Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, Year I

January 11, 2023

Heb 2:14-18, Ps 105, Mk 1:29-39

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

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The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* Throughout these initial days of Ordinary Time, the Church, through the Letter to the Hebrews and the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel, has us set our proper spiritual coordinates for the year so that we can focus on who Jesus is, what work he seeks to do in us in the ordinary time of daily life, and how we’re called to respond. Yesterday in the Letter to the Hebrews, we pondered how Jesus who is the Father’s definitive Word, the one exalted above the angels, the one through whom all things were made, was made “for a little while” lower than the angels, he suffered death so that he might “taste death for everyone” and in “bringing many children to glory,” would make “their salvation perfect through suffering.” Within the word Jesus came to incarnate and proclaim is the message about the role of suffering in God’s plans of salvation and what that suffering prophesies, death. Jesus suffered and died in order to lead us through suffering and death to salvation.

* Suffering and death, we remember, were not part of God’s plan for us in the beginning but are the consequences of sin, which introduced a disharmony in our relationship with God, in our relationship with others, and in our relationship within us, causing a fissure, in a sense, between our immaterial immortal soul and our body, a fissure that reaches its culmination in death. But suffering and death weren’t meant by God to be simple punishments; they were meant to be medicine for the sin that leads to both. They were meant to be for us what the serpent lifted up in the desert was for snake bitten Jews (Num 21:9): a reminder to us of what ails us and at the same time a medicine. Suffering and death were meant to be a remedy for the sins that ail us and part of our healing. Suffering, as St. John Paul II wrote in his beautiful document Salvifici Doloris, is meant to “unleash love” in the human person. Suffering forces proud men and women to allow others to care for us, to give others a chance to love us, to force us when we’re ill out of our supposed self-sufficiency. Suffering in others also forces us and others out of our egocentrism and gives us the choice to become hardened like the priest and the Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan or rather to become like the Samaritan who draws near to care for and love someone in need. Likewise death is meant to be medicinal. There’s no greater reminder to us that we’re not God than death. It’s a clarion wake-up call to us that we need God.

* In today’s passage from the Letter to the Hebrews, we see how Jesus, God’s definitive word, came to communicate to us God’s message about suffering and death in God’s salvific plans. It describes how Jesus shared, except sin, in all things human — “flesh and “blood,”  including our suffering and death — so that “through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the Devil” and “free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life.” The Letter goes on to say, “Because he himself was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” Jesus knows our sufferings. Jesus knows our death. Jesus is “like his brothers and sisters in every way.” And that’s why he can be “a merciful and faithful high priest before God to expiate the sins of the people.” I want to ponder especially the Letter’s words about Jesus’ freeing those who through...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

January 10, 2023

Heb 2:5-12, Ps 8, Mk 1:21-28

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.10.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

*  Today we begin a new liturgical season, exceptionally not on the first Monday of Ordinary Time, but on the First Tuesday, since yesterday we completed the Christmas Season with the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord, which because of Christmas, Mary Mother of God and the Epiphany all being celebrated on Sunday, was moved to Monday. Every year Ordinary Time begins with the Gospel of St. Mark and in, alternate years, either the Letter to the Hebrews, like we do this year, or the First Book of Samuel, which we will hear next January. If we had begun yesterday as is normally foreseen, we would have pondered the beginning of Mark and Hebrews and the double message the Church gives us to set our spiritual table for the year: that Jesus is the Word who summarizes in himself all that God wants to communicate to us, that he took on our nature precisely to communicate to us by his words and witness in a way most fitting for us as human beings, and that that Word-made-flesh inaugurated his public ministry in the fullness of time with the eruption of his kingdom telling us to do four things: repent, believe, follow him and fish for men and women. Today we will build on those foundations.

