Catholic Preaching

Catholic Preaching

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Catholic Preaching episodes

  • Envy Versus Gratitude: Sometimes A Matter of Life or Death, Second Thursday (II), Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, January 22, 2026

    Msgr. Roger J. Landry

    IESE Business School, Manhattan
    NYC Leonine Forum Chapter
    Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
    Votive Mass For Giving Thanks to God for the Gift of Human Life
    Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children
    January 22, 2026
    1 Sam 18:6-9.19:1-7, Ps 56, Mk 3:7-12

     

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

    https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.22.26_Homily_1.mp3

     

    The following points were attempted in the homily: 

    • On this day on we mark the 53rd anniversary of the notorious Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions that legalized abortion in our country across all 50 states and facilitated the slaughter of more than 65 million unborn children made in God’s image and likeness, the Church in the United States does a day of prayer and penance for the legal protection of unborn children and we offer a Votive Mass for Giving Thanks to God for the Gift of Human Life. We give thanks for the gift of life, our life, the life of our parents, siblings, children, friends, each other, in fact every human life. We likewise give thanks for the 2022 Dobbs decision that made it possible for states to restrict and eliminate abortion and that has saved the lives of so many precious little boys and girls now under four. We give thanks for work of so many in the pro-life movement, for all those at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception tonight, for all those who will march tomorrow, for all those who work in pregnancy help centers, for those who give prayerful witness to life outside abortion clinics, for all those moms and dads who choose life, for those who help them, and, tonight as we explore the subject of Catholic Social Teaching and the American Experiment, for those public leaders who valiantly and justly defend and advance life.
    • We give thanks. As we pray at Mass it is right and just, our duty and salvation, always and everywhere to give God thanks. But it’s super important for us to give God thanks for the gift of life, every life, including those that last just a few breaths, including those precious children with the mysterious vocation to be born with illnesses and disabilities. Every life is a gift and therefore it’s key for us to thank the Giver and all those who cooperate with the Giver. One of the most important aspects of a culture and civilizations of life — something that does not get enough attention — is the attitude and practice of gratitude. That’s one of the reasons why we have this specific votive Mass, to form Catholics more and more deeply in gratitude so that we might be salt, light and leave in forming a civilization of life and love. Diametrically opposed to the virtue of thanksgiving, however, is not ingratitude. We know from our own life that sometimes our lack of gratitude can flow from simple self-centeredness. We take for granted what others do and overlook their sacrifices, care, and generosity. How many of us growing up were habitually ungrateful to our parents and, rather than thanking them for everything they provided each day — shelter, clothing, food, education, rides, love and even life — we often behaved as if we were entitled to what they were giving us freely. But in most circumstances those were omissions. More diametrically opposed to virtue of gratitude is when we resent gifts, when we get upset about those give them, and get sad and angry at the gifts others receive, focused far more on what others have than the blessings we do. One of the vices diametrically opposed to gratitude is envy, and today’s readings help us focus on that truly deadly sin. The sin of envy is a deep sadness or even anger over someone else’s blessings. The Book of Wisdom reminds us, “By the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it” (Wis 2:24). Envy is a sign that the devil to some degree possesses us, because the devil is defined by envy against God and against his goodness. Envy led to the devil’s fall and his desire to destroy us, because Christ took on our nature instead of the angelic nature. Envy led Cain to kill Abel. Envy has led to the destruction of friendships, of families, of societies, and done enormous harm to the Church. Envy, in short, kills and is deeply embedded in the culture of death. Some radical feminists push for abortion because they’re envious that men don’t need to share the same consequences of sexual activity, the burdens of pregnancy, and consequently some career possibilities. Somewhat like an older infant can sometimes become envious at the attention a newborn brother or sister gets, so sometimes young adults who receive word that they’ve conceived a child can become not just fearful, but envious, of the attention and sacrifices a newborn baby would demand. Sometimes, too, people say that they don’t want to bring another child into the world, because that will somehow diminish the resources available for other children, or even the oxygen available in the atmosphere, and give into envy in other people’s names. In short, rather than respond to gratitude for the gift of human life, they respond with fear, sadness, and envy for the way the child will necessarily have to become a center of their life, when they might not want something or someone else, including themselves, displaced.
    • In today’s readings, we see the vice of envy on full display, how destructive it is, and what we need to do to neutralize it and replace it with gratitude. In the first reading, the Israelites, led by Saul, had triumphed in battle. Everyone was rejoicing. The women came out to meet the returning soldiers with an ancient ticker-tape parade, singing and dancing, with tambourines, sistrums and joyful songs. They began singing, “Saul has slain his thousands.” Think about that: Saul had triumphed over thousands of people! He was not just a king but a hero. Women were publicly fawning over him. He should have been exultant, but his joy at his battlefield prowess was short-lived, because in the second verse, they sang, “and David his ten thousands.” That filled Saul with bitterness. Remember, David was slaying tens of thousands of people for the Israelites, for the nation Saul was leading. It would be like cheerleaders on a basketball team that has just won a championship, chanting “our point guard has scored 30 points, but our center has scored 40,” and the point guard’s being more upset that he was upstaged by a teammate striving for the same team goal than he would be happy at winning a championship. Saul’s behavior was ugly. It was petty. And it was destructive. Rather than grateful that God had obviously anointed David with special blessing — otherwise how could the harpist-shepherd have really taken down so many? — and had blessed Saul and his armies with David’s many gifts, Saul said to himself, “All that remains for him is the kingship.” The victory turned into a defeat in his heart and he sought revenge against the one who helped him triumph. Like King Herod out of envy would eventually try to strike down David’s 28th generation grandson, so Saul put David in his royal crosshairs. Rather than fighting alongside each other, rather than working together for the good, rather than rejoicing in their victory, Saul decided to try to destroy his greatest military asset. And even after he calmed down at the end of today’s passage, we would see that this cancer of envy would return over and again and Saul would seek to destroy David several times anew, despite David’s goodness to Saul.
    • The future Pope Francis, in a book containing 48 spiritual conferences from his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, pondered what happened in Saul during this scene. “Saul’s envy of David,” he wrote, “betrayed a serious obtuseness on his part. Instead of joining with the people and benefitting from the unification of the whole nation around David, Saul preferred to go on his own way, stubbornly refusing to recognize this man anointed by God. Envy always errs in its object and frustrates the struggle. When people desire something good but do so with envy, they end up losing what is truly good, and, in the case of Saul, it was the common project, the corporate institution. When Saul’s isolated, disobedient conscience separated him from the Lord, he dragged the whole people down with him.” Cardinal Bergoglio makes a very profound point. When envy exists in a heart, it really can’t rejoice in a common victory because one can’t tolerate sharing the credit. Envy is a destructive selfishness that makes true solidarity disintegrate, because one is sad rather than joyful at the success or blessing of a teammate or a brother. Jealousy and envy are two different things. Jealously is basically, “I like your shirt and I hope to have one just like it one day.” Envy is, “I like your shirt, and because I don’t have one, I don’t want you to have yours either.” It ultimately desires the death of others and it leads to terrible atrocities.
    • We see this truth about the homicidal hearts of the envious between the lines of today’s Gospel. The lines themselves show us the great attractiveness of the Lord Jesus on display. St. Mark tells us that such a large crowd of people was following Jesus that he needed to have a boat ready to push a little bit away from the shore so that the people wouldn’t crush him. They were coming from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon. For those who don’t know the geography of the Holy Land very well, those locations might just be names. But Galilee was in the north and Judea in the South of the Holy Land. Idumea was even further to the South. The Transjordan were pagan inhabited regions on the eastern side of the Jordan and Sea of Galilee opposite where Jesus would carry out most of his public ministry. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities way to the north along the Mediterranean. To get a sense of the message St. Mark was communicating it would be as if Jesus were here in Manhattan and that people were walking to see him from Maine, New Jersey and as far away as North Carolina, from Detroit and the outer reaches of Long Island, and it wasn’t just Catholics coming but also atheists, secularists, and those of other religions. They were all pressing upon Jesus, who was curing and teaching. Even the demons couldn’t help, in a sense, but praise him, blurting out against themselves that he was far more than the Jews’ long-awaited Messiah, but something far more significant, “You are the Son of God.”
    • At the same time, however, we see in this scene that not everyone was attracted to Jesus. Amid the joy of so many miraculous healings, so many exorcisms, so many blind people seeing for the first time, so many deaf and mute people communicating normally, so many lame people leaving their mats and with exultation ripping off their bandages, not everyone was happy. In fact there were some people who — as we saw at the end of yesterday’s Gospel — were at this time plotting to have Jesus murdered, because he actually had the gall to love people with deeds on the Lord’s day. These were people who resented what he was doing, and resented other people’s happiness, because of their own miserable approach to God, others and themselves. They were a society of older brothers from the Parable of the Prodigal Son who practiced religion like slaves not sons, who, when their brothers received any blessing, couldn’t celebrate because their hearts resided in resentment. They would rather have their brothers suffer, remain lost, remain crippled, and even die than to celebrate their healing, rediscovery and spiritual resurrection. That is the evil that envy wreaks. And that envy would lead ultimately to Jesus’ death.
    • As we explore tonight the American experiment in ordered liberty through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching, we have to be alert to the way envy is unraveling our common national identity. Many are marinated in neo-Marxist class warfare in which the have-nots envy what the haves have and even the haves envy sometimes the little that the have nots have. They’re trained to look at everything as a zero sum game, and either we’re going to have something or someone else is, and we can become envious even of the thought of they’re having what we want. This is clearly part of what fuels the immigration debate, because many look with envy rather than love at those crossing the border, whether legally or illegally, angry at their potentially taking our jobs or our family member’s health care, social services, classroom seats, or tax dollars. On Wall Street, in academia, among rich celebrities in entertainment or sports, and especially in politics, how many character assassinations take place because someone enviously wants to have the money, or fame, or position someone else occupies? Envy has all of a sudden become a prominent part even of our foreign policy, that someone we cannot rejoice in all we have do have, until we somehow own Greenland, or get massive oil revenues from Venezuela, or exact more in tariffs from our allies, or even get the Nobel Prize committee to choose us over everyone else on the planet. Envy. And we’ve already talked about the way it leads some to reject rather than rejoice in the gift of human life, even a helpless baby at the same stage of existence you and I, and his or her parents and grandparents, once were.
    • It’s not enough just to point out how evil and destructive envy is, we need to battle against it perseveringly, first in our own hearts and then in our culture. What is the remedy for envy? I can propose a few ways:
      • The first is that we need to form the habit of love of neighbor, which means to will the good of the other. To wish the other well in our thoughts, in our words and with our deeds, and to choose it. To desire the best for them, to list and obsess about their good qualities in our own mind and heart, to pray for them to get ahead. This is the first antidote to envy.
      • The second is authentic humility. We are not entitled to whatever we want. I’ve always loved Cardinal Merry del Val’s Litany of Humility, which takes some heroism to pray, because its goes so much against the way our fallen human nature can operate: “That others may be esteemed more than I …
That, in the opinion of the world, 
others may increase and I may decrease …
That others may be chosen and I set aside …
That others may be praised and I unnoticed …
That others may be preferred to me in everything…
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should.” This is a prayer that helps us accept when we’re not chosen and even makes us happier when a brother is chosen than when we are. The more we cultivate this prayer, the less we’ll be eaten alive by envy.
      • Third is genuine fraternity. In contrast to Saul’s envy we see Jonathan’s fraternal love. If anyone should have been jealous over David’s success it should have been he, because he was presumptively Saul’s heir, but instead of being filled with envy, he repeatedly intervened to save David’s life. He was filled with fraternity, friendship and love. No wonder why he’s always been a model of a true friend.
      • Fourth and last, to go back to the votive Mass we’re celebrating tonight, is to be grateful for what God has given us. Envy and jealousy both flow from thinking we need something or someone else other than God and what he’s bestowed in order to be happy. They ultimately flow from a deep insecurity about how loved we are by God in our own unique way. When we can live in that divine love then we can more easily rejoice in the way God loves others, even if he loves them differently than the way he loves us.
      • Today as we celebrate this Mass thanking God for the Gift of Human Life, we rejoice at the blessings that our triune God has given each of us and especially the supreme gift of himself, the gift of his word, the gift of our faith and the opportunity through the Leonine Forum and other means to grow in it, the gift of each other, the gift of being alive at this time, the gift of so many opportunities to do good, and the gift of our vocation and mission to love others as Jesus has loved us, even to giving of our life to save the lives of our brothers and sisters, however small. We ask him to strengthen us tonight by what we’re going to learn as well as by how we will feed us to be able to be able to help our fellow citizens order their liberty toward God and love so that they may use that freedom to choose life and to rejoice always in it.

