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

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 27, 2022

1 John 1:1-4, Ps 97, Jn 20:1-8

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. John, Jesus’ beloved disciple. Yesterday on the feast of St. Stephen, we were able to get beyond the irenic melodies of silent night to ponder the fact that the baby in swaddling clothes in Mary’s arms had taken our humanity in order to offer it to save us, and St. Stephen testifies to how we are called to follow Christ and give witness of him and his saving plan to others. Today the Church turns to St. John the Evangelist, who left John the Baptist to come and see where Jesus was staying, who was called by Jesus from his fish, boats and parents, who followed him throughout his public ministry, who with his brother James and Peter was called apart by the Lord when he cured the daughter of Jairus, was transfigured, and was in agony, who rested his head on Jesus’ heart during the Last Supper, who outran Peter to the tomb, and who pondered what Jesus said and a depth that has nourished the Church ever since. If St. Stephen is the saint liturgically nearest to Jesus’ crib, St. John is second, because he teaches us several lessons that help us enter far more deeply into the meaning of the Incarnation and the birth of the Son of God.

* The first thing St. John helps us to grasp is the reality of the Incarnation. Today we begin his first Letter, which we will ponder throughout the rest of the Christmas season. St. John was writing to Christians at a time of the Gnostic and Docetist heresies that believed that all matter was evil and therefore believed that God could have never assumed matter to himself. Therefore, they taught that Jesus only appeared to have a body but was more like a disincarnate ghost. He only appeared to be wrapped in swaddling clothes. He only appeared to eat. He only appeared to walk on water. He only appeared to die on the Cross. He only pretended to give us his body and blood to consume because he didn’t have a real body and real blood. For them, the incarnation was a philosophical impossibility. St. John wrote underlining the sensible reality of the Incarnation: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the Word of life, for the life was made visible, we have seen it and testify to it.” During these days of Christmas, it’s key for us to use the senses God gave us to grow in faith. It’s important for us to meditate, with the help of crèches, paintings, music, newborn babies and various other realities on the fact that the Creator of the world became a little baby just like we were except original sin; he was fed, he was bathed, he was embraced and kissed, he slept, he squeezed onto fingers and everything else. Most of us don’t ponder enough the sacred humanity of Jesus and the first thing St. John helps us to do is to use our senses to approach the Word of Life made visible, audible, and tangible.

* The second thing St. John helps us to grasp is why Jesus came. He reminds us in the heart of Jesus’ Good Shepherd discourse: “I came so that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).  This life, he tells us, in the prologue to his Gospel, was the “light of men.” This life is not just “bios” or biological life, but “zoe,” or supernatural life. This is why, Jesus testifies in St. John, he came to give witness to the truth. This is the life for which God out of love sacri...

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/12.26.22_Gods_Advent_Preparation_for_the_Eucharist_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/12.26.22_Christmas_and_the_Eucharist_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 26, 2022

Acts 6:8-10.7:54-59, Ps 31, Mt 10:17-22

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* In the Church’s liturgical calendar, the observance of the feasts of saints is normally trumped by the most important liturgical seasons. For example, when saints’ memorials that ordinarily would have to be celebrated (obligatory memorials) fall in Lent, Easter, Advent or Christmastide, they become optional, encouraging the priest to focus on the liturgical season more than the particular holy man or woman. When such saints’ days fall during the most important parts of the liturgical year — Sundays, the weekdays of Holy Week, and the Easter Octave — they’re generally outright suppressed. Even though the Christmas Octave is liturgically basically in the same category of feasts that take precedence over all saints’ days (as we will see later in the week with the feasts of St. Thomas Becket on Dec. 29, St. Roger on Dec. 30, and St. Silvester on Dec. 31), the Church makes an exception for the first three days after Christmas and has made the celebration of three saints’ days not just obligatory but liturgically festive: today, the Feast of St. Stephen; Dec. 27, the feast of St. John the Evangelist, and Dec. 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Church wants to ensure that marking their feast days are never optional.

* While it’s somewhat straightforward to celebrate the feast of the Holy Innocents during the Christmas season and not much of a stretch to celebrate St. John, since his Gospel on how the Word became Flesh and how we either accept or reject Christ the Light (Christmas Day) who shines on the people walking in Darkness (Christmas Vigil) can be easily tied into Christmas, the feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, which occurs annually the day after Christmas, requires more work to harmonize. The events described in today’s first reading about his calling, ministry and martyrdom, all took place nearly 40 years after the events we celebrated yesterday on Christmas Day. If we’re able to grasp the connection between the two, however, it will help very much to reinforce the message of Christmas.