* Today’s passage from the Letter to the Hebrews says that this Son who says it all, even though he was higher than the angels and the angels were created through him, was made “for a little while lower than the angels,” taking on our nature so that he could “suffer death … that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.” This was so, being made “perfect through suffering,” he might lead “many children to glory” precisely through suffering. Jesus humbled himself in this way not simply to speak to us about this glory to which we’re called by the Lord, who is mindful of us and cares for us; he came to show us the path of salvific suffering and lead us through this suffering to glory. The Word speaks to us through his body language so that he might say to us both “this is my body given for you” and “do this in memory of me.” This is the nature of Jesus’ consecration in coming into the world. He did all that he did so that we might be sanctified. That’s why the Letter to the Hebrews says significantly: “He who consecrates and those who are being consecrated all have one origin,” namely God the Father and the depth of his fatherly love. Because of this origin, because of this consecration, because of this love, the Letter to the Hebrews says that Jesus “is not ashamed to call them ‘brothers’ saying: ‘I will proclaim your name to my brethren, in the midst of the assembly I will praise you.’” Jesus has come to proclaim the Father’s name and praise to us so that we can join him in the Father’s home. That’s who Jesus is and that’s what he’s about at the general level.

* We see how Jesus goes about accomplishing that mission of announcing to us God’s message, of communicating to us the name and praise of God, of leading us to perfection through suffering, in the Gospel. Right after Jesus began his public ministry and called his first disciples to follow him, he entered the Capernaum synagogue and began to announce and incarnate God’s word through teaching. St. Mark tells us, “The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.” The Scribes would teach by citing Moses, or Scriptural texts, or rabbinical commentaries.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Christ the King Catholic Church, Dallas, Texas

Nuptial Mass of Thayer Daniel Wade and Emily Elizabeth Horton

January 7, 2023

Eccl 3:1-8.11-13, Ps 103:1-2.8.13.17-18, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 7:21.24-29

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.7.23_Thayer_and_Emily_Wade_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* When engaged couples are asked for recommendations for the readings for their Nuptial Mass, most for obvious reasons choose those that explicitly relate to marriage or marital love, like God’s plan for man to leave father and mother and cling to his wife and become one flesh, Tobias’ and Sara’s prayer on their wedding night, the beautiful canticle in the Song of Songs to human love as an image of God’s love, or the several other fitting options that are presented to them in the ritual lectionary. But it says a lot about a couple when they ask to go beyond the suggested selections. It generally reveals a broader knowledge of Sacred Scripture. It shows the priority they give to their faith, that just as they would spend some time discussing the lyrics of the song to which they’ll dance for the first time as a married couple at their reception, so they want to give just as much or more care about what they proclaim about their relationship at their wedding Mass. And it also displays something for which they want publicly to praise and thank God, or pray, at the beginning of their married life.

* So I was very pleased, but frankly not surprised, that Thayer and Emily went beyond the ritual and asked that today we would hear from the Book of Ecclesiastes. This is not because they’re fans of the 1965 Byrds’ song Turn, Turn, Turn based on this famous passage. They wanted, rather, to convey a trust in God’s providence, that there is an appointed time, a kairos, for everything — being born, dying, planting, harvesting, building up, tearing down, speaking, staying silent, fighting, reconciling, loving — and that none of these occurrences takes place outside of God. What might seem to some as a perpetual cycle of history’s repeating itself, they see as a providential path with a point: that “God has made everything appropriate to its time” and has, through all of these experiences, “put the timeless into their hearts,” a longing for something permanent, indeed eternal.

* That’s the way they look at what happened December 11, 2021, at a black tie Christmas party in the backyard at Hawthorn House close to Harvard. What to many in the world might just seem a random lucky coincidence between a guy in a tux and a woman in what Thayer called “an absolutely exquisite crimson gown,” they saw as part of a much bigger picture. It’s what makes sense of why previous relationships had ended, why Emily was at Harvard Business School, why Thayer had decided two days before to leave his job and would therefore have the time to court her more easily and to fall in love much more quickly. It’s what allowed them to glimpse God’s hand behind why Thayer had previously met Zach, Courtney and Janet Horton, why he had read a powerful article by Emily on Harbus the central theme of which resonated with what he had long been thinking, and why God had had them wait.