        •  

        The readings for today’s Mass were: 

        Reading 1
        1 SM 18:6-9;19:1-7
        When David and Saul approached
        (on David’s return after slaying the Philistine),
        women came out from each of the cities of Israel to meet King Saul,
        singing and dancing, with tambourines, joyful songs, and sistrums.
        The women played and sang:
        “Saul has slain his thousands,
        and David his ten thousands.”
        Saul was very angry and resentful of the song, for he thought:
        “They give David ten thousands, but only thousands to me.
        All that remains for him is the kingship.”
        And from that day on, Saul was jealous of David.
        Saul discussed his intention of killing David
        with his son Jonathan and with all his servants.
        But Saul’s son Jonathan, who was very fond of David, told him:
        “My father Saul is trying to kill you.
        Therefore, please be on your guard tomorrow morning;
        get out of sight and remain in hiding.
        I, however, will go out and stand beside my father
        in the countryside where you are, and will speak to him about you.
        If I learn anything, I will let you know.”
        Jonathan then spoke well of David to his father Saul, saying to him:
        “Let not your majesty sin against his servant David,
        for he has committed no offense against you,
        but has helped you very much by his deeds.
        When he took his life in his hands and slew the Philistine,
        and the LORD brought about a great victory
        for all Israel through him,
        you were glad to see it.
        Why, then, should you become guilty of shedding innocent blood
        by killing David without cause?”
        Saul heeded Jonathan’s plea and swore,
        “As the LORD lives, he shall not be killed.”
        So Jonathan summoned David and repeated the whole conversation to him.
        Jonathan then brought David to Saul, and David served him as before.
        Responsorial Psalm
        PS 56:2-3, 9-10A, 10B-11, 12-13
        R. (5b) In God I trust; I shall not fear.
        Have mercy on me, O God, for men trample upon me;
        all the day they press their attack against me.
        My adversaries trample upon me all the day;
        yes, many fight against me.
        R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
        My wanderings you have counted;
        my tears are stored in your flask;
        are they not recorded in your book?
        Then do my enemies turn back,
        when I call upon you.
        R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
        Now I know that God is with me.
        In God, in whose promise I glory,
        in God I trust without fear;
        what can flesh do against me?
        R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
        I am bound, O God, by vows to you;
        your thank offerings I will fulfill.
        For you have rescued me from death,
        my feet, too, from stumbling;
        that I may walk before God in the light of the living.
        R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
        Gospel
        MK 3:7-12
        Jesus withdrew toward the sea with his disciples.
        A large number of people followed from Galilee and from Judea.
        Hearing what he was doing,
        a large number of people came to him also from Jerusalem,
        from Idumea, from beyond the Jordan,
        and from the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon.
        He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd,
        so that they would not crush him.
        He had cured many and, as a result, those who had diseases
        were pressing upon him to touch him.
        And whenever unclean spirits saw him they would fall down before him
        and shout, “You are the Son of God.”
        He warned them sternly not to make him known.

         

        The post Envy Versus Gratitude: Sometimes A Matter of Life or Death, Second Thursday (II), Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, January 22, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

        22 min
      • The Courage of David, Jesus and Agnes, Second Wednesday (II), January 21, 2026

        Msgr. Roger J. Landry

        Chapel of The Pontifical Mission Societies, St. Petersburg, Florida
        Wednesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
        Memorial of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
        January 21, 2026
        1 Sam 17:32-33.37.40-51, Ps 144, Mk 3:1-6

         

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

        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.21.26_Homily_1.mp3

         

        The following points were attempted in the homily: 

