Catholic Preaching

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

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of the Holy Family, Year A

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 30, 2022

Col 3:12-21, Ps 128, Mt 2:13-15.19-23

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.30.22_Holy_Family_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily:

* We celebrate today the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We mark the fundamental fact that when the Son of God became man, when the Word became flesh, he became flesh as a little child within a family. That was a divine choice, for Jesus did not have to come into our world in that way. He could have come as a 33-year-old adult and immediately begun his public ministry of preaching, teaching, healing and saving. He could have come as an 80-year-old sage or at least as a 12-year-old wunderkind dazzling the scribes and priests in the Temple. But he was conceived and began his existence as a one-celled human zygote in Mary’s womb, progressed to a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus until finally he was born as a baby in a family, where he was nourished according to his human nature and grew in “wisdom and favor before God and man.” Why did he choose to come into our world this way? He didn’t tell us the reason, but one doesn’t need to be a great theologian to see why it made sense: the eternal Son of God wanted to redeem all of human life in its totality, from its very beginning, which meant redeeming the family from its very beginning.

* All of existence is meant to be familial. Saint John Paul II used to call the Blessed Trinity a family, because it is a structured communion of persons in love, with a Father, a Son and the love between them so strong as to take on personhood. The human person was made in the image and likeness of God as a communion of persons, “male and female he made them” (Gen 1:27-28), and hence the image of God is familial: a husband and a wife can love each so much that, like the Trinity, their love can generate a third person. They can literally “make love” and then name, raise and live in joyful communion with the love they make.

* But we know that man, woman and children didn’t live up to their being in the image of God. Right from the beginning, sin invaded the family. It began with Adam and Eve and the first sin, in which Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, with neither taking responsibility and with both thereafter hiding the most vulnerable aspects of their humanity from each other and God. The legacy of sin quickly affected their children. Cain killed his brother Abel. There was jealousy between Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael, enmity between Isaac’s sons Jacob and Esau, envy between Jacob’s 12 sons, ten of whom ganged up to try to kill their brother Joseph. There was deadly jealousy in King David’s family, with Absalom trying to defeat his father to usurp his crown. Jesus’ family tree chronicles generations of infidelity to each other and to God. There is rampant polygamy and concubinage. Divorce was permitted by Moses because of the hardness of people’s hearts to keeping their life-time promises. God would sum up the relationship with his people through the Prophet Hosea under the idea of adultery, because adultery, rather than fidelity, had almost become the rule in the relationships within individual families and the family of Israel with God. Simply put, the family had become a mess. As the human family “increased and multiplied,” so did sin.

* Jesus was born of a family in order to redeem the family, to reconcile all of family life to God, because the family has a crucial role in the world God created.

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/12.29.22_Eucharistic_Apostolate_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/12.29.22_Eucharistic_Plan_of_Life_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Mass of December 29, Fifth Day in the Octave of Christmas

Memorial of St. Thomas Becket, Martyr

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 29, 2022

1 John 2:3-11, Ps 96, Lk 2:22-35

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.29.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today, on the fifth day of Christmas, the Church gives us what happened on the 40th day after Jesus’ birth, his presentation in the temple. There Simeon, moved by the Spirit, whose whole life was an Advent for the long-awaited Messiah, encountered him. And when he embraced the Anointed Child in his arms, he called him a “light to reveal you [God] to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” Jesus came as “light of the human race” (Jn 1:4), as the “refulgence of eternal light” (Wis 7:26) and the “refulgence of [God’s] glory” (Heb 1:3). This was indeed good news of great joy for all the people, but at the same time some treated this gift as bad news of great foreboding. As St. John would say, “The light came into the world but people preferred darkness to light” (Jn 3:19). The glory of God took on our flesh but people were seeking their own glory rather than God’s. That’s why as soon as Simeon testified that his eyes has seen God’s salvation in the one named “God saves” (Jesus), as soon as he had said that the infant he was holding in his arms was God’s light and glory, he turned to say to Mary, “This child is destined for the fall and the rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be contradicted… so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” The response to Jesus’ light and glory would unveil what was in people’s hearts. Even though Jesus had come to save everyone, not everyone would accept that gift. Simeon said that rather than everyone’s following and echoing Jesus’ word, many would contradict what he said in words and in body language. He would become the cause of the “ruin” and the “resurrection” of many, depending upon their response to Jesus’ word, his light, his glory, and his offer of salvation. And so it’s important for us to examine during this Christmas octave what the thoughts and response of our heart are to Jesus.