* On that 2021 vigil of Gaudete Sunday, in which the Church cries out its joy to God not only for putting the timeless in human hearts, but for putting himself, the eternal God, into the human race, they began a 392-day journey together with each other and with God to this Church where Christ the King will join them for the rest of their life in one flesh. Today they proclaim hand-in-hand that there is indeed an appointed time for everything,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany, Vigil

January 7, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.7.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday as we celebrate the Epiphany of the Baby Jesus. I’m recording this homily in Rome on the day of the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI. I thought it would be fitting, therefore, as we pray for Pope Benedict and thank God for the gift he has been for the Church, to share some of the thoughts he gave the Church as successor of St. Peter during the eight times he celebrated the feast here, by focusing on why he said today’s feast is so important and then sharing his insights on the protagonists and elements in this history-changing story.

* The Solemnity of the Epiphany, Pope Benedict said, is the celebration of the “manifestation” of Christ to the peoples represented by the Magi as the universal king to all nations and all who seek the truth (2008). It marks the fact that “by becoming man in Mary’s womb, the Son of God [showed that he] did not only come for the People of Israel, represented by the Shepherds of Bethlehem, but also for the whole of humanity” (2011). It is the “beginning of a great procession that continues throughout history, … humanity’s pilgrimage to Jesus Christ, … to the God who was born in a stable, who died on the Cross and who, having risen from the dead, remains with us always, until the consummation of the world” (2012). But at the same time, the Epiphany shows to us God who in turn is on pilgrimage, a pilgrimage to man” (2007). This Sunday we will join “the men and women who in every age set out on the way that leads to the Child of Bethlehem, to offer him homage as the Son of God and to bow down before him” (2013).

* Who were the Magi and what can we learn from them? In 2012, Pope Benedict said they likely “belonged to the great astronomical tradition that had developed in Mesopotamia over the centuries. … But this information of itself is not enough. No doubt there were many astronomers in ancient Babylon, but only these few set off to follow the star that they recognized as the star of the promise, pointing them along the path towards the true King and Savior. They were, as we might say, men of science, but not simply in the sense that they were searching for a wide range of knowledge: they wanted something more. They wanted to understand what being human is all about. …They were men with restless hearts, not satisfied with the superficial and the ordinary. They were men in search of the promise, in search of God. And they were watchful men, capable of reading God’s signs.” In 2013 he added, they were “men driven by a restless quest for God and the salvation of the world. … They desired more than simply knowledge about things. They wanted above all else to know what is essential. They wanted to know how we succeed in being human. And therefore they wanted to know if God exists, and where and how he exists. Whether he is concerned about us and how we can encounter him. … They wanted to understand the truth about ourselves and about God and the world. Their outward pilgrimage was an expression of their inward journey, the inner pilgrimage of their hearts. They were men who sought God and were ultimately on the way towards him. They were seekers after God.” And in 2012 he added another characteristic: “They were also courageous, yet humble: we can imagine them having to endure a certain amount of moc...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

January 1, 2023

Num 6:22-27, Ps 67, Gal 4:4-7, Lk 2:16-21

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.1.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* As we continue to mourn for Pope Benedict and pray as he asked in his spiritual testament that “the Lord may admit [him] to the eternal dwellings, despite all [his] sins and shortcomings,” it’s fitting for us to profit anew from the extraordinary insights the Holy Spirit gave him to understand and teach the Word of God. Yesterday, I re-read the eight homilies he gave for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God from 2006 through 2013 and, in homage to him and great gratitude to God, I’d like to mine his deep insights on today’s readings and feast.

