of the climaxes of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercisesis his meditation on the two standards or banners. He has us imagine we’re on a big battlefield and on one side there is the flag of Christ and on the other the standard of Satan. We have to choose one or the other. Christ, he notes, is offering us a life of poverty, humility, self-denial, the Cross, and everything the Cross signifies. Satan is offering us all the vanity and pleasures of the world. We’re offered two ways of life, two treasures, essentially two gods, one true and the other of our own making. We have to choose. The whole of the Spiritual Exercises is meant to help us to choose Christ and to persevere in that choice. To choose Christ is to choose to heed his word and to be willing to endure rejection on account of his name. To stand under his banner is to stand under the Cross and to join the long line of heroes— Jeremiah, Elijah, Peter, Paul, Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Thomas More, Stanley, Mary, Agnes, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, Perpetua, Felicity, Joan of Arc, Teresia Benedicta and so many others — who have followed Christ to and through the Cross into eternal life. While the details will change between our life and the life of the saints who have gone before us, God’s grace is indeed sufficient for each of us to imitate their fidelity, fight the good fight, finish the race and keep and defend the faith until the end.
Today at Mass, we are given the literally awesome privilege to receive the same Jesus into this Fieldhouse as who entered the Nazareth synagogue. In fact we’re able to do even more, and receive within under sacramental form the same Jesus whom Mary received within her womb. Rather than calling for his death like those in ancient Nazareth, today we welcome lovingly the Author of Life. Like the temple in Shiloh or the Temple of Jerusalem, we will not just house the Ark of the Covenant but because an Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant, containing within the world’s greatest treasure. And so we pray here with words that Saint Iñigo Lopez used to pray in his Thanksgiving each day, the words he placed at the beginning of the Spiritual Exercises, humbly asking God to give us the help he knows we need to do in our own circumstances what Ignatius did in his. “Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, [into which we enter in the Mass] strengthen me. Good Jesus, hear me. Within the wounds, shelter me. From turning away, keep me. From the evil one, protect me. At the hour of my death, call me. Into your presence lead me to praise you with all your saints forever and ever. Amen.”

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
JER 26:1-9
In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim,
son of Josiah, king of Judah,
this message came from the LORD:
Thus says the LORD:
Stand in the court of the house of the LORD
and speak to the people of all the cities of Judah
who come to worship in the house of the LORD;
whatever I command you, tell them, and omit nothing.
Perhaps they will listen and turn back,
each from his evil way,
so that I may repent of the evil I have planned to inflict upon them
for their evil deeds.
Say to them: Thus says the LORD:
If you disobey me,
not living according to the law I placed before you
and not listening to the words of my servants the prophets,
whom I send you constantly though you do not obey them,
I will treat this house like Shiloh,
and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth
shall refer when cursing another.
Now the priests, the prophets, and all the people
heard Jeremiah speak these words in the house of the LORD.
When Jeremiah finished speaking
all that the LORD bade him speak to all the people,
the priests and prophets laid hold of him, crying,
“You must be put to death!
Why do you prophesy in the name of the LORD:
‘This house shall be like Shiloh,’ and
‘This city shall be desolate and deserted’?”
And all the people gathered about Jeremiah in the house of the LORD.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 69:5, 8-10, 14
R. (14c) Lord, in your great love, answer me.
Those outnumber the hairs of my head
who hate me without cause.
Too many for my strength
are they who wrongfully are my enemies.
Must I restore what I did not steal?
R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.
Since for your sake I bear insult,
and shame covers my face.
I have become an outcast to my brothers,
a stranger to my mother’s sons,
Because zeal for your house consumes me,
and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.
R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.
But I pray to you, O LORD,
for the time of your favor, O God!
In your great kindness answer me
with your constant help.
R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.
Gospel
MT 13:54-58
Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.
They were astonished and said,
“Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds?
Is he not the carpenter’s son?
Is not his mother named Mary
and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?
Are not his sisters all with us?
Where did this man get all this?”
And they took offense at him.
But Jesus said to them,
“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and in his own house.”
And he did not work many mighty deeds there
because of their lack of faith.
The post The Courage to Defend the Faith, 17th Friday (II), July 31, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
27 min
July 30The Kingdom, Conversion and Blessed Solanus, 17th Thursday (II), July 30, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Christ the King Chapel, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio
Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Solanus Casey
July 30, 2026
Jer 18:1-6, Ps 146, Mt 13:47-53

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.30.26_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
During this Applied Biblical Studies Conference focused on the Gospel of Matthew, how providential it is that we have a chance at daily Mass to ponder the last two of eight images of the kingdom in this 13th chapter of his Gospel, the Parable of the Dragnet and the Parable of the Head of the Household. These are not only a great preparation for Curtis Mitch’s first workshop this afternoon but contain for us fundamental lessons about God’s saving will and the response of our human will. They also are an excellent prism with which to peer into the life of Blessed Solanus Casey, the humble Capuchin from Wisconsin whom the Church celebrates today on the 69thanniversary of his death.