        • One of the most urgent virtues needed today is courage and today’s readings and the saint we celebrate today all give us extraordinary examples of courage and the virtues that lead to it and strengthen it.
        • In the first reading, we see one of the most famous examples of courage not just in the Bible but in history. For 40 days Goliath had been calling on someone from the Israelite Camp to come out and fight him, one-on-one, to determine the outcome of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines. But none of those on the Israelite side, including Saul, were willing to take him up on the challenge. Everyone was too cowardly. The text tells us that they were all “dismayed and terror-stricken.” David, however, was not. He was a young boy, a harpist — not exactly a form of music associated with warriors! — who had with him a simple slingshot that he would use to get the attention of the sheep he would watch. He heard Goliath’s challenge on the 40th day as he was bringing food to his older brothers in Saul’s army. He volunteered. He was not afraid of going head to head — more like head to waist! – against the 6’9” warrior with all the latest gear, a heavy, long sword, a javelin with an iron head weighing 15 pounds and bronze scimitar, a bronze helmet on his head, and a bronze corselet of scale armor weighing 125 pounds. David didn’t even bother taking up the offer of Saul’s armor. He was satisfied with his sling and five stones he got from a Wadi because he knew he would be acting “in the name of the Lord.” He said, “Not by sword or spear that the Lord saves, for the battle is the Lord’s!” And we know how the story ends.
        • In today’s Gospel, we see an example of Jesus’ courage. We’re not normally accustomed to look at Jesus’ courage except perhaps on Good Friday, but today we see it on full display. Jesus was risking his life contradicting the Scribes and the Pharisees with regard to their misunderstanding of the Sabbath. It was because of Jesus’ words about and works of charity on the Sabbath that they would plot to kill him. Jesus met in the synagogue a man with a withered hand and immediately responded with compassion. The Greek word used to describe the man’s hand strongly suggests it was withered through an injury, not because of a malady from birth. And Jesus wanted to cure his hand and allow him to use it to work and build up a life for himself. But the Pharisees present didn’t look at the injured man in the same way. They were indifferent to his plight. The text suggests that they may have even planted him there as a pawn to try to entrap Jesus, to see if he would try to cure him on the Sabbath. Hence Jesus asked if it were against God’s law and will to do good and save life. They didn’t reply. St. Mark tells us that Jesus looked at them with anger at their malevolence and was grieved at their hardness of heart, which prevented them not only from seeing the place of charity in the law of God but also from looking on this man with love. Jesus’ question, “Is it lawful to do good … rather than evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?,” is still very relevant today. Jesus had the courage to do good, even when it would cost him.  Jesus was essentially asking if it was possible to love someone in deeds on the Lord’s day, if it was possible to save or redeem. Jesus’ opponents didn’t respond because they knew how ridiculous their response would seem. After Jesus was gone, however, the Pharisees went out on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day, and began to conspire with the Herodians (with whom they would ordinarily not interact at all, because of the Herodians’ licentiousness and relations with the Romans) about how to put Jesus to death. Despite their idolatry of the Sabbath, they hypocritically thought nothing was wrong in using the sabbath to “do evil” and to “destroy” life. Jesus had come to do good, but they were plotting evil; he was seeking to enhance the injured man’s life, and they were seeking grounds to end Jesus’. But Jesus was courageous enough to look them in the face, to look death in the face, and help this man whom he had come to save.
        • What are the motivations of courage? We can see three of them in today’s readings.
          • The first is faith, like we see in David, who believed in the power of God. A slingshot and five stones were nothing compared to Goliath; but a slingshot, five stones and God were plenty.
          • The second is charity. Jesus had compassion on the man and it led him courageously to act in his favor. Love can make even a petite woman a mamma bear to defend her children.
          • The third is righteous indignation. Jesus was angry at the hardness of heart of those who didn’t care about the man in the synagogue. Likewise our holy anger can get us to stand up against the victims of injustice and act.
          • We have a great illustration of different forms of courage in the great saint we celebrated today. St. Agnes was a beautiful 12-year-old virgin, who had consecrated herself to the Lord, her “heavenly spouse,” as she called Jesus in the stories of her death. Men who wanted her for themselves couldn’t stand the fact that she belonged to someone else, even to the One she believed was God. If they couldn’t have her, they didn’t want anyone to have her. In fact, if they couldn’t have her, they wanted her dead. They outed her as a Christian during the ferocious anti-Christian persecution of the emperor Diocletian in 304. After the magistrate tried to frighten her through showing her various means of torture, she persevered. He sentenced her to a brothel so that people would destroy the beauty of her bodily consecration to the Lord, but the Lord miraculously protected her. She was intrepidly courageous through it all. Because she was dead to herself and alive in Christ Jesus, she wasn’t afraid of the threats. Her martyrdom, as St. Ambrose once said, was simply an extension of the death to self out of love for God that characterized her chaste virginity: virginity is praiseworthy, he wrote, not because it is found in the virgin martyrs but because in makes the virgin martyrs. Her chaste love for the Lord in little things became the school of the training in courage that allowed her to remain faithful in love of the Lord and others while under the threat of torture and death. Her whole life became a Mass offered in communion with Christ, as bride and Bridegroom, as chaste body and crowned Head. Today on her feast day she teaches us how courageously to be drawn by Jesus to unite ourselves to him in things big and small and to be saved by him!
          • In today’s Psalm, we prayed, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.” We called him our refuge, fortress, stronghold, deliverer, and shield. Every Mass is a boot camp where he trains our hands for battle by joining them in prayer and in communion. Let us ask him today as we receive him to fill us with the faith, charity and holy anger to lead us to fight the good fight of faith like David did, like St. Agnes did, like Jesus himself did!

            •  

            The readings for today’s Mass were: 

            Reading 1
            1 SM 17:32-33, 37, 40-51
            David spoke to Saul:
            “Let your majesty not lose courage.
            I am at your service to go and fight this Philistine.”
            But Saul answered David,
            “You cannot go up against this Philistine and fight with him,
            for you are only a youth, while he has been a warrior from his youth.”
            David continued:
            “The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear,
            will also keep me safe from the clutches of this Philistine.”
            Saul answered David, “Go! the LORD will be with you.”
            Then, staff in hand, David selected five smooth stones from the wadi
            and put them in the pocket of his shepherd’s bag.
            With his sling also ready to hand, he approached the Philistine.
            With his shield bearer marching before him,
            the Philistine also advanced closer and closer to David.
            When he had sized David up,
            and seen that he was youthful, and ruddy, and handsome in appearance,
            the Philistine held David in contempt.
            The Philistine said to David,
            “Am I a dog that you come against me with a staff?”
            Then the Philistine cursed David by his gods
            and said to him, “Come here to me,
            and I will leave your flesh for the birds of the air
            and the beasts of the field.”
            David answered him:
            “You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar,
            but I come against you in the name of the LORD of hosts,
            the God of the armies of Israel that you have insulted.
            Today the LORD shall deliver you into my hand;
            I will strike you down and cut off your head.
            This very day I will leave your corpse
            and the corpses of the Philistine army for the birds of the air
            and the beasts of the field;
            thus the whole land shall learn that Israel has a God.
            All this multitude, too,
            shall learn that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves.
            For the battle is the LORD’s and he shall deliver you into our hands.”
            The Philistine then moved to meet David at close quarters,
            while David ran quickly toward the battle line
            in the direction of the Philistine.
            David put his hand into the bag and took out a stone,
            hurled it with the sling,
            and struck the Philistine on the forehead.
            The stone embedded itself in his brow,
            and he fell prostrate on the ground.
            Thus David overcame the Philistine with sling and stone;
            he struck the Philistine mortally, and did it without a sword.
            Then David ran and stood over him;
            with the Philistine’s own sword which he drew from its sheath
            he dispatched him and cut off his head.
            Responsorial Psalm
            PS 144:1B, 2, 9-10
            R. (1) Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
            Blessed be the LORD, my rock,
            who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.
            R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
            My refuge and my fortress,
            my stronghold, my deliverer,
            My shield, in whom I trust,
            who subdues my people under me.
            R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
            O God, I will sing a new song to you;
            with a ten-stringed lyre I will chant your praise,
            You who give victory to kings,
            and deliver David, your servant from the evil sword.
            R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
            Gospel
            MK 3:1-6
            Jesus entered the synagogue.
            There was a man there who had a withered hand.
            They watched Jesus closely
            to see if he would cure him on the sabbath
            so that they might accuse him.
            He said to the man with the withered hand,
            “Come up here before us.”
            Then he said to the Pharisees,
            “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil,
            to save life rather than to destroy it?”
            But they remained silent.
            Looking around at them with anger
            and grieved at their hardness of heart,
            Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.”
            He stretched it out and his hand was restored.
            The Pharisees went out and immediately took counsel
            with the Herodians against him to put him to death.

            The post The Courage of David, Jesus and Agnes, Second Wednesday (II), January 21, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

            18 min
          • The Heart that God Sees and Summons, Second Tuesday in Ordinary Time (II), January 20, 2026

            Msgr. Roger J. Landry

            Chapel of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA, St. Petersburg, Florida
            Tuesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
            January 20, 2026
            1 Sam 16:1-13, Ps 89, Mk 2:23-28

             

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

            https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.20.26_Homily_1.mp3

             

            The following points were attempted in the homily:  