* The fundamental message of Christmas is that Christ has come into the world to remake us even more wondrously than he formed us in Creation. The Savior is born for us so that we might experience rebirth. As the Collect of Christmas Mass During the Day emphasized, Christ took on our humanity so that we might share in his divinity. The “reason for the season” is not simply “Jesus” but more precisely what Jesus wishes to do in us. That’s what this feast of St. Stephen helps us to ponder. In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, we turn to God the Father and ask, “Grant, Lord, … that we may imitate what we worship,” words that became am imperative for us on the day of our priestly ordination, when we were instructed to imitate what we celebrate. We beg for the grace to emulate Christ the Lord before whose manger we kneel. And if we’re going to imitate Jesus, we can’t forget that that Baby born in a silent night in a stable came into the world to fight, to fight with love as the Good Shepherd to redeem us from wolves, to fight against the devil, to fight for the full love of God and love of others, including the love of those who have made themselves our enemies. And that baby adored by shepherds who grew up to call himself the Good Shepherd calls us to follow him, to imitate him whom we adore.

* We see that St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Christmas

December 24, 2022

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Merry Christmas! 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 celebrate the birth of the Lord.

* There are four different Masses at Christmas with four totally different sets of readings: the vigil Mass in which we hear again the Gospel we pondered last week of the Angel’s appearance to St. Joseph; the Mass during the Night, in which in the Gospel we examine what the angels said to the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night; the Mass at Dawn, the Gospel of which centers on the Shepherds’ encounter with Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem; and the Mass during the Day, in which we meditate on the beginning of St. John’s Gospel and the theological reality of the Word of God’s becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Each of the Gospels, and the readings that complement them, merits a full treatment, but what I would like to do is to focus on St. Luke’s account of the shepherds with the angels and then with Mary and Joseph and ponder four lessons we can learn from them about what God expects of us as God’s eternal word enters into a consequential conversation with us as he is born of Mary in Bethlehem.

* The first lesson is about vigilance. The Shepherds were on watch. They were able to hear the message proclaimed by the angels because they were awake and this alertness points to an interior readiness to receive God’s word through the Angel. Their hearts were open, waiting for God and longing for God. They were in a state of Advent. They were willing to stretch their imaginations to recognize that God’s highest glory would be found wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger and that such lowliness would be in turn lifted to divine heights. The first Sunday of Advent each year features a Gospel passage that reminds us that we need to awaken and remain alert for the Lord is coming like a thief in the night. The shepherds are models of what it means to be awake and alert for the Lord’s arrival. Like the shepherds, we are all called to be vigilant, to be alert and awake. One great way to determine whether we’re really alert and awake to God, whether we’re able to stretch our imaginations to embrace Christ in the real, real world, is whether we’re able to give up some of our sleep to come to be with him, like happens with the beautiful tradition of Christmas Midnight Mass, which is a bulwark against the propensity to fit the celebration of Christmas and the worship of God into our crowded life; but an annual reminder that we are called to make our lives revolve around the mysteries of faith and that those mysterious realities are worth changing sleep patterns and inconveniencing ourselves. The truth is that if we’re not awake to the presence of God with us, to his word announced through messengers, then we’re essentially living in a dream world that will make us often miss God’s promptings. The shepherds show us what should be occurring in us spiritually throughout the year, staying awake to God’s promptings, to God’s voice, with interior longing, so that when God speaks and calls, we’re listening and ready.

* The second lesson the shepherds teach us is how to respond to God’s promptings. The Gospel passage tells us that “they made haste” to go to Bethlehem. This expression calls to mind what we know about the Blessed Virgin Mary, who as soon as the angel told her that her elde...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Mass of December 23

December 23, 2022

Mal 3:1-4.23-24, Ps 25, Lk 1:57-66

 

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

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The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* In today’s final O Antiphon, we turn to Jesus and pray, “O Emmanuel, rex et legisfer noster, expectatio gentium et salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster,” “O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, expectation and Savior of the nations, come and save us, Lord our God.” God-with-us comes to rule us, to show us how to love God and others, as the fulfillment of our longings for salvation. And in today’s readings we sense not only his proximity but what he will do when at last he comes.  “Lift up your heads and see: your Redemption is near at hand,” we pray in the Responsorial Psalm. We lift our heads, our hearts, our hands and our voices, because God is coming to be with us to redeem us in his kingdom and through his two-fold law of love.