In the image of the Kingdom of heaven as a dragnet thrown into the sea, we can see two great lessons: The kingdom seeks to draw everyone in, but not everyone is fit for the kingdom. The net will collect fish of every kind, but the good (literally the “beautiful” in Greek) will be retained and the bad (literally the “rotten”) will be thrown away after the haul. So there is a universal will for salvation but there’s also a response necessary, a judgment to be made, and not everyone will make it. In Jesus’ first homily, he reminded us that the presence of the kingdom requires conversion on our part. As St. Matthew records for us in his fourth chapter, Jesus said, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:17). In his eighteenth chapter, he records Jesus reminding us, “Unless you convert and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (18:3). We ponder today and every Thursday in the third Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary “The Proclamation of the Kingdom of God and the Call to Conversion.” Upon meeting Christ the King, as we see in several of the vocation stories St. Matthew records, some people do change their lives, turn around and follow Jesus, but others do not. All are caught, but not all are fit. This is one of the points Jesus makes several times in St. Matthew’s Gospel: in the 8thchapter, in Jesus’ words after healing at a distance the Centurion’s servant, when Jesus said that many will come from the east and west to enter the kingdom, but many of the children will be cast into the outer darkness; in the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in the 13th Chapter, where the two will be separated and the weeds burned; in the Parable of the Wedding banquet in the 22nd chapter, about those summoned to the banquet who refuse to come or arrive improperly dressed; and most memorably in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in the 25thChapter, where the goats on his left will sadly depart from him into the eternal fire. The eternal Son of God has taken on our humanity, entered our world, gave his life as a ransom to save us all, and wills all of us to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, but there are great stakes to our having been made free in his image and likeness. By his help, we need to respond with faith and live according to what God has revealed to us, to make him and his kingdom the precious pearl or hidden treasure worth giving our life to gain forever. Even though he has made us ontologically very good, we can become morally bad, or as St. Matthew calls us, ethically “rotten,” corrupt or hollowed out through structured without or in opposition to God. “There are only two kinds of people in the end,” C.S. Lewis once famously wrote. “Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.” Hell exists not despite God’s love but precisely because of it, to honor the desires of those who don’t want to live in loving communion with Him and others. It is the state, as the Catechism calls it, of “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” It is the tragic possibility of human freedom for those who, in voluntarily choosing sin, separate themselves from God and others.
Jesus, however, preached this Parable of the Dragnet not as an image of predestination or even to try to motivate us by scaring the hell out of us. He preached it for the same reason he said what he did after the healing of the Centurion’s servant and gave the Parables of the Weeds and Wheat, the Banquet and the Last Judgment: to bring us to conversion, to awaken us and everyone to the fact that just because we’re in the Church doesn’t mean necessarily that eternal life with him is guaranteed. It’s not enough to practice the faith on the outside. We have to be living it on the inside. God gives us a consoling image of the type of conversion to which he is calling us in today’s first reading. He sends Jeremiah to see the work of the potter, fashioning and refashioning the clay and says that that is what he wants to do in us. He wants to form us, and re-form us, more and more into his image and likeness. Even if we’re not happy with who we are right now, even if we know he’s not happy, the potter’s wheel is still spinning and God with his master hand wants to shape us more and more into the persons he created us to be.
At the end of today’s Gospel, at the end of this chapter focused on parables of the Kingdom, Jesus asks the disciples and us, “Have you understood all these things?” The Greek means, “Have you put all of these things together?,” indicating that we’re summoned to put the new truths Jesus has taught together as the pieces of a mosaic with the other tesserae he has given us. It’s not enough merely to hear Jesus’ parables and ponder the images. It’s not enough for us to have him solve the riddle of the images used in the parable. It’s to grasp the truths pointed to by Jesus’ unforgettable illustrations using similes from daily life in such a way that it helps us to seize the kingdom wholeheartedly. All of them are meant to form a whole that helps us live properly in the kingdom. This is what it means to apply our Biblical studies. Jesus mentions in the last parable of the chapter that the scribe instructed in the Kingdom is like the head of his household who takes from his storeroom both old and new. When we truly convert to Christ, it’s not like we lose whatever was authentic in our lives before, but find the fulfillment of everything good before. For the scribes, the scholars of the Old Testament, once they learned about the Kingdom, about Jesus’ fulfilling their messianic hopes, they were able to take from their storeroom of prayer and study both “new and old” to live by and help others to live by. They were able to take from Jeremiah’s image, for example, and see what Jesus the Potter was doing for them in their hearing. The Lord wants to transform us in the same way. He doesn’t throw out our own experiences, but reforms them in the new clay pot that he continually seeks to perfect in us with our consent and cooperation.
We see in Blessed Solanus Casey an illustration of someone who understood these things, someone who brought from his storeroom so much from the Gospels, from the Old and New Testaments, as well as from rich human wisdom and put them all together, someone who was a good fish who in creative ways cast out the Church’s dragnet far and wide. Baptized Bernard, the future blessed came from a humble, large, hard-working Irish farming family in Oak Grove, Wisconsin, and worked as a logger, electric street car operator, prison guard and hospital orderly before entering high school seminary at the old age of 21. He was not exceptionally gifted in terms of academic talents — he struggled to learn German — and for that reason was ordained as a simplex priest, capable of celebrating Mass but not preaching (except very rarely) or hearing confessions. It would have been very easy for him to complain, to focus on what he couldn’t do, but instead he focused on what he could and cast his nets into the deep. For most of his religious life, he was a porter, welcoming people to the Capuchin monasteries — in Yonkers, lower East Manhattan, Harlem, Brooklyn, Huntington (Indiana) and for many years in Detroit — listening to their problems, answering their questions and needs, praying for and with them. Huge numbers of people would come to see him and leave changed as the Divine Potter used his holy Porter to reform them profoundly. Welcoming them, Blessed Solanus helped them similarly to welcome with faith in divine providence whatever God sent. “O what God must have ahead of us,” he would say, “if we only leave all to his planning.” That’s what it means to live with trust in the Potter, something he himself modeled. “I look on my whole life as giving,” he said, “and I want to give and give until there is nothing left of me.” As he lay dying, 53 years to the hour of his first Mass, his last words were a Eucharistic oblation, “I give my soul to Jesus Christ,” a fitting valedictory of trust for someone who like we prayed in the Psalm sought to praise the Lord all his life, sing praise to him while he lived, who put his trust not in princes or human beings or earthly plans, but in the Lord who made heaven and earth. He once wrote about the three things that mark “saintly characters.” They are “eagerness for the glory of God, touchiness about the interests of Jesus, and anxiety for the salvation of souls.” With great zeal for God and concern for Jesus’ deepest hungers, he labored always for the salvation of souls, trying to help fish become good and beautiful and stay for their lifetime in the net of the Church.