            • Today we have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meaning of vocation, which can nourish both our baptismal vocation to be holy and faithfully love God and others as God loves, as well as the missionary vocation that flows from that baptismal calling.
            • In the first reading, we have the vocation story of David. God sent the prophet Samuel to Jesse’s house to anoint the one whom God would indicate he had chosen to be his king after he rejected Saul for his infidelity. Samuel had long served the Lord but he still looked too much with human eyes than God’s vision. When Samuel first saw Jesse’s eldest son Eliab, he thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is here before him.” But the Lord said to him, “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature.” That’s precisely what had been done with Saul, who we heard on Saturday “was a handsome young man. There was no other child of Israel more handsome than Saul; he stood head and shoulders above the people.” But God as we know ultimately rejected Saul for stubborn infidelity. The Lord told Samuel, “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” And so the presentations happened of the next six sons, but none was chosen by God. Finally, Samuel asked if there were any other boys and Jesse replied that the youngest was still tending the sheep. After he was sent for, this ruddy, youthful, handsome boy approached and the Lord said, “There. Anoint him, for this is he!” And Samuel did anoint him, so that well before he would supplant Saul as the acknowledged leader of God’s people, he would be getting prepared by “the Spirit of the Lord [who had] rushed upon him.”
            • The Lord normally chooses those superficially unlikely, because he sees what we often miss. The Blessed Mother would say in her famous Magnificat, “The Lord has looked with favor on the lowliness of his handmaid.” St. Paul would declare in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.”
            • The Lord sees the heart, but we need to ask: What was it in David’s heart that God saw? What was it in our heart that God saw?
              • In David’s heart he saw great courage, the courage that would lead him to go against the fearsome Goliath armed just with a slingshot and the name of the Lord.
              • In David’s heart he saw the capacity for passionate fidelity not counting on human respect. David wasn’t embarrassed to dance in front of the ark of the Lord even when his loved ones taunted him for it.
              • In David’s heart he saw sincerity and the capacity to receive his mercy. After Samuel told Saul he had sinned, like we saw yesterday, Saul made excuses. After Nathan told David he had sinned, David immediately repented.
              • In David’s heart he saw humility and a capacity for forgiveness. David forgave Saul who was trying to kill him. He forgave his Son Absalom who tried to steal his kingdom. He forgave Shimei, who was cursing him as he was fleeing.
              • In David’s heart he saw a capacity for shepherding after his own heart. David was a young shepherd, capable of risking and giving his life for his sheep, capable of risking and giving his life for God. In him God the Father ultimately saw an image of the heart of his 28th generation grandson, the Son of David who would become the Good Shepherd.
              • Jesus mentions an illustration of that shepherdly wisdom after God’s own heart in today’s Gospel. Jesus reminds his critics among the Pharisees that when David and his soldiers were fighting for the Lord and were starving, they entered the shrine where Abiathar was high priest and ate the “bread of offering,” the showbread that would normally remain there for a week as an offering of the best of grains before being replaced and consumed by the priests. David had a heart capable of prioritizing according to God’s will, seeing that the Lord isn’t glorified by his sons — not to mention his soldiers — starving, that the good of the practice of the bread of offering in the temple isn’t absolute, and higher goods need to be remembered. Jesus’ heart was similar. When his apostles were starving on the Sabbath, they plucked off the heads of grain, meshed them in their hands, and ate, even though according to the Scribes and Pharisees — and not according to God — they were violating the Sabbath. The Scribes and Pharisees, to prevent the people of Israel from ever getting close to breaking the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day, created a whole series of regulations with regard to work. We see this throughout the Gospel. They preferred that people starve rather than mesh grain a little in their hands, as if going hungry glorified the God who gives us each day our daily bread. David’s heart saw God’s will more clearly than the Scribes and Pharisees did, and it was one of the reasons why he was chosen.
              • The saints we celebrate are models of the type of heart that the Lord chooses. The unlikely calling of David is a foretaste of the vocation of St. Fabian. He was a Christian layman who came to Rome to see what would happen after the death of Pope Anteros in 236. The electors were deadlocked. They looked for divine inspiration and saw a white dove flying, which helped them to open themselves up to who the Holy Spirit would want. The dove descended, passed over the heads of various of the leading candidates and then settled on this spectator, Fabian. They took it as a sign that this good man, from a noble family, was the one God wanted, and they chose him, ordained him a deacon, priest and bishop and he served through 250. At the beginning of his pontificate, he had decent relations with the Roman authorities and was even able to arrange with them for the return of the relics of Saints Pontus and Hippolytus. It was peaceful enough to build an organization to care for the poor and he was the one who arranged the sections of the city into diakonia, to care for the poor in an organized way, adapting to what the Lord wanted even though obviously there had been no such structures before him. In the year 250, however, the emperor Decius turned on the Christians and Fabian was the first one martyred. The Lord saw in him the courage, commitment, and shepherdly care he saw in David and Fabian witnessed to it to the end. .
              • We see a similar heart in the life of St. Sebastian. He was a guard very much in the favor of the emperor Diocletian who was able to remain faithful to the Lord while serving in the Roman army. He used his office as the head of the guards in order to support Christians who were being rounded up as martyrs and to console and, on some occasions, convert their pagan parents, friends and family members who had come to try to talk them out of “wasting” their lives in martyrdom. But when word eventually got to Diocletian about what Sebastian was doing for the Christians — and that he himself was a Christian too — Diocletian responded by rage as if Sebastian had betrayed him. And, as the early Christians said, he was martyred twice. The first time he was shot seemingly to death with arrows and they brought him for burial, but there they recognized he wasn’t dead and nursed him back to health. Having recovered, he went back to try to talk sense into Diocletian, surprising him on a staircase and preaching to him almost as a man returned from the dead. Diocletian would have none of it and had him beaten to death by clubs. In every circumstance, Sebastian was faithful to the Lord, courageous, seeking to extend the mercy he had received and trying to guide others, in life and death, to the Good Shepherd who had given his life for them.
              • God in his eternal vision likewise saw something in our hearts that led him to call us to baptism and to mission. He probably saw a similar capacity for passionate fidelity even though many of our contemporaries would think that we’re crazy for prioritizing Christ over the things of the world and coming to Mass during the week simply because we want to, rather than because we have to. God saw in us the courage to do what others were persuading us not to do, and the courage to persevere. God saw in us the capacity of humbly receiving his mercy, letting our life be defined by it, and forgiving others, including those who have really hurt us. He saw in us a capacity for shepherding others through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, for caring for all those where the Church is new, poor or persecuted, for nurturing and for our willingness to lay down our lives for the sake of those entrusted to us, however small and vulnerable. He saw in us ultimately something that reminded him of the love of the heart of his Son. He chose us and anointed us from early in life so that we might correspond to our Christian vocation. And he sent the Holy Spirit upon us, as he did upon David, to help us to attune our hearts ever more to his wisdom.
              • Today we are preparing not to sacrifice a heifer but ourselves together with the Lord. In the great miracle of Lanciano, when 1300 years ago the host took on the accidents of human heart wall, something confirmed in anatomical and histological tests in the 1970s, we can get a glimpse that in every Mass, the Lord seeks to give us a heart transplant, to give us his own heart together with his entire Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so that our hearts may become increasingly pure and see and revere him in everything; so that our hearts may beat in synchrony with his and continue loving as he loves us first, so that God the Father in seeing our hearts might more and more see a reflection of his Son’s. Today, in gratitude for our vocations and the way the Lord called us like he called David, we turn to God and we ask him for the grace ultimately to be faithful to our calling! And we pray that God will be able to say about us what he said about David in today’s Psalm, “I have found [Roger, and Joe, and Keith, and Melanie, Jennyfer, Ines, and each of you], my servant.”

                •  

                The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                Reading 1
                1 SM 16:1-13
                The LORD said to Samuel:
                “How long will you grieve for Saul,
                whom I have rejected as king of Israel?
                Fill your horn with oil, and be on your way.
                I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem,
                for I have chosen my king from among his sons.”
                But Samuel replied:
                “How can I go?
                Saul will hear of it and kill me.”
                To this the LORD answered:
                “Take a heifer along and say,
                ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’
                Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I myself will tell you what to do;
                you are to anoint for me the one I point out to you.”
                Samuel did as the LORD had commanded him.
                When he entered Bethlehem,
                the elders of the city came trembling to meet him and inquired,
                “Is your visit peaceful, O seer?”
                He replied:
                “Yes! I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.
                So cleanse yourselves and join me today for the banquet.”
                He also had Jesse and his sons cleanse themselves
                and invited them to the sacrifice.
                As they came, he looked at Eliab and thought,
                “Surely the LORD’s anointed is here before him.”
                But the LORD said to Samuel:
                “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature,
                because I have rejected him.
                Not as man sees does God see,
                because he sees the appearance
                but the LORD looks into the heart.”
                Then Jesse called Abinadab and presented him before Samuel,
                who said, “The LORD has not chosen him.”
                Next Jesse presented Shammah, but Samuel said,
                “The LORD has not chosen this one either.”
                In the same way Jesse presented seven sons before Samuel,
                but Samuel said to Jesse,
                “The LORD has not chosen any one of these.”
                Then Samuel asked Jesse,
                “Are these all the sons you have?”
                Jesse replied,
                “There is still the youngest, who is tending the sheep.”
                Samuel said to Jesse,
                “Send for him;
                we will not begin the sacrificial banquet until he arrives here.”
                Jesse sent and had the young man brought to them.
                He was ruddy, a youth handsome to behold
                and making a splendid appearance.
                The LORD said,
                “There–anoint him, for this is he!”
                Then Samuel, with the horn of oil in hand,
                anointed him in the midst of his brothers;
                and from that day on, the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David.
                When Samuel took his leave, he went to Ramah.
                Responsorial Psalm
                PS 89:20, 21-22, 27-28
                R. (21a) I have found David, my servant.
                Once you spoke in a vision,
                and to your faithful ones you said:
                “On a champion I have placed a crown;
                over the people I have set a youth.”
                R. I have found David, my servant.
                “I have found David, my servant;
                with my holy oil I have anointed him,
                That my hand may be always with him,
                and that my arm may make him strong.”
                R. I have found David, my servant.
                “He shall say of me, ‘You are my father,
                my God, the Rock, my savior.’
                And I will make him the first-born,
                highest of the kings of the earth.”
                R. I have found David, my servant.
                Gospel
                MK 2:23-28
                As Jesus was passing through a field of grain on the sabbath,
                his disciples began to make a path while picking the heads of grain.
                At this the Pharisees said to him,
                “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?”
                He said to them,
                “Have you never read what David did
                when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?
                How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest
                and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat,
                and shared it with his companions?”
                Then he said to them,
                “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.
                That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”

                The post The Heart that God Sees and Summons, Second Tuesday in Ordinary Time (II), January 20, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                18 min
              • Baptism and Mission, Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord, January 11, 2026

                Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
                Baptism of the Lord, Year A
                January 11, 2026
                Is 42:1-4.6-7, Ps 29, Acts 10:34-38, Mt 3:13-17

                 

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

                https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.11.26_Homily_1.mp3

                 

                The following text guided today’s homily: 