* St. John in the first reading helps us to do so concretely. Throughout his first letter, St. John calls Jesus the “light” and summons us to live in the light and walk in the light. St. John describes three stages of the incarnate Jesus’ progressive illumination in our lives. At one level, they all say essentially the same thing about the type of communion Christ seeks to form with us; on another, they go progressively deeper.

* The first level has to do with God’s word, his commandments, and his truth, which are a light for our steps and a lamp for our soul. St. John says, “The way we may be sure that we know Jesus is to keep his commandments.  Whoever says, ‘I know him,’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.” If we’ve become one with God, we’ll become one with his word, with his will, with the Truth he enfleshes. To know Jesus Christ — rather than just to know about him — is to become united with him in doing the will of God, which is fleshed out in the commandments, in the word of God, in what Jesus has taught, in what the prophets taught in anticipation of him, in what the apostles have taught in application of his life and lessons. Do we see God’s word, do we view the commandments as God’s light and glory? Do we allow ourselves to experience Jesus’ resurrection through conforming our life to this truth?

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/12.28.22_Eucharistic_Charity_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/12.28.22_Eucharist_and_Sacred_Preaching_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of the Holy Innocents

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 28, 2022

1 John 1:5-2:2, Ps 124, Mt 2:13-18

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.28.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today’s feast of the Holy Innocents brings us to face one of the most challenging parts of the faith. We’re celebrating the mass murder of all the boys in Bethlehem under two, in which the words of Jeremiah that were fulfilled in Bethlehem, “sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.” If we mourn the death of any loved one, how much more we mourn the death of those murdered, and how much more we grieve the execution of innocent children! Yet today, despite those fundamentally human reactions, implanted in our nature and supernature by God, we celebrate with a Gloria the feast of the Holy Innocents, and we have to ask why. The answer is not just “because they’re in heaven with Jesus,” because that would be celebrating only a good outcome of a deplorable evil. We’re celebrating something more profound. We’re celebrating the fact that these baby boys made in Jesus’ image and likeness in a very important way experienced the fullness and purpose of human life, which is to live and die for Jesus who had come to die for them and for us. Much later Jesus would say that the one who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel would save it. This is a truth we proclaim every time we celebrate the feast of a martyr. No matter how much that martyr was tortured and killed, we celebrate it as a victory, because the martyr died heroically out of love for the Lord and because of that death now lives forever with Jesus in heaven. The Feast of the Holy Innocents is the most powerful articulation of this most challenging Christian truth we have in the liturgical cycle.

* How Christians mark the feast of the martyrs and, a fortiori, of the Holy Innocents really indicates a great deal about our faith and how we go about our life. Do we look at their deaths principally as great victories or colossal defeats? If we look at their deaths as manifestations of the triumph of evil, then we often will seek to avoid suffering, avoid martyrdom, avoid conflict. If we look at their deaths as exclamation points on lives lived as lives ought to be lived, then we will often accept our own martyrdom should it come to that and, in the meantime, live a life in regular self-offering to Jesus, to the people for whom he gave his life, and to his kingdom. The purpose of human life is to live and die for Jesus, to live and die with Jesus, in little things and ordinary moments, and even in big things and extraordinary ones.

* That’s a truth many don’t want to accept or to live. King Herod certainly didn’t want to live it. When he heard the Wise Men speaking about a newborn king of the Jews, of the long-awaited Messiah, he viewed Jesus only as a threat. And when the Magi didn’t fall for his ploy to return to him to tell him where he was to be found so that he could be selectively assassinated, in a rage Herod killed every infant boy in the area. His lack of willingness to serve God’s plans in the coming of the Messiah led him to wreak so much evil. Once upon a time he had been a faithful man, building the temple, obeying scrupulously the Mosaic law. But he began to get corrupted by lust, power and pleasure and then was totally opposed to sacrifices big and small, not even wanting to put up with people who didn’t agree with him or like him.

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/12.27.22_Adoration_1.mp3