Today as we approach the Master Potter in this Mass, he wants to help us to “put things together” in such a way that our life will change. This is the way the Potter makes us ever more fit to contain the treasure he places in our earthen vessels. This is the “ever new” that he wants to combine with everything else he from his divine storehouse of graces has given us up until now. We know that the choice between the good and the bad fish, between the beautiful and the rotten, takes place according to a very straightforward criterion. The Jews weren’t spending all-nighters on the Sea of Galilee trying to catch fish for aquaria. The good or beautiful fish that are saved are those that are fit for eating, who are capable of making themselves a holocaust for others. To use the famous acrostic of the early Church, in which the Greek word for fish, ichthus, was understood to signify by its letters “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior,” the good and beautiful fish are those who, like Jesus, are able to say, “This is my body … given for you,” given to nourish you, given to help you live. The rotten fish are those who have been corrupted by interior selfishness, who by their own choices have made themselves unfit for this type of total service. To live in the kingdom means to imitate the King, like Blessed Solanus, in humbly serving all his subjects, giving oneself totally for others, losing one’s life for the sake of advancing the Kingdom so as to save it. The Mass is in fact the greatest storehouse of all, from which we can draw so much good. The Eucharist is where Jesus wants to put us together with him and with each other, to make us “beautiful” fish and fishers of men, casting with Blessed Solanus, in every way possible, the dragnet that hopes to bring all to Christ.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
JER 18:1-6
This word came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
Rise up, be off to the potter’s house;
there I will give you my message.
I went down to the potter’s house and there he was,
working at the wheel.
Whenever the object of clay which he was making
turned out badly in his hand,
he tried again,
making of the clay another object of whatever sort he pleased.
Then the word of the LORD came to me:
Can I not do to you, house of Israel,
as this potter has done? says the LORD.
Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter,
so are you in my hand, house of Israel.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 146:1B-2, 3-4, 5-6AB
R. (5a) Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise the LORD, O my soul;
I will praise the LORD all my life;
I will sing praise to my God while I live.
R. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Put not your trust in princes,
in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.
When his spirit departs he returns to his earth;
on that day his plans perish.
R. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Blessed he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD, his God.
Who made heaven and earth,
the sea and all that is in them.
R. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gospel
MT 13:47-53
Jesus said to the disciples:
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets.
What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”
“Do you understand all these things?”
They answered, “Yes.”
And he replied,
“Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven
is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom
both the new and the old.”
When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.
The post The Kingdom, Conversion and Blessed Solanus, 17th Thursday (II), July 30, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
July 26Wisely Seeking and Seizing the Kingdom, 17th Sunday (A), July 26, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Sixth World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly
July 26, 2026
1Kings 3:5.7-12, Ps 119, Rom 8:28-30, Mt 13:44-46

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.26.26_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
While I was a seminarian in Rome, working as a guide to the necropolis underneath St. Peter’s Basilica where St. Peter’s tomb and bones were unearthed in the 1940s, I was asked to give a special private tour to a couple from Houston, George and Annette Strake. George’s father, George Sr., had financed the excavations. After the tour, I joined them for a meal and talked to them about what his father had told them about the excavations, which led to a general conversation about his father and how he had gotten his start. It was a gripping story that not only illustrates in a pristine form what the American dream is all about in this month of our country’s 250th birthday, but more importantly also showcases the chief lessons Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel parables.
George, Sr., was orphaned at age 7 in St. Louis. He needed to work extra hard in school to get a scholarship to study at a good university. After college, he served during World War I in the Army Air Corp and, after the war went to Mexico and Cuba to work in and learn the oil business. In 1929, the year of the great depression, he went to Houston, where his new wife Susan was from, with very little money but a big hope to fix that situation. He had learned during his time in Tampico (Mexico) and Havana the types of surface formations that increase the odds of finding oil underneath. So he began to drive up and down the back roads of East Texas in search of these formations. Most nights he would come back with a search as empty as his gas tank. He did this for almost a year, until one day, following a creek bed outside a town called Conroe, he spotted a formation like the one he had been looking for. At great risk to his young family, he sold basically all they had to buy the land. The risk paid off. Eventually two wells were struck and he became over time one of the wealthiest oilmen in Texas — and with his family great philanthropists to various good Catholic causes.