                • All four of the Gospel writers focus on Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. It shows how central the baptism of Jesus is in presenting and understanding his life and saving work. But his baptism is confusing. All those who were going out to the Jordan River to be baptized by John were there for a baptism of repentance. They were self-consciously sinners who, having heard John’s message of conversion, of making straight the paths for the coming of the Messiah, were entering into the waters with John, symbolically showing their need to be interiorly cleansed of their sins. Jesus, however, was sinless. There was not only no need for him to enter the waters but his lining up among sinners to be baptized by John rightly shocked John, who tried to prevent it. “I need to be baptized by you and yet you are coming to me!,” he exclaimed. John had already declared that he was baptizing with water but someone was coming after him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, someone whose sandals John considered himself unworthy to unfasten. Jesus, he would announce, was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, not a sullied sheep needing to have his sins removed. But Jesus told John, as we heard in today’s Gospel, to permit it, in order to “fulfill all righteousness.” Yes, Jesus’ baptism was not to remove any sins in Jesus, but God’s plan to restore justice after the sins of Adam and Eve and you and me, to set things right between the human race and God. The Lamb of God needed as Good Shepherd to lead his flock through the waters of Baptism to restore us to a proper relationship with God. While John’s baptism symbolized our need to be forgiven of our sins but couldn’t take those sins away, Jesus’ entering into the waters of the Jordan sanctified not only those waters, but all the waters God had created, so that, later, in the baptisms Jesus and his Church would do, they would be able to effect what the cleansing immersion of baptism symbolized — and actually take away those sins. Jesus through his baptism leads all of us to the Jordan where his baptism there points to his baptism of blood on Calvary that fulfilled what his baptism in water foretold. His baptism, in other words, gives a glimpse, a summary, of his whole saving life and work.
                • But while most look to the baptism of John as a symbol and of the Church as a sacrament or efficacious sign of the wiping away of our sins, that is only a part of what baptism involves. The more important part is how God seeks to fill us after he has cleansed us. That’s seen in what happens after Jesus emerges from the water. God the Father thunders from heaven, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, revealing that Jesus is indeed the one whom Isaiah prophesied who would be able to say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” Together it is the fulfillment of today’s first reading from Isaiah, in which God the Father says, “Here is my servant,” the word principally means “obedient Son,” “whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I have put my spirit; he shall bring forth justice to the nations.” He is the Son, he is pleasing, he is anointed by the Holy Spirit.
                • By Jesus’ baptism, there is a manifestation of Jesus’ identity, an epiphany, a theophany pointing to him and to what he seeks to do in every one of the baptized. Throughout Church history, three epiphanies of Jesus are connected, and we can still see this in various prayers for the Solemnity of the Epiphany we celebrated last week. The first is the epiphany that took place when the wise men came to Jesus in Bethlehem; the second is the Baptism of Jesus; and the third is the wedding feast of Cana, which happened at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry after the baptism, when Jesus revealed his glory and the divine power he had to change not only water into wine, or even later wine into blood, but sinners into saints. Insofar as it was only St. Matthew who recorded the epiphany in Bethlehem, and only St. John who recalled the epiphany in Cana, the fact that all four evangelists remember the epiphany at the Jordan shows how important this epiphany is. It’s important not just for understanding the life of Jesus and recognizing his divinity as a person within the Blessed Trinity; it’s important because that’s what happens in the baptism Jesus came to inaugurate that would fulfill the righteousness he came to bring. The most important thing about the Sacrament of Baptism is not the incredible gift of the forgiveness of sins, original and personal; it’s the gift of divine filiation by which God the Father adopts us as his beloved sons and daughters and proclaims, “This is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” It’s that we not only are cleansed to receive the divine indwelling but that the Holy Spirit in fact comes down upon us to make us his temple.
                • The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the meaning of Jesus’ baptism by teaching, “The baptism of Jesus is on his part the acceptance and inauguration of his mission as God’s suffering Servant. He allows himself to be numbered among sinners; he is already ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.’ Already he is anticipating the ‘baptism’ of his bloody death. Already he is coming to ‘fulfill all righteousness,’ that is, he is submitting himself entirely to his Father’s will: out of love he consents to this baptism of death for the remission of our sins. The Father’s voice responds to the Son’s acceptance, proclaiming his entire delight in his Son. The Spirit whom Jesus possessed in fullness from his conception comes to ‘rest on him.’ Jesus will be the source of the Spirit for all mankind. At his baptism ‘the heavens were opened’ — the heavens that Adam’s sin had closed — and the waters were sanctified by the descent of Jesus and the Spirit, a prelude to the new creation. Through Baptism the Christian is sacramentally assimilated to Jesus, who in his own baptism anticipates his death and resurrection.” It goes on to make the application of Jesus’ baptism to us: “The Christian must enter into this mystery of humble self-abasement and repentance, go down into the water with Jesus in order to rise with him, be reborn of water and the Spirit so as to become the Father’s beloved son in the Son and ‘walk in newness of life.” Baptism is the foundation of our whole Christian life, what the Catechism calls, vitae spiritualis ianua, the gate of the spiritual life. It’s what makes possible our receptivity to all the Sacraments, because they’re all intensifications of the new life baptism gives.
                • At the beginning of Mass today, we prayed in communion with the whole Church, “Almighty, ever-living God, who, when Christ had been baptized in the River Jordan and as the Holy Spirit descended upon him, solemnly declared him your beloved Son, grant that your children by adoption, reborn of water and the Holy Spirit, may always be well pleasing to you.” We pray on this day for the grace always to please the Lord. Our vocation in life is by the power of the Holy Spirit to follow Jesus in pleasing God the Father. We do that, first and foremost, by living up to our identity as beloved children of the Father, as temples of the Holy Spirit, and sons and daughters in Christ the Son. It means to live free from sin and alive for Christ Jesus. It’s continuously to renounce Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and live in communion with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, with all the other members of the Holy Catholic Church, professing our faith in the forgiveness of sins through baptism, in the communion of saints united in one baptism, in the resurrection of the body and life every lasting that baptism makes possible. It’s living with God’s help according to our baptismal call to holiness.
                • There’s a second way we live well-pleasing to God the Father. We learn this from Jesus. Tight after his baptism, Jesus went into the desert for a 40-day retreat, and then emerged immediately thereafter preaching and teaching. That’s why we mark the end of the Christmas season now with the Feast of his Baptism, because his entering the Jordan both concluded his years of hidden life and inaugurated his public ministry. His baptism was the beginning of the epiphany of his saving work. In a similar way, our baptism is not meant to be a private event between us and God. It’s similarly meant to inaugurate our public ministry, our mission. For us to be faithful to our baptismal calling, for us to be well-pleasing to God, we must take seriously our identity as missionary disciples in communion with God and with all the members of the Church, including those who are now among the communion of saints in the Church triumphant. That’s why Jesus, at the very end of his earthly life, immediately before the Ascension, entrusted to us the continuation of his saving work. In his earthly valedictory, he said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and proclaim the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and knowing that I am with you always, until the end of the age.” With his own authority, he wants us to bring people first to baptism, to immersion in God’s Trinitarian life, by which God wipes away our sins and brings us into communion with him and others. But then Jesus wants us to become formed formators, evangelized evangelizers. He wants us trained not to just to “know” everything he’s taught but to “observe” everything he has commanded, conscious that he is very much with us still and always. To be faithful to our vocation and well-pleasing to God is to help others come to receive the grace of baptism and learn how to live holiness of life — and the freedom from sin and freedom for love that it makes possible. In the Rite of Baptism, we see this point about mission underlined. The bishop, priest or deacon does the Epaphtha prayer over our ears and mouth, asking God to bless our ears so that we may receive his word and our mouths so that we may proclaim “his” faith (faith in him) “to the praise and glory of God the Father.” We likewise see it in the rite of the baptismal candle. Having been filled with the light of Christ symbolized by the Paschal Candle, we are summoned to live our identity as the light of the world, symbolized by our baptismal candle, and keep that light burning brightly, illuminating others with the light of faith and warming others with flame of Christian charity.
                • Today as we remember our baptism and renew our baptismal promises, we also renew our commitment to be God’s instruments to lead others to the saving waters of baptism and to the newness of life to which baptism calls us. We renew our summons to continue Jesus’ public ministry. We renew our calling to be missionary disciples and ask God’s help to be faithful. In today’s second reading, we have the beautiful words of the apostle St. Peter in the house of the pagan centurion Cornelius, where Peter had gone to baptize Cornelius and his whole gentile family. Peter said, “In truth, … God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.” God, Peter proclaims, doesn’t play favorites. He wants everyone to come to communion with him. He wills all to be saved and the fundamental means he established is baptism and the life to which baptism leads. God is interested in 100 out of 100 or, in today’s numbers, 8.1 billion out of 8.1 billion. And Jesus gives us and all our brothers and sisters in the Church the great mission to go to the whole world and seek to bring everyone with us to the waters flowing from the Jordan all the way to the eternal Jerusalem. That’s our public ministry. That’s the way we will live as Jesus lived. That’s the way we will be so pleasing to God.
                • There’s a beautiful procession in the Rite of baptism from the baptismal font to before the altar, where, together with the newly baptized and for infants in their name, we pray the Our Father, a sign that we know we are indeed beloved sons and daughters of God the Father in whom he is well pleased. That procession happens to show that baptism leads to the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith, as Jesus fulfills his promise to remain with us always by coming to be our very food and dwelling within us. This is the way he seeks to strengthen and help us become pleasing to the Father. As we prepare now to renew our baptismal faith in the Creed and to receive that nourishment from the altar to which our baptism points, we ask the Lord to help us always to remember the Christian dignity we received in Baptism, remain faithful to our baptismal vocation, live always as beloved children of God the Father, spread with missionary zeal the gift of our faith, and come, one day, to experience that eternal life that Baptism makes possible.