* We see two aspects of this redemption in the readings today. The first is purification. The Prophet Malachi tells us that the Messiah — “the Lord whom you seek” who would “suddenly … come to the temple” — would be “like a refiner’s fire, … refining and purifying silver. … He will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or silver that they may offer due sacrifices to the Lord.” Jesus’ essential work in us is to purify the treasure we hold in clay vessels (2 Cor 4:7). That process of purification is implicitly alluded to in today’s Gospel scene. At a superficial level, the reason why we have the birth and naming of St. John the Baptist two days before Christmas is that, historically, it preceded the birth of Christ, and since December 17, we have been traversing all of the proximate historical events of that first Advent. But the birth and naming of the precursor both point to the birth and naming of the one John came to announce, Jesus. John’s mission was to purify, to help the people prepare the path for the Messiah to come, who would say at the Jordan, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:10-12).

* The second aspect of redemption is intergenerational love. Malachi announces the mission of John the Baptist, the new Elijah. About John, God says, “Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me … to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” The mission of the precursor was to prepare the way and the day of the Lord, who would seek to reunite us as one family. Malachi talks about intergenerational reunion that begins not just with dry duties of familial piety and an extrinsic obedience to the fourth commandment, but something altogether full of love, that the hearts of parents and the hearts of kids would be turned lovingly toward each other. That’s one of the things that the Lord wants to have happen at every Christmas, that children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, extended families all come together to be reunited in worshipping God-with-us. We know that the disunity that happens in families occurs because of sin, when people choose to act as gods or want to be treated as gods, determining the law.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Mass for December 22

December 22, 2022

1 Sam 1:24-28, 1 Sam 2:1.4-8, Lk 1:46-56

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* For me, one of the most evocative phrases of the second phase of Advent is a line we pray in the Advent Preface the Church prays at all of the Masses between December 17 and 24: “The Virgin Mother longed for him with love beyond all telling.” Advent is a season of longing, of desire, and no one shows us that desire better than Mary, not only as Daughter Zion summing up in herself the longings of the Jewish people across the centuries awaiting the coming of the Messiah, but also as the Mother chosen by God the Father to conceive and bear that Messiah, that Son of the Living God. So many first-time moms are bursting with excitement for the birth of their child. Mary’s longing was, the Preface reminds us, beyond all description. She wants to help us enter into that holy longing.

* Today’s O Antiphon is a commentary on Advent longing. The Church prays,  O Rex gentium et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti. “O King and Desired One of the Nations, O Cornerstone who makes one from both [who unites the house of Israel with all the nations]: come and save the human person whom you formed from the clay.” In this O Antiphon we first make explicit what is implicit in the O Adonai of December 18 when we refer to Christ not only as the “leader of the house of Israel” who gave the Israelites the law, but also the “Adonai” or Lord who spoke as Yahweh (I am who am, the God of every being) to Moses in the burning bush. Jesus is king of all nations, not just Israel, and he comes to unite Israel with all of the nations in the worship of the one true God as one family. He is the Desideratus gentium, the Desired One of the Nations, who implanted within us a holy longing for him and for the redemption he alone brings. And we pray in this O Antiphon for him to fulfill this Mission. Just as he is the creator of us all, having breathed into our common ancestors at the beginning of time the breath of life, our soul, so he wants to remake us and reunite all of us he formed from the clay as one family.

* Today we see what’s supposed to happen with the soul he has breathed into us. It shows us what our response is supposed to be when God fulfills our longing for him with love beyond all telling. We’re called to burst with praise and thanksgiving. Mary shows us this in her famous Magnificat, when she exclaims, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Our souls are meant to magnify God and God, in fulfilling our desires, has given us so many reasons for soul-bursting praise. The Almighty has done great things for us and holy is his name! At the same time, we see in Mary’s Magnificat, that in order to praise and thank God aright, we need to experience longing for him and for the gifts that come from his generous hand. Mary describes how God looks on us in our lowliness, how he defends the innocent, the weak and the small with the strength of his arm, how he lifts us up the lowly, how he fills the hungry with good things, how he routinely and mercifully comes to the rescue of Israel. Each of these situations — poverty, hunger, weakness, even desperation — increases our recognition of our need to be saved and stokes our longing. And then when God comes in response to the prayers made out of that longing, how can our souls remain quiet? In her Magnificat,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Mass for December 21

Memorial of St. Peter Canisius

December 21, 2022

Song 2:8-14, Ps 33, Lk 1:39-45

 

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here: 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There’s a great irony of proclaiming in today’s first reading from the Song of Songs, “The winter is past,” on the day winter begins, with the winter solstice occurring at 4:48 pm on the East Coast. But the connection will make far greater sense if we understand these words of the Song of Songs from the perspective of today’s O Antiphon* (see explanation below): O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol iustitiae: veni et illumina sedentes in tenebris et umbra mortis. “O Rising Sun in the East, splendor of eternal light and sun of justice, come, illumine those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.” Jesus is the Rising Sun and his light — his eternal “Light from Light” — shines in the midst of the greatest darkness and makes the darkest day of the year radiant. Even when we’re walking through the dark valley of the shadow of death, Jesus comes to bring us into the kingdom of light.