George, Sr., made millions during the Great Depression, at a time when, obviously, so many others were struggling to survive or losing all that they had. Some might say that he was just lucky, in the right place at the right time. There’s no denying that he had did have some good fortune — for example, his being in born in the age of automobiles that he could take to survey land, his wife’s being from Houston rather than some oil-barren location, and so on — but to a large degree he made his luck by excelling in three things: first, he had a hunger for a finding a treasure that could help him not only to support his family but to help him do great good with his life; second, a recognition of what would lead to that treasure, as he scoured back road and creek beds; and third, a willingness to sacrifice all he had to obtain that treasure.
Jesus is saying that Christians need the same three virtues in today’s twin parables of the treasure buried in a field and the pearl of great price. The parables are simple enough to understand. The first is of a poor peasant finding a buried treasure amid his work in the field. There were money changers but no real secure banks to speak of in ancient Palestine. People would often bury things of value in secret locations in fields. There was also no principle of “finders keepers, losers weepers”; whatever was discovered in a field belonged not to the discoverer but the owner because the land was essentially his bank. That’s why the peasant needed to buy the field to obtain the treasure. It’s quite obvious that the one selling had no idea that an ancient treasure was buried on his property. He didn’t place the same value in the field as much as his laborer did. For the peasant, selling all he said to get the money to buy the field was nothing compared to what he knew he would be gaining.
The second parable is of a wealthy merchant searching for precious pearls, going from place to place in pursuit of something truly valuable and beautiful. Finally he found the pearl of his dreams, whose worth was unsurpassable, but whose owner valued it less than the money, property and the buyers’ other pearls he would get in exchange. And so the wealthy merchant sold all that he had before — doubtless houses, gems and other valuable — to obtain that pearl of great price.
The spiritual lessons we’re called to draw from these parables parallel the virtues we see in the story of George, Sr.: first, Jesus wants us to have a burning desire, an unquenchable yearning, for the treasure of the kingdom of heaven; second, he wants us to know where we need to look to find and obtain that treasure; and third, he wants us to have the willingness to sacrifice everything to obtain that treasure. Let’s look more deeply at each of these qualities so that we might honestly see whether we have them and, if not, to ask the Lord today for the grace to have them in abundance.
The first quality is an insatiable desire for the treasure of the kingdom of God, which is basically an unquenchable thirst for God. Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21). He told us in that same Sermon that many of us seek to “store up for [ourselves] treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” but he wanted us to “store up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven,” a treasure not measured in clothing that moths can wreck, metals that rust can corrode, or money that thieves or taxes can take. Jesus is telling us that our heart must be set on God — and not just in general, but set on him more that George Sr.’s heart was set on finding oil, more than a professional athlete wants to win another championship, more than an ambitious politician seeks to win an election, and more than a man in love will do everything he can to win over and marry the woman he can’t stop thinking about. Do we have that hunger? Do we value God most of all in life or do we value other things more than God?
In today’s first reading, God was pleased with the 18-year-old Solomon, who had just been made king after his father David’s death. God told him in a dream, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” Solomon asked not for health or a long life. He didn’t ask for riches. He didn’t ask for victory over his father’s enemies. He hadn’t placed his treasure in any of those things. Rather, he asked, “Give your servant an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right and wrong.” He asked for the gifts of wisdom and prudence and a well-informed conscience, so that he could do the right thing and decide according to what God’s will, both personally and politically. He knew he would be surrounded by opulence not to mention courtiers trying to kiss up to him, the rich and powerful seeking advantages, and beautiful women seeking to be queen. He wanted a heart that sees and desires what God sees and desires, because there would be so many challenges for which he was unprepared and so many temptations to which he would be exposed. God replied with pleasure to his request, saying, “I will give you a heart so wise and understanding” that no one, before or after him, would be his equal.
What would we reply if God said to us today, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you!” The response to such a question would generally show what we value most. If we were to take a poll of Americans in general or even American Catholics, how many would ask for a Porsche or a Tesla? How many would crave a winning Mega millions ticket and the material possessions it could obtain? How many would ask to become a celebrity as a singer, actor, athlete or reality show star, or to marry one? How many would ask to be younger or older, healthier, taller, smarter, more athletic or more physically attractive? In other words, how many would ask for fame, for material possessions, for power? On the other hand, how many would ask God for the grace to be holier, to be more like Him, to think like him, to be merciful like him, to be a Good Samaritan like him, to be rich in what matters most, namely, to be rich in loving communion with him? One of the most moving scenes in the history of saints is the dialogue Jesus had with St. Thomas Aquinas toward the end of his life. St. Thomas had authored many of the most sublime volumes of theology in the history of the Church and had written several of the greatest and most beautiful hymns to Jesus in the Eucharist. A few months before he died, Thomas was praying before a Crucifix and Jesus spoke to him, saying, “Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma: quam mercedem accipies?” You have written well of me, Thomas. What do you want as a reward?” St. Thomas replied, “Non aliam nisi Te, Domine!” “I want nothing but You, Lord!” He wanted nothing but God because his real treasure was God. His great desire was union with God. His great passion was to please God. Jesus wants to fill us with a hunger like St. Thomas’! He wants us to yearn for God with the zeal with which the merchant searched for pearls. That striving for God and his kingdom is the first quality God wants us to have. “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” God tells us today. He wants us to ask for this desire for Him.