                  •  

                  The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                  Reading I
                  Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7

                  Thus says the LORD:

                  Here is my servant whom I uphold,
                  my chosen one with whom I am pleased,
                  upon whom I have put my spirit;
                  he shall bring forth justice to the nations,
                  not crying out, not shouting,
                  not making his voice heard in the street.
                  a bruised reed he shall not break,
                  and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,
                  until he establishes justice on the earth;
                  the coastlands will wait for his teaching.

                  I, the LORD, have called you for the victory of justice,

                  I have grasped you by the hand;
                  I formed you, and set you
                  as a covenant of the people,
                  a light for the nations,
                  to open the eyes of the blind,
                  to bring out prisoners from confinement,
                  and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.

                  Responsorial Psalm
                  Psalm 29:1-2, 3-4, 3, 9-10

                  R. (11b)  The Lord will bless his people with peace.

                  Give to the LORD, you sons of God,
                  give to the LORD glory and praise,
                  Give to the LORD the glory due his name;
                  adore the LORD in holy attire.
                  R. The Lord will bless his people with peace.
                  The voice of the LORD is over the waters,
                  the LORD, over vast waters.
                  The voice of the LORD is mighty;
                  the voice of the LORD is majestic.
                  R. The Lord will bless his people with peace.
                  The God of glory thunders,
                  and in his temple all say, “Glory!”
                  The LORD is enthroned above the flood;
                  the LORD is enthroned as king forever.
                  R. The Lord will bless his people with peace.

                  Reading II
                  Acts 10:34-38

                  Peter proceeded to speak to those gathered

                  in the house of Cornelius, saying:
                  “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality.
                  Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly
                  is acceptable to him.
                  You know the word that he sent to the Israelites
                  as he proclaimed peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all,
                  what has happened all over Judea,
                  beginning in Galilee after the baptism
                  that John preached,
                  how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth
                  with the Holy Spirit and power.
                  He went about doing good
                  and healing all those oppressed by the devil,
                  for God was with him.”

                  Alleluia
                  Cf. Mark 9:7

                  R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                  The heavens were opened and the voice of the Father thundered:
                  This is my beloved Son, listen to him.
                  R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                  Gospel
                  Matthew 3:13-17

                  Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan

                  to be baptized by him.
                  John tried to prevent him, saying,
                  “I need to be baptized by you,
                  and yet you are coming to me?”
                  Jesus said to him in reply,
                  “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us
                  to fulfill all righteousness.”
                  Then he allowed him.
                  After Jesus was baptized,
                  he came up from the water and behold,
                  the heavens were opened for him,
                  and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove
                  and coming upon him.
                  And a voice came from the heavens, saying,
                  “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

                  The post Baptism and Mission, Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord, January 11, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                  25 min
                • The Testimony We Have Within Ourselves, Memorial of Blessed Pauline-Marie Jaricot, January 9, 2026

                  Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                  Chapel of The Pontifical Mission Societies, New York
                  Friday after Epiphany
                  Memorial of Pauline-Marie Jaricot, Foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith
                  January 9, 2026
                  1 John 5:5-13, Ps 147, Lk 5:12-16

                   

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

                  https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.9.26_Homily_for_the_Memorial_of_Blessed_Pauline_Jaricot_1.mp3

                   

                  The following is a transcript of the homily: 

                  • On this feast of Blessed Pauline Jericho, it’s helpful for us to look at the readings that the Church gives us through a missionary lens.
                  • Jesus cured the leper in the Gospel. He knew he wanted to be cleansed, and he knew with faith that Jesus could cleanse him, so he went up to Jesus and fell down before him. Those were already massive acts of faith, considering a leper was ostracized and had to stay at least 50 feet from everybody ringing a bell and shouting at the top of his lungs, “Unclean! Unclean!” But he had confidence that Jesus himself wouldn’t run away, that Jesus wouldn’t castigate him. And so Jesus, seeing this man before him, did something for which we can still hear the shrieks across millennia. He reached out, touched the leper and said, “I do will it! Be made clean!”
                  • Jesus has come into the world. He has willed to make us clean. That’s what it means to call him savior. We need cleansing. Without Jesus, we die estranged from God. We die in our sins, original and personal. We need that cleansing. In summary of all of salvation, Jesus, the Lamb of God who came to take away our sins, came and touched the human race. He took on our own humanity to cleanse it from within. This is His will.
                  • Because Jesus did not want to be boxed in simply as a free doctor who could cure us of our illnesses but then watch us to return to our former life living without him, because he didn’t want word of him spreading too fast, with people categorizing him other than who he really was and proclaiming that he was doing things other than his most important things, he ordered the healed man who has just received this incredible gift not to say anything about the miracle but simply to do what the mosaic law prescribed after a healing. The man had received the miracle because he had extraordinary faith. He was somebody who already grasped who Jesus was, and knew that Jesus had the power to cleanse leprosy by his word. He knew that Jesus’ words meant something, and that if Jesus said something, it should be done. But when Jesus ordered him not to tell anyone, he instead told everyone, and the reports spread all around so that Jesus needed to escape from people in order to be able to pray, because everybody was coming for horizontal miracles rather than the greater vertical miracle of faith. We always need to pay attention to this. We go to Jesus with faith, with needs, we receive from him so many gifts including the miracles of the sacraments. When Jesus, however, tells us to do something, do we do it, or do we decide to do our own thing?. Eventually, once Jesus has saved us on the Cross, he’s going to give a totally different command. Rather than say, “Make sure you don’t tell anyone anything,” he’s going to say, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” He’s not going to say “Proclaim the Gospel if you feel like it, … if you’re in a good mood or had a good night’s rest,” but without condition, “Go and proclaim the Gospel to everyone.” And the key of our faith is whether we strive to do that or whether we, parallel to the healed leper, go about doing our own thing, even though we have faith.
                  • In today’s first reading, St. John, who did have faith, and who was, as we see in the window behind us among the other apostles, carrying out that his work as an apostle, catechizing the early community of the church, specifically about the incredible gifts that God has given us in order to help our apostolic mission. He begins today by saying, “Who’s the victor over the world?” We should never forget. Pauline Jaricot never forgot. We are the disciples of the one who has conquered sin and death! We’re on the eternally winning team, provided that we don’t do our own thing, but we accept Jesus’ coaching.
                  • Then St. John talks about the triple witness of the Holy Spirit, of water and blood. Let’s think about what this means. The Holy Spirit has been sent for mission to testify, not only to Jesus, but to testify through us about Jesus. The water obviously refers to baptism. We’re going to be celebrating the Baptism the Lord on Sunday. Jesus, right after his baptism, went out to proclaim the Gospel, calling everyone to “repent and believe.” What’s the blood? It’s the Eucharist, Jesus’ precious blood poured out for sinners that we’re able to consume, the witness that Jesus wouldn’t stop at anything in order to save us, and that flowing with his own blood within us, we now become capable of a similar testimony. St John says, “Whoever believes in the Son of God has this testimony within himself.” We have within the testimony of the Holy Spirit. We have within the testimony of water, the sacrament of Baptism. We have within the extraordinary gift of Jesus himself and the Holy Eucharist. And we shouldn’t receive those incredible gifts in vain. St. John then specifies even further what this mission of the Holy Spirit, Baptism and the Eucharist are all about. “This is the testimony. God gave us eternal life. And this life is in His Son. Whoever possesses the Son has life. Whoever does not possess the Son of God does not have life.” So we have to possess the Son. We celebrated on Sunday the memorial of St Elizabeth Ann Seton, a convert from Episcopalianism, a native of the city of New York. When she finally converted in March of 1805, and received Jesus for the first time in Holy Communion, she said, “I possess him, and he possesses me.” There’s a mutual belonging that takes place in Holy Communion. In order to have eternal life, any one of us needs to have that mutual belonging. It’s not enough to be a good person. It’s not enough to be a Muslim who plays five times a day toward Mecca. It’s not enough to follow the teachings of Buddha. We’ve got to have Jesus’ life within. That’s why St Francis Xavier left Spain to go to four different countries to try to spread the faith. That’s what St Therese was praying for throughout her years in the Carmel of Lisieux and now the Carmel of the Heavenly Jerusalem. It’s what blessed Pauline was praying for and working for.
                  • Now we know that Jesus who founded the sacraments, he who sent the Holy Spirit, is in himself bound by the sacraments. He is able to save somebody who isn’t baptized, by somehow communicating the effects of baptism. But we can never know that, and that’s what spurs our work, because 5.5 out of the 8.1 billion people on the planet don’t have Christian faith yet and many of those who do don’t really live it. They’re not living with the life of God within and, therefore, their salvation is at risk. People are dying everywhere without really knowing Jesus. That’s ultimately what has spawned all for the Pontifical Mission Societies. It’s what spurred on Blessed Pauline Jaricot.
                  • She was a 17 year old girl who was vain. She was practicing the faith. She was a decent Catholic. She wasn’t committing mortal sins. But she worried too much about what clothes she was wearing or what makeup and going to dances and other things. She went to church one day, and the priest in her parish preached a homily against vanity, and she felt deeply convicted because she was living a vain life. She was putting her treasure in things that were passing and fleeting, things that didn’t really matter. Who cares if you wear makeup? Who ultimately cares whether you’re dressed as a rich girl or a poor girl? And so she changed, and she began really to live her faith. The first thing that touched her was the impiety of so many of her fellow French men and women, boys and girls. This was only a couple decades after the French Revolution, which had devastated faith in France and tried to force down everybody’s throat a secular ideal. Many were coming back to the faith, but many weren’t, and so she put together a group of girls to do reparation for all the sins that people were committing, praying for their conversion. It was out of that group that eventually came the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. She had a dream about two lamps. One lamp was full and one lamp was empty, and the oil from the full lamp was flowing into the empty lamp. The way that she interpreted that dream was that the empty lamp was France and the full lamp from which the oil was coming was missionary territories, especially China and the United States. What her hope for the re-evangelization of her own country was that the faith of those she would build up across the globe would come back to nourish the faith of the French. So that’s why she founded the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. That’s why she got these groups of 10, and then hundreds, and then thousands, together in order to try to help the missions praying for them each day an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a simple prayer, “St Francis Xavier, pray for us.” And then to sacrifice a penny a week. The Society was built on the contributions ultimately of the poor. Those sacrifices were all accumulated and most of the first disbursements came to the United States of America, to the Diocese Louisiana and the two Floridas, and to the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky, both of which had French bishops. The Lord, over the course of these last 204 years, has been able to build something beautiful to help the Church with her give this tri-fold witness, together with the Holy Spirit flowing from our baptism, strengthened by the Eucharist, that in Christ, whom we’re about to receive, there really is the fullness of life.
                  • Blessed Pauline was able to do that because, like the wise virgin in Jesus’ parable, her lamp was full of oil, constantly burning for the Lord, and that’s where everything starts. The type of faith that yearns for Jesus and therefore yearns to spread that yearning, the type of faith who comes to Him saying, “You can make me clean!,” the type of faith that does what he says and takes him seriously when he says, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature!” Through the intercession of Blessed Pauline, let’s continue that holy work.