* He said in 2006, “In today’s liturgy our gaze continues to be turned to the great mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, while with particular emphasis we contemplate the Motherhood of the Virgin Mary.In the Pauline passage we have heard (cf. Gal 4: 4), the Apostle very discreetly points to the One through whom the Son of God enters the world:  Mary of Nazareth, Mother of God,  At the beginning of a new year, we are invited, as it were, to attend her school, the school of the faithful disciple of the Lord, in order to learn from her to accept in faith and prayer the salvation God desires to pour out upon those who trust in his merciful love.”

* In 2008, he described the essence of that school as a school of contemplative prayer. He said, “The Evangelist Luke repeats several times that Our Lady meditated silently on these extraordinary events in which God had involved her. We also heard this in the short Gospel passage that the Liturgy presents to us today. “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2: 19).The Greek verb used, sumbállousa, literally means ‘piecing together’ and makes us think of a great mystery to be discovered little by little. Although the Child lying in a manger looks like all children in the world, at the same time he is totally different: he is the Son of God, he is God, true God and true man. This mystery — the Incarnation of the Word and the divine Motherhood of Mary — is great and certainly far from easy to understand with the human mind alone. Yet, by learning from Mary, we can understand with our hearts what our eyes and minds do not manage to perceive or contain on their own. Indeed, this is such a great gift that only through faith are we granted to accept it, while not entirely understanding it. And it is precisely on this journey of faith that Mary comes to meet us as our support and guide. … In her heart Mary continued to treasure, to ‘piece together’ the subsequent events of which she was to be a witness and protagonist, even to the death on the Cross and the Resurrection of her Son Jesus. It is only by pondering in the heart, in other words, by piecing together and finding unity in all we experience, that, following Mary, we can penetrate the mystery of a God who was made man out of love and who calls us to follow him on the path of love. … May the new year … be a time in which to advance in that knowledge of the heart, which is the wisdom of saints.”

* That contemplation, Pope Benedict would say in 2010, happens not just with the mind and the heart but also with the eyes. He commented, “We heard in both the First Reading from the Book of Numbers and in the Responsorial Psalm, several expressions with reference to God that contain the metaphor of the face: ‘The Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you’ (Nm 6: 25). ‘May God be gracious to us and bless us and mak...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.31.22_Eucharist_and_the_Evangelical_Counsels_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Mass for December 31

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 31, 2022

1 Jn 2:18-21, Ps 96, Jn 1:1-18

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.31.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* “Children, it is the last hour.” Those words of St. John in the first reading today are a fitting starting point for our reflections as the civil year 2022 draws to its close and we mourn together the death of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI. St. John goes on to describe the “many antichrists” who have appeared. The antichrist is not the devil, but, as St. John says later in his first epistle, anyone who denies the mystery of Christmas that we continue to celebrate, anyone who denies that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. During St. John’s time, there were many Docetists and Gnostics who because they believed that all matter was evil denied that God could have ever taken on human flesh. But today there are other types of antichrists, who even though theoretically they may have no problem with the incarnation, live as if God hadn’t taken on our humanity to make us sharers in his divinity. For us to have lived 2022 as a year of the Lord and for us to prepare to live 2023 in this way we must live it together with Christ, the Word Made Flesh who has entered our world, continues to dwell among us in the Holy Eucharist, has promised to remain with us always until the end of time, and desires to be our full-time Savior, Lord, King, Shepherd and Friend. Many times practicing Catholics can behave as practicing antichrists through most of their day, week and year, denying that Jesus wants to come to them in the flesh of their work and study, their sufferings and joys, their Mondays through Saturdays, their TV rooms and bedrooms, indeed that he wants to come to be God-with-them in all aspects of their life. That’s the essence of the spiritual cancer of secularism, which — despite the fact that we believe in God — gets us to live as if God doesn’t exist, as if he hasn’t become one of us, as if he doesn’t want to accompany us, love us, and help us each moment.