The second quality we need is a recognition of where the treasure of the kingdom can be found. George, Sr., drove up and down the roads of East Texas and walked up and down creek beds looking for oil-bearing formations. Where are the places that will form us in the kingdom? What is the path to true union with God in his kingdom? Are we actively searching for that path or are we staying where we are in a “great depression” or our own, waiting for God and the kingdom to find us? The merchant in the parable knew the places he needed to go, and so he visited the shops, markets and seaside bazaars where pearls would be sold. The farmer wasn’t so much searching for a buried treasure, but once he discovered it in the middle of his workday tilling previous unfarmed parts of the owner’s property, he knew what to do. What about us? To grow in God’s kingdom, where do we go? And where should we go? Our task is much simpler than George, Sr.’s. We know where we find God. We find him in personal prayer, we find him in the Sacraments. We find him speaking to us in Sacred Scripture. We find him radiantly shining in the lives and writings of the saints. We find him living within us in the truly Christian moral life. We find him in cruciform, sacrificial love. We find him — as Jesus, St. Lawrence the deacon and St. Teresa of Calcutta remind us and the Church — in the loving service of our neighbor, since every time we care for someone who is hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need, Jesus tells us that we, through them, are finding and caring for him.
In order for us to find God in those places, however, we need to grasp that each of the things I just named is a If we don’t regard prayer, the sacraments, Sacred Scripture, the writings and lives of the saints, Christian virtue, the Cross, and love of neighbor as treasures, it will be very difficult to find God there. Do we realize, for example, how great a treasure is the Sacrament of Confession, where God enriches us with the precious gift of his mercy and makes us rich in sharing it with others? Do we grasp that the commandments and the moral law God gives us are not moral straightjackets but precious jewels, such that we want to burst out with the words of today’s Responsorial Psalm, “Lord, I love your commands!?” Do we see that caring for a sick loved one, or helping a stranger, is like spiritual silver and gold? Do we regard Eucharistic Adoration as a precious gift that we’re silly not to take advantage of, more foolish than a person with a winning Mega millions lottery ticket would be not to cash it in? Are we aware that Mass is in fact the greatest earthly treasure of all, and the wisest investment of our time we could ever make? The second virtue we need is precisely to know what the treasure is and where it can be found. “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” God tells us anew, and he wants us to ask for the gift to know where to find Him as the treasure we seek.
The third virtue needed is the capacity to sacrifice to obtain that treasure. The rich pearl hunter and the poor hardworking peasant sold all they had to obtain the pearl and field, respectively. George, Sr., sold all he had to buy the property with the surface formations that seemed to indicate oil below. Likewise, we need to do more than hunger for the kingdom and recognize where we can find it; we also need to be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to seize it. The apostles, like St. James whose feast we celebrated yesterday, are great illustrations of those who, when finding a treasure, left all they had to follow Jesus. When the Lord Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James and John from their boats right after they had captured the largest catch in their careers, they left everything “immediately” and followed him. Likewise, when Jesus came to find St. Matthew at his tax collecting post and said, “Follow me!,” Matthew left all the money on the table, all the ledgers, and immediately got up to went with Jesus. St. Peter would later summarize the common characteristic of the apostles when he said to Jesus, “We have given up everything and followed you.” That’s in sharp contrast to the one who is famous for not having the willingness to sell all he had to obtain Jesus as the precious pearl. When the Rich Young Man came to Jesus with the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” Jesus replied that he needed to keep the commandments. The young man responded that he had been keeping them perfectly since the time he was a boy; nevertheless, he said, he still knew he was missing something. Jesus replied that what he was lacking was detachment from the earthly treasures enslaving his heart. “If you wish to be perfect,” if you wish to have it all, Jesus told him, “Go, sell what you have and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me!” The Rich Young Man was given the chance to become perfect in Christ’s kingdom, to become wealthy in what matters most, to become the intimate friend of the King himself, but he was too addicted to his material possessions, to the things of this world, to leave them behind. He chose his stuff over Jesus and unsurprisingly “went away sad.” We need to take good note of this because there are many like the Rich Young Man today. He was a good man, a moral man, someone who kept the commandments, someone on the way to eternal life. But he was missing out on the fullness of the kingdom here on earth because he wasn’t willing to do what the merchant or the peasant did in today’s parables. He wasn’t willing to do what the apostles did. He wasn’t willing to make God the true treasure of his life and to sacrifice other pearls for the greatest one of all. Many are like him. They say their prayers each day. They come to Mass. They go to Confession. They get married in the Church. They support their parish and contribute to charity. But they’re not as happy in the faith as God wants them to be. They’re missing something, because something is holding them back; earthly treasures, big or small, have begun to own them.