* We see this happen in the Gospel. Even though John the Baptist is in the darkness of Elizabeth’s womb, Jesus comes within the womb of Mary and irradiates that darkness with his light and joy. We see the same dynamism in the first reading, the Song of Songs, which is an allegory of the dramatic loving dialogue that’s supposed to happen between God and each one of our souls. Much more than a husband and wife who have been apart for a year run across airports to embrace each other, so our longing is meant to be even greater for God because his longing is greater for us. There’s darkness in separation, but the hope of reunion shines in the midst of that darkness, and when the encounter happens, the long night is forgotten.

* Throughout Advent our desire is supposed to be growing like we see in the Song of Songs. The main purpose of the Advent wreath is to indicate what’s supposed to be happening within us: that week by week, the flame of our intense desire is meant to be doubling, tripling and quadrupling. And that’s what we see in the relationship between Bridegroom and Bride in this passage, which has inspired so many mystics, like St. Bernard, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese, to use it as a paradigm for the loving relationship we’re supposed to have with God. Jesus is coming as a Lover “springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills, … like a gazelle or a young stag.” He was doing that in the Gospel within Mary’s womb before he had even the tiniest of feet. He speaks, continually saying, “Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one and come!” He wants to raise us from sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, and come to him who loves us, who finds us beautiful and pure. He wants to see us, to hear our voice, to have us “sing a new song” (today’s Responsorial Psalm, literally the “song of the dove,” the song inspired by the Holy Spirit that we’re called to sing to our Emmanuel). This is the whole essence of Advent. Jesus is coming out of love for us because he seeks to espouse us to him forever. He’s coming because he loves us, because he finds us beautiful, and wants, by water and the word,  to make us like a dove, “pure and immaculate in his sight” (Eph 5:25-27).

* In our world, in our souls, the darkness that Christ wants to heal is wherever Christ doesn’t shine. St. John tells us in his Gospel about Jesus, “The light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil” (Jn 3:19).

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, ManhattanMass for December 20December 20, 2022Is 7:10-14, Ps 24, Lk 1:26-38

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily:

The O Antiphon on which the Church has us meditate today in anticipation of Christ’s birth is “O clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel: qui aperis, et nemo claudit; claudis, et nemo aperit: veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris,” which is translated, “O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens: come and lead forth the captive who sits in the shadows from his house arrest (his home of prison).”

Jesus is the Key of David who opens and locks the door to heaven. He identifies himself as such in his message to the Church of Philadelphia in the Book of Revelation, where he identified himself as “the holy one, the true, who holds the key of David, who opens and no one shall close, who closes and no one shall open” (Rev 3:6). He was the descendant of David to whom the keys of the kingdom were eventually transmitted and who in turn transmitted them to Peter and his successors. But this reference to a key to open and close goes back to the time of today’s first reading. We encounter King Ahaz who, if you remember the Gospel of Jesus’ genealogy from December 17, was the eighth generation grandson of King David. We’ll return to King Ahaz shortly, but his son, Hezekiah, was one of the most faithful kings in the Davidic line. He replaced the master of his household — Shebna, basically his prime minister, who had allowed the temple of God to become sullied — with Eliakim. God said to Shebna through Isaiah, “I will thrust you from your office and pull you down from your station. On that day I will summon my servant Eliakim, son of Hilkiah; I will clothe him with your robe, and gird him with your sash, and give over to him your authority. He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah. I will place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open.  I will fix him like a peg in a sure spot, to be a place of honor for his family” (Is 22:19-23). Jesus received those keys according to his humanity. As the Archangel Gabriel said to Mary in today’s Gospel about the Son she would conceived in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit and bear, “The Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”

As we draw near to the celebration of Christmas, we prepare to welcome Jesus as that key, the one who comes to lead those sitting in darkness from our house arrest. We recognize that Jesus has come into the world to open up the doors to our prison cells and lead us out of darkness into light. The key he holds is the Cross, which is what — through his passion, death and resurrection — freed us from sin and the death to which it leads and opened up for us a life of grace and the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem.

But while Jesus has done his work of opening up our prisons, we must leave our “house arrest” behind. The doors are open but we must walk out that door. Plato, 500 years before Christ, in his famous work The Republic, gave an allegory (extended metaphor) of a cave, which he puts on the lips of Socrates in one of the most famous philosophical images ever made. Plato describes an underground cave which has an opening toward the light. In this cave there are living human beings chained from childhood in such a way that they face the inside wall of the cave and ha...