* That’s the proper context for us to consider how to live this “last hour” of the last day of the year leading to the “last hour” of the year that’s about to begin. It’s meant to be a year of the Lord, a year lived together with him. How can we best mark this day?  I think the phrase from St. John’s Prologue today is very helpful: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” The past year has been a year of many graces, graces upon which God wants to build in the upcoming year. Yes, there have been sins — our own sins and the sins of so many in the Church and world; we can think about what’s happening in Ukraine, the attacks on pregnancy help centers and push for state referenda on abortion in our country, and various scandals in the Church, to name just a few —  but as St. Paul reminds us, “Where sin abounds, grace superabounds” (Rom 5:20). God’s grace has been greater than all and every sinful disgrace. For us to cooperate in what God wants to do in us in the new “year of the Lord” that is about to begin, it’s important for us to look back, therefore, and see the graces he’s given us in 2022, in 2021, in 2020 and beyond as the foundation for what he hopes to do this year.

* One of the most important spiritual practices of the saints and serious Christians is a nightly general examination of conscience. For many years I have done it in the way taught by Blessed Alvaro del Portillo, who was beatified by Pope Francis in 2014. He taught that in the daily general examination,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, Year A

December 31, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.31.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us as we mark the transition from one year to the next, thanking God for all of the graces he’s given us in 2022 and begging his help that 2023 will be a true “year of Lord.” As we make this transition, the Church has us turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary and ponder in particular the ongoing mystery and reality of her motherhood, because Mary’s maternity and the passing of time are intimately connected. St. Paul tells us, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … so that we might receive adoption as sons.” The fullness of time is precisely the moment when Mary’s fiat allowed the eternal to enter into time, when the Son of God took on her humanity and entered our world, changing human history into salvation history. Therefore, Mary is not just the Mother of God-with-us but the Mother of all of us entrusted to her by that Son when he died so that we might live.

* At the transition of one civil year to the next, when we’re all led to think about the passage of time, about all that has happened during the past year and all that might occur in the year to come, the Church has us turn to our Mother Mary to show us how to live it with faith, no matter what occurs. Little did Mary expect, as she was beginning the Jewish New Year about 6 BC, that that year would inaugurate the “fullness of time” that St. Paul describes, that God would “send his Son, born of a woman,” and that she would be that woman. Little did she know she would receive a visit from the Archangel Gabriel, conceive and carry the Son of God in her womb, put her life at risk for conceiving a child from someone other than by her husband Joseph, give birth to Jesus in Bethlehem in the midst of poverty and rejection, receive as surprise guests shepherds, angels and wise men from afar, present him in the Temple as Simeon announced that he would be a sign of contradiction, have Herod hunt down her Son to kill him and have to flee in the middle of the night to Egypt. What a year that must have been!And that was just the beginning of the adventure.

* The Church sets Mary before us today as a model of faith and trust in God as we begin 2023 because she, like us, needed faith, needed trust in God, to journey into the unknown. As we commence the new year, not having any idea what it will bring, she gives us her maternal confidence in faith that whatever comes, whether seemingly good or bad — tremendous happiness or sadness, births and conversions of loved ones or unexpected deaths, even our own, great advances for the Church or colossal failures — that whatever comes, whether seemingly adverse or propitious, Christ wants to incorporate into his saving mission, even making his grace super-abound when sin abounds.

* After faith, the second way Mary seeks to mother us as we transition from one civil year to another is by helping us acquire a contemplative heart like hers. In this Sunday’s Gospel of the visit of the Shepherds to Bethlehem, after Mary had heard all that they had told her about what the angels had said to them, St. Luke tells us that she “kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” Pope Benedict, for whom the whole Church is now praying, talked about Mary’s contemplative heart in his apostolic exhortation on the ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.30.22_Eucharist_and_Confession_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.30.22_Eucharistic_Pastoral_Plan_to_Make_Eucharistic_Families_and_Parishes_1.mp3