Today we all need to learn from the apostles, from George, Sr., from those who obtained the precious pearl and the hidden treasure to be willing — and wise enough! — to sacrifice the lesser for the greater, to forsake the good things of earth for God. The protagonists in the parable weren’t reluctant to sell everything they had for the treasure. They were eager to do so, because they focused not on what they were selling or losing but on what they were buying and obtaining. Likewise, for us to make the sacrifices necessary to obtain the treasure of the kingdom, we need to grasp how disproportionate what we’re gaining is from what we’re giving up. St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ. More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish [the actual word is manure], that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Phil 3:8-9). Compared to what we gain, what we’re giving up is fit for the trash can and latrine, he says. This type of attitude toward the kingdom, toward sacrificing good things for the greatest thing of all, explains all the greatness that happens in individual lives and happens in the Church. It explains martyrdom, because the martyrs, like Father Jacques Hamel whom we remember today on the tenth anniversary of his being killed at Mass in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in France, account even their life here on earth less valuable than fidelity to God and living in his kingdom forever. It explains the lives of the saints, like Saints Joachim and Anne whom the Church celebrates today, because they’re the ones who let go of so many great worldly expectations in order to become truly rich in God and his kingdom. It explains how to suffer and to die well, because for those who really seek first God and his kingdom, death is not dreaded but desired, since even though we have to leave behind so many loved ones and good things, we recognize that all of these goods are nothing in comparison with “what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9). It explains vocations to the priesthood and to religious and consecrated life, because those who say yes to these callings indeed put God above families of their own, his love above human loves, his will above their will, his kingdom above amassing a kingdom of their own. It explains vibrant parishes, because it’s in those parishes that people sacrifice huge amounts of their time, money, and expertise to build them and help them grow. It explains truly joyful homes, monasteries, convents and rectories, which arise from situations where family members and spiritual siblings willingly and repeatedly sacrifice to make others happy, to do things not because they have to but because they choose to out of love for others, instead of just being a type of dormitory where perhaps a few sacrifice but most just prioritize their self-centered aims. “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” God says to us today. And he wants us to ask for the capacity truly to love him to the point of giving our life joyfully for him who took on our humanity to give his life for ours. To live up to our vocation to be saints, we must be willing to sacrifice everything else for God.
What if we haven’t lived this way until now? What if we recognize that we haven’t sought God and his kingdom as we should have, or haven’t recognized sufficiently all those places God has given us to find that treasure, or haven’t sacrificed enough to obtain it, or all of the above? St. Paul’s words in today’s second reading are a great consolation. He reminds us, “All things work out for the good for those who love God.” Even the Cross, even persecutions, even a terrible diagnosis and physical suffering, even our past sins, can all become fertilizer for new spiritual growth — provided that we bring them to God, let him transform them, and learn from these experiences. All our past mistakes and worldly priorities can “work out for the good” — ours and others’ — if today we respond to Jesus’ message and the graces extended to us and begin to live by the truth of these parables. Today God the Father asks us, like he asks Solomon, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” and today we ask for the grace to do what the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph, what Saints Joachim and Anne, the apostles, so many saints and Father Jacques Hamel have done: to seek the kingdom, to place it first, and sacrifice everything for it, uniting all we have and are to what God wants to do in us. We can in fact become incredibly wealthy in what matters most if we put into practice what Jesus teaches us today.
One last consideration. Today is the sixth World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly, established in 2021 by Pope Francis not only to celebrate the gift of grandparents and the elderly, not just to prioritize and pray for them, whether living still with us or living in the Lord, but to treasure them and to profit, hopefully, from their wisdom. As human beings get older, they are supposed to be becoming wiser, thanks to the experience of years. For Christians it’s especially so, if we are deepening our personal knowledge of God and awareness of his ways. The Lord wants us over time to become more and more like the head of the household in the third parable today who is able to draw from his storeroom both old and new: the experience of decades long past with the creativity that flows from living with God in the present. As we age, we should be wiser than the 18-year-old Solomon in treasuring God’s wisdom and ways and tasting the fruits of decades of walking with the Lord in his ways. Today we ask God to bless those who are grandparents and seniors even more with the gift of wisdom so that they may be examples to us all of what we see in the figures of Simeon and Anna at the Presentation of the Temple: those who use their advanced years to grow in desire for God, to advance in docility to the Holy Spirit, to give the gift of whatever time they have left to prioritize God, and then to rejoice when at least their eyes see in Christ God’s salvation and glory.
As Catholics get older, it’s a joy to see so many begin to prioritize what matters most, and it’s not surprising that many become daily Mass-goers, because the best place to make that choice for the Kingdom is here at Mass. St. John Vianney, the patron saints of priests, catechized his people about the power of the Eucharist to make us great saints, to help us seize the kingdom, if we but choose to center our whole life on Jesus, the King himself, in the Eucharist. He said, “Next to this sacrament, we are like someone who dies of thirst next to a river, just needing to bend the head down to drink; or like a poor man next to a treasure chest, when all that is needed is to stretch out the hand” and grab the gold coins. The Eucharist is that treasure that quenches our thirst and makes us truly rich, because Christ himself is the incarnate pearl of great price. Let’s ask God the Father for the grace to make his Son here in the Eucharist our true treasure, so that we may experience in this life and forever in heaven the joy Jesus describes of the poor peasant and rich merchant, the joy we see in Saints Joachim and Anne at the conception of Mary, of Saints Simeon and Anna discovering the baby Jesus in the temple. That joy, that treasure, that salvation and glory, that Savior, is ours for the asking. This is what Jesus is offering us today: the admirabile commercium of an eternal lifetime. Let’s follow the saints in giving our whole life in exchange for this gift.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 1 KGS 3:5, 7-12
The LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream at night.
God said, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.”
Solomon answered:
“O LORD, my God, you have made me, your servant, king
to succeed my father David;
but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act.
I serve you in the midst of the people whom you have chosen,
a people so vast that it cannot be numbered or counted.
Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart
to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong.
For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?”
The LORD was pleased that Solomon made this request.
So God said to him:
“Because you have asked for this—
not for a long life for yourself,
nor for riches,
nor for the life of your enemies,
but for understanding so that you may know what is right—
I do as you requested.