                    •  

                    The readings for the Mass were: 

                    Reading I
                    1 John 5:5-13

                    Beloved:

                    Who indeed is the victor over the world
                    but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?
                    This is the one who came through water and Blood, Jesus Christ,
                    not by water alone, but by water and Blood.
                    The Spirit is the one who testifies,
                    and the Spirit is truth.
                    So there are three who testify,
                    the Spirit, the water, and the Blood,
                    and the three are of one accord.
                    If we accept human testimony,
                    the testimony of God is surely greater.
                    Now the testimony of God is this,
                    that he has testified on behalf of his Son.
                    Whoever believes in the Son of God
                    has this testimony within himself.
                    Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar
                    by not believing the testimony God has given about his Son.
                    And this is the testimony:
                    God gave us eternal life,
                    and this life is in his Son.
                    Whoever possesses the Son has life;
                    whoever does not possess the Son of God does not have life.
                    I write these things to you so that you may know
                    that you have eternal life,
                    you who believe in the name of the Son of God.

                    Responsorial Psalm
                    Psalm 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20

                    R.        (12a)  Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.

                    or:
                    R.        Alleluia.
                    Glorify the LORD, O Jerusalem;
                    praise your God, O Zion.
                    For he has strengthened the bars of your gates;
                    he has blessed your children within you.
                    R.        Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
                    or:
                    R.        Alleluia.
                    He has granted peace in your borders;
                    with the best of wheat he fills you.
                    He sends forth his command to the earth;
                    swiftly runs his word!
                    R.        Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
                    or:
                    R.        Alleluia.
                    He has proclaimed his word to Jacob,
                    his statutes and his ordinances to Israel.
                    He has not done thus for any other nation;
                    his ordinances he has not made known to them. Alleluia.
                    R.        Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
                    or:
                    R.        Alleluia.

                    Alleluia
                    See Matthew 4:23

                    R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                    Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom
                    and cured every disease among the people.
                    R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                    Gospel
                    Luke 5:12-16

                    It happened that there was a man full of leprosy in one of the towns where Jesus was;

                    and when he saw Jesus,
                    he fell prostrate, pleaded with him, and said,
                    “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”
                    Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said,
                    “I do will it.  Be made clean.”
                    And the leprosy left him immediately.
                    Then he ordered him not to tell anyone, but
                    “Go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing
                    what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them.”
                    The report about him spread all the more,
                    and great crowds assembled to listen to him
                    and to be cured of their ailments,
                    but he would withdraw to deserted places to pray.

                    The post The Testimony We Have Within Ourselves, Memorial of Blessed Pauline-Marie Jaricot, January 9, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                    15 min
                  • Manifestation and Mission, The Solemnity of the Epiphany, January 4, 2026

                    Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                    Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
                    Solemnity of the Epiphany
                    January 4, 2026
                    Is 60:1-6, Ps 72, Eph 3:2-3.5-6, Mt 2:1-12

                     

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

                    https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.4.26_Homily_1.mp3

                     

                    The following text guided the homily: 