I give you a heart so wise and understanding
that there has never been anyone like you up to now,
and after you there will come no one to equal you.”
Responsorial Psalm PS 119:57, 72, 76-77, 127-128, 129-130
R. (97a) Lord, I love your commands.
I have said, O LORD, that my part
is to keep your words.
The law of your mouth is to me more precious
than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
Let your kindness comfort me
according to your promise to your servants.
Let your compassion come to me that I may live,
for your law is my delight.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
For I love your command
more than gold, however fine.
For in all your precepts I go forward;
every false way I hate.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
Wonderful are your decrees;
therefore I observe them.
The revelation of your words sheds light,
giving understanding to the simple.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
Reading 2 ROM 8:28-30
Brothers and sisters:
We know that all things work for good for those who love God,
who are called according to his purpose.
For those he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son,
so that he might be the firstborn
among many brothers and sisters.
And those he predestined he also called;
and those he called he also justified;
and those he justified he also glorified.
Alleluia CF. MT 11:25
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth;
for you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the kingdom.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 13:44-52 OR 13:44-46
Jesus said to his disciples:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field,
which a person finds and hides again,
and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant
searching for fine pearls.
When he finds a pearl of great price,
he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets.
What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.
“Do you understand all these things?”
They answered, “Yes.”
And he replied,
“Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven
is like the head of a household
who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.”
The post Wisely Seeking and Seizing the Kingdom, 17th Sunday (A), July 26, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
30 min
July 11 Becoming Like the Master Through the Lessons He Gives, 14th Saturday (II), July 11, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Monastery of St. Anne, Swieta Anna, Poland
Saturday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Benedict
July 11, 2026
Is 6:1-8, Ps 93, Mt 10:24-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 IS 6:1-8
In the year King Uzziah died,
I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne,
with the train of his garment filling the temple.
Seraphim were stationed above; each of them had six wings:
with two they veiled their faces,
with two they veiled their feet,
and with two they hovered aloft.They cried one to the other,
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts!
All the earth is filled with his glory!”
At the sound of that cry, the frame of the door shook
and the house was filled with smoke.
Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed!
For I am a man of unclean lips,
living among a people of unclean lips;
yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me,
holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar.
He touched my mouth with it and said,
“See, now that this has touched your lips,
your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.”
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
“Here I am,” I said; “send me!”
Responsorial Psalm PS 93:1AB, 1CD-2, 5
R. (1a) The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
The LORD is king, in splendor robed;
robed is the LORD and girt about with strength.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
And he has made the world firm,
not to be moved.
Your throne stands firm from of old;
from everlasting you are, O LORD.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
Your decrees are worthy of trust indeed:
holiness befits your house,
O LORD, for length of days.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
Alleluia 1 PT 4:14
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
If you are insulted for the name of Christ, blessed are you,
for the Spirit of God rests upon you.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 10:24-33
Jesus said to his Apostles:
“No disciple is above his teacher,
no slave above his master.
It is enough for the disciple that he become like his teacher,
for the slave that he become like his master.
If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul,
how much more those of his household!
“Therefore do not be afraid of them.
Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed,
nor secret that will not be known.
What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light;
what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.
And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul;
rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy
both soul and body in Gehenna.
Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?
Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.
Even all the hairs of your head are counted.
So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
Everyone who acknowledges me before others
I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father.
But whoever denies me before others,
I will deny before my heavenly Father.”
The post Becoming Like the Master Through the Lessons He Gives, 14th Saturday (II), July 11, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
July 10 Shrewd and Pure Sheep Among Wolves, 14th Friday in Ordinary Time (II), July 10, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Vincentian Seminary, Krakow
Tertio Millennio Seminar
Friday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
July 10, 2026
Hos 14:2-10, Ps 51, Mt: 10:16-23

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.10.26_Homily_1.mp3

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 HOS 14:2-10
Thus says the LORD:
Return, O Israel, to the LORD, your God;
you have collapsed through your guilt.
Take with you words,
and return to the LORD;
Say to him, “Forgive all iniquity,
and receive what is good, that we may render
as offerings the bullocks from our stalls.
Assyria will not save us,
nor shall we have horses to mount;
We shall say no more, ‘Our god,’
to the work of our hands;
for in you the orphan finds compassion.”
I will heal their defection, says the LORD,
I will love them freely;
for my wrath is turned away from them.
I will be like the dew for Israel:
he shall blossom like the lily;
He shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar,
and put forth his shoots.
His splendor shall be like the olive tree
and his fragrance like the Lebanon cedar.
Again they shall dwell in his shade
and raise grain;
They shall blossom like the vine,
and his fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
Ephraim! What more has he to do with idols?
I have humbled him, but I will prosper him.
“I am like a verdant cypress tree”—
because of me you bear fruit!
Let him who is wise understand these things;
let him who is prudent know them.
Straight are the paths of the LORD,
in them the just walk,
but sinners stumble in them.
Responsorial Psalm PS 51:3-4, 8-9, 12-13, 14 AND 17
R. (17b) My mouth will declare your praise.
Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
and of my sin cleanse me.
R. My mouth will declare your praise.
Behold, you are pleased with sincerity of heart,
and in my inmost being you teach me wisdom.
Cleanse me of sin with hyssop, that I may be purified;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
R. My mouth will declare your praise.
A clean heart create for me, O God,
and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.
R. My mouth will declare your praise.
Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
R. My mouth will declare your praise.
Alleluia JN 16:13A; 14:26D
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
When the Spirit of truth comes,
he will guide you to all truth
and remind you of all I told you.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 10:16-23
Jesus said to his Apostles:
“Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves;
so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.
But beware of men,
for they will hand you over to courts
and scourge you in their synagogues,
and you will be led before governors and kings for my sake
as a witness before them and the pagans.
When they hand you over,
do not worry about how you are to speak
or what you are to say.
You will be given at that moment what you are to say.
For it will not be you who speak
but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.
Brother will hand over brother to death,
and the father his child;
children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.
You will be hated by all because of my name,
but whoever endures to the end will be saved.
When they persecute you in one town, flee to another.
Amen, I say to you, you will not finish the towns of Israel
before the Son of Man comes.”

The post Shrewd and Pure Sheep Among Wolves, 14th Friday in Ordinary Time (II), July 10, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
July 10 Healing Through Mission, 14th Thursday (II), July 9, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Corpus Christi Basilica, Krakow
Tertio Millennio Seminar
Thursday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions
July 9, 2026
Hos 11:1-4.8-9, Ps 80, Mt: 10-7-15

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
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The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 HOS 11:1-4, 8E-9
Thus says the LORD:
When Israel was a child I loved him,
out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the farther they went from me,
Sacrificing to the Baals
and burning incense to idols.
Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
who took them in my arms;
I drew them with human cords,
with bands of love;
I fostered them like one
who raises an infant to his cheeks;
Yet, though I stooped to feed my child,
they did not know that I was their healer.
My heart is overwhelmed,
my pity is stirred.
I will not give vent to my blazing anger,
I will not destroy Ephraim again;
For I am God and not man,
the Holy One present among you;
I will not let the flames consume you.
Responsorial Psalm PS 80:2AC AND 3B, 15-16
R. (4b) Let us see your face, Lord, and we shall be saved.
O shepherd of Israel, hearken.
From your throne upon the cherubim, shine forth.
Rouse your power.
R. Let us see your face, Lord, and we shall be saved.
Once again, O LORD of hosts,
look down from heaven, and see:
Take care of this vine,
and protect what your right hand has planted,
the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
R. Let us see your face, Lord, and we shall be saved.
Alleluia MK 1:15
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Kingdom of God is at hand:
repent and believe in the Gospel.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 10:7-15
Jesus said to his Apostles:
“As you go, make this proclamation:
‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Cure the sick, raise the dead,
cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.
Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts;
no sack for the journey, or a second tunic,
or sandals, or walking stick.
The laborer deserves his keep.
Whatever town or village you enter,
look for a worthy person in it,
and stay there until you leave.
As you enter a house, wish it peace.
If the house is worthy,
let your peace come upon it;
if not, let your peace return to you.
Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words—
go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.
Amen, I say to you, it will be more tolerable
for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment
than for that town.”

The post Healing Through Mission, 14th Thursday (II), July 9, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
July 08 Bearing Apostolic Fruit from Being Attached to the Luxuriant Vine, 14th Wednesday (II), July 8, 2026
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Vincentian Seminary, Kraków, Poland
Tertio Millennio Seminary
Wednesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
July 8, 2026
Hos 10:1-3.7-8.12, Ps 105, Mt 10:1-7

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.8.26_Homily_1.mp3

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 HOS 10:1-3, 7-8, 12
Israel is a luxuriant vine
whose fruit matches its growth.
The more abundant his fruit,
the more altars he built;
The more productive his land,
the more sacred pillars he set up.
Their heart is false,
now they pay for their guilt;
God shall break down their altars
and destroy their sacred pillars.
If they would say,
“We have no king”—
Since they do not fear the LORD,
what can the king do for them?
The king of Samaria shall disappear,
like foam upon the waters.
The high places of Aven shall be destroyed,
the sin of Israel;
thorns and thistles shall overgrow their altars.
Then they shall cry out to the mountains, “Cover us!”
and to the hills, “Fall upon us!”
“Sow for yourselves justice,
reap the fruit of piety;
break up for yourselves a new field,
for it is time to seek the LORD,
till he come and rain down justice upon you.”
Responsorial Psalm PS 105:2-3, 4-5, 6-7
R. (4b) Seek always the face of the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Sing to him, sing his praise,
proclaim all his wondrous deeds.
Glory in his holy name;
rejoice, O hearts that seek the LORD!
R. Seek always the face of the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Look to the LORD in his strength;
seek to serve him constantly.
Recall the wondrous deeds that he has wrought,
his portents, and the judgments he has uttered.
R. Seek always the face of the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
You descendants of Abraham, his servants,
sons of Jacob, his chosen ones!
He, the LORD, is our God;
throughout the earth his judgments prevail.
R. Seek always the face of the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia MK 1:15
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Kingdom of God is at hand:
repent and believe in the Gospel.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 10:1-7
Jesus summoned his Twelve disciples
and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out
and to cure every disease and every illness.
The names of the Twelve Apostles are these:
first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew;
James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
Philip and Bartholomew,
Thomas and Matthew the tax collector;
James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;
Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot
who betrayed Jesus.
Jesus sent out these Twelve after instructing them thus,
“Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town.
Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”
The post Bearing Apostolic Fruit from Being Attached to the Luxuriant Vine, 14th Wednesday (II), July 8, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min

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Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, who works for the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations in New York.