                    • The Epiphany, the “manifestation” of the eternal Son of God, is an incredibly rich solemnity. After paintings of the Madonna and Child, the Epiphany is the second most depicted scene in history. In today’s first reading, God through the prophet Isaiah, talks about a two-fold dimension of this feast. “Jerusalem,” he says, “rise up in splendor! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you. See, darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples; But upon you the Lord shines, and over you appears his glory.” But then it becomes clear that that light and glory are not meant to stop with Israel. Isaiah tells them, “Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by your shining radiance. Raise your eyes and look about; they all gather and come to you: Your sons come from afar, and your daughters in the arms of their nurses. … Caravans of camels shall fill you, dromedaries from Midian and Ephah; All from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense, and proclaiming the praises of the Lord.” That’s what we mark today. The Lord’s manifestation with its light and glory and then the beginning, in the coming of the wise men, of how the peoples of nations shall walk by that light. In past years, we have had a chance to look at various angles of this feast: about hope, about the star, about life as a pilgrimage together with others, about the gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, and about the adoration they give. Today, however, insofar as you are Missionaries of Charity and I serve as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, I’d like to ponder the two different missionary angels of this great solemnity, the Light that has come in Jesus and the way all nations are meant to walk by that light.
                    • The Magi have always symbolized the great object of the Church’s mission: the Gentiles, all the non-Jewish people of the world. This was almost always the subject of St. John Paul II’s homilies on this day. Earlier in my priesthood, I found this highly annoying. I wanted to preach a homily to seminarians on retreat on the priestly significance of the gifts the wise men brought and how it led to the even greater gift of their adoration. For ideas I decided to go through all St. John Paul II’s homilies on the Epiphany looking for insights. As I went year by year from 1979 through 2005, he gave a few references to the gold, frankincense and myrrh, but almost every year, he focused rather on how the wise men represented all the nations who could come to walk by the manifested One’s light. In 1988, he stated, “The event of the day has been called by the Church, for centuries, with the name of Epiphany. The Magi, who came from the east, are at the beginning of a great itinerary, whose past goes back in the history of the chosen People of the ancient alliance and the future leads to all the peoples and nations of the earth. With the coming of the Magi from the east it appears at the same time that the light that Jerusalem brings in itself is not only destined for Israel. In the light of the new Epiphany, God reveals himself in Jesus Christ to all peoples and to all the nations of the earth. The divine light is intended for everyone, which penetrates the darkness of human existence.” 15 years later, he added, with a reference to today’s second reading, “The Magi, who come from the East to Jerusalem, represent the first fruits of the peoples attracted by the light of Christ. They recognize in Jesus the Messiah, and they show beforehand that now is the fulfilment of the ‘mystery’ of which St Paul speaks in the second reading: ‘that the Gentiles are called in Christ Jesus … to be co-heirs of the promise through the preaching of the Gospel’” (2003).
                    • The wise men were those seeking for God. They didn’t have the grace of Biblical revelation but they had two other sources. The first were the heavens, where they were looking to discern messages from the Creator of the heavens and earth. When they saw a star at its rising, they were driven to discover what its message was. There were also prophecies outside of Israel, from women called Sybils, that heralded the future birth of a universal king who would be king of all. One of these Sybilline prophecies predicted that the birth of the king would be preceded by a sign in the heavens. The famous Roman historian Suetonius wrote in his Life of Vespasian, “There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world” and Tacitus wrote in his Annales, “There was a firm persuasion … that at this very time the East was to grow powerful and rulers from Judaea were to acquire universal empire.” This was the context in which the wise men would have been looking upward. When they saw the rising star, they not only interpreted that the Creator was trying to communicate something to them in general, but that God might specifically be heralding the birth of the newborn King in the east, who would be a universal king. And they were willing to do anything — including a journey that likely took 18-24 months in preparation and execution — to determine whether that was indeed what was occurring. In contrast to King Herod and the chief priests and scribes in his court who didn’t move even six miles downhill to investigate whether the long-awaited Messiah had in fact come, the wise men are icons of the type of hunger that so many have for God, of the journey people are ready to make to seek, find, come to know, love, serve, follow and share the glory of Israel and the light of revelation to all nations.
                    • Their finding Jesus, remaining in his light, and adoring him are only the first of the missiological applications. The second is that after the journey, St. Matthew tells us they returned “by another route,” which the great saints of the Church have always said points to far more than a detour to evade Herod. It suggests that they returned changed, they went back differently than they arrived, converted more and more to the new King’s way and categories, to the path of faith, to the life of Christ-like love. They themselves became witnesses to what they observed. They became bearers of the Lord’s light and glory. It would have been tempting, indeed understandable, for them to have wanted to spend the rest of their lives with Jesus, but they prioritized bringing word of him home so that others may know that the fulfillment of humanity’s deepest longings had indeed come. They therefore show us that the hunger for God is always meant to translate in a hunger to share him. That those who have discovered the gift are in turn meant to help others discover the gift. That paying him homage leads to seeking to give others far more than gold, frankincense and myrrh, but the treasure of knowing the newborn King not just of the Jews but of the universe and helping others enter his kingdom.
                    • John Paul II always used to ponder this application in his preaching on this day. In his first Epiphany homily in 1979, three months after his election, he said, “The Epiphany is the feast of the vitality of the Church. The Church lives her awareness of God’s mission, which is carried out through her. The Second Vatican Council helped us to realize that the ‘mission’ is the proper name of the Church, and in a certain sense defines her. The Church becomes herself when she carries out her mission. The Church is herself, when men—such as the shepherds and the Magi Kings from the East—reach Jesus Christ by means of faith. When in the Christ-Man and through Christ they find God again.” In 1995, he added, “Today’s liturgy thus becomes the epiphany of the great mission, which starting from God leads to man through the coming into the world of the Son of God, and extends through the heart of man to other men, to all those who still do not know the light descended on Jerusalem and ignore the way to reach the cave of Bethlehem. The path of the Magi who came from the East is like a great symbol of all those ways on which men, near and far, from the extreme ends of the earth, walk over the centuries towards the light of Christ. He who now, Newborn, allows himself to be found and worshipped by the Magi, one day, at the end of his earthly mission, will say to the Apostles: ‘Go all over the world and preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mk 16, 15), and with these words he will give a precise direction to the history of the Church. The great movement that leads to all the nations of the world corresponds, in God’s plan, to the coming of Christ in the flesh.” One year later, he summarized, “The Church’s missionary activity, through its many stages down the centuries, finds its starting point and universal scope in the feast of Epiphany.” And finally, 25 years ago this Tuesday, the day on which the Epiphany is celebrated in the Vatican and in many Catholic countries, he published a great apostolic exhortation, the Church’s pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium, in which he named the Biblical motto for the thousand years of Christianity then commencing and now a quarter-of-a-century in execution. “Duc in altum!” “Put out into the deep.” Looking back on that document a year later in 2002, he said, “I return to that unforgettable moment and once again offer to each of you the program of the new evangelization. I repeat to you the Redeemer’s words:  ‘Duc in altum!’ Do not be afraid of the darkness of the world, because the one who is calling you is ‘the light of the world’ (Jn 8:12), ‘the bright morning star’ (Rev 22:16). Jesus, one day you said to your disciples: ‘You are the light of the world’ (Mt 5,14); may you grant that the Gospel witness of these brothers of ours [newly ordained bishops, successors of the apostles, sent out to the nations] may shine out for the people of our time.Make their mission effective, so that all whom I have entrusted to their pastoral care may always glorify our Father who is in heaven (cf. Mt 5,16).” So the Epiphany of the Lord is the beginning of the Epiphany of the Church, which, like the wise men, has been on mission ever since, a mission to bring us from Christ’s early epiphany to his eternal one. That’s what we prayed for at the beginning of Mass today: “O God, who on this day revealed your Only Begotten Son to the nations by the guidance of a star, grant in your mercy that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.”
                    • Someone who experienced both aspects of the missionary dimensions of the feast, and now rejoices in its everlasting fulfillment, is the great American saint, the saint of this city of New York, whom the Church celebrates today. The foundress of the first American religious order, the foundress of the first Catholic school for girls in the United States and essentially the American Catholic school system, Elizabeth Ann Seton was raised an Episcopalian, the granddaughter of a Church of England priest. She had faith and was pious. But eventually she grasped that there was something more. Seven years into her marriage, her husband Will came down with tuberculosis and suffered terribly for two years as Elizabeth cared for him. Eventually doctors advised him to travel to Livorno, Italy, in the hopes of an easier situation for his lungs. There he died. While there, Elizabeth stayed with Will’s Catholic business partners who had a chapel in their home with the Blessed Sacrament. She became exposed through them not just to the Catholic teaching on the Holy Eucharist but the way Catholics practically respond to the reality of the Eucharist. She began slowly to yearn for Jesus. She wrote to her sister-in-law Rebekah, “How happy would we be if we believed what these dear [Catholics] believe, that they possess God in the Sacrament and that he remains in their churches and is carried to them when they are sick.” The Lord himself had planted within her that desire. She couldn’t believe at first that the Real Presence was true, but she wanted it to be true. The Lord was leading her, like a star, on an inner journey to his ongoing Eucharistic epiphany. A couple of weeks later, she wrote Rebekah that when she happened upon a Eucharistic procession, “I fell on my knees without thinking when the Blessed Sacrament passed by and cried out in agony to God to bless me if he was there, that my whole Soul desired only him.” As she, perhaps involuntarily, paid homage to her Eucharistic Lord, her prayer was heard. She would come to believe what Catholics believe. She would be blessed by having her whole soul desire him. She returned to the United States and immediately began instruction to become a Catholic. About a year later, in March 1805, at St. Peter’s Church in lower Manhattan, she would enter the Catholic Church and experience something even greater than the wise men had in Bethlehem: she would receive Jesus in Holy Communion. She counted down the days to her first Communion. The night before she would receive him for the first time, she could barely sleep. And when she did receive him, finally, she wrote a friend, “It seemed to me my King had come to take his throne. At last,” she emphasized, “God is mine and I am his.” She became one of the Catholic Church’s greatest Eucharistic converts and a great Eucharistic apostle, helping her five children — and countless others educated by her and her sisters — to come to possess and be possessed by Jesus, even more humbly present in the Eucharist than in the manger. During the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, which had the joy to stop here at this convent, as my fellow pilgrims and I accompanied Jesus through the streets carrying on our person a first-class relic of her, we prayed that others, like St. Elizabeth, would seek the same Jesus she loved, cry out for his blessing and follow her and us on the path of Eucharistic conversion, holiness and mission.
                    • As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Epiphany today on her feast, we thank God for the gift of the lessons he teaches through her and the wise men about the search for him and about how to be his instruments to share Christ, God-with-us, in his ongoing Eucharistic manifestation with those hungering for him, whether they know it yet or not. We ask for the grace to leave this chapel today by another route. We ask to be filled with the Lord’s light and glory. The Mass is Christ’s continuous epiphany, but our contemporaries need us to be the “wise men,” the new Mother Setons, who show where the star of the tabernacle lamp and altar candles still burn to help and encourage those we know to join us on the journey to find Christ and come into a life-changing communion with him. God is calling us, you and me, to be missionaries of his Eucharistic charity, indeed, modern Melchiors, Balhasars, and Kaspars. As we fall to our knees today before the same Lord before whom they prostrated themselves as a small, poor, vulnerable infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, God wants us, like them and Mother Seton, to discover here in this Bethlehem Light from Light and the glory of God in the highest and then be transformed to bring that light and glory to the ends of the earth. Come, let us adore him! And come let us pray for the whole world to join us in that homage!

                      •  

                      The readings for this Solemnity are: 

                      Reading I
                      Isaiah 60:1-6

                      Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem!  Your light has come,

                      the glory of the Lord shines upon you.
                      See, darkness covers the earth,
                      and thick clouds cover the peoples;
                      but upon you the LORD shines,
                      and over you appears his glory.
                      Nations shall walk by your light,
                      and kings by your shining radiance.
                      Raise your eyes and look about;
                      they all gather and come to you:
                      your sons come from afar,
                      and your daughters in the arms of their nurses.

                      Then you shall be radiant at what you see,

                      your heart shall throb and overflow,
                      for the riches of the sea shall be emptied out before you,
                      the wealth of nations shall be brought to you.
                      Caravans of camels shall fill you,
                      dromedaries from Midian and Ephah;
                      all from Sheba shall come
                      bearing gold and frankincense,
                      and proclaiming the praises of the LORD.

                      Responsorial Psalm
                      Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13.

                      R. (cf. 11)  Lord, every nation on earth will adore you.

                      O God, with your judgment endow the king,
                      and with your justice, the king’s son;
                      He shall govern your people with justice
                      and your afflicted ones with judgment.
                      R. Lord, every nation on earth will adore you.
                      Justice shall flower in his days,
                      and profound peace, till the moon be no more.
                      May he rule from sea to sea,
                      and from the River to the ends of the earth.
                      R. Lord, every nation on earth will adore you.
                      The kings of Tarshish and the Isles shall offer gifts;
                      the kings of Arabia and Seba shall bring tribute.
                      All kings shall pay him homage,
                      all nations shall serve him.
                      R. Lord, every nation on earth will adore you.
                      For he shall rescue the poor when he cries out,
                      and the afflicted when he has no one to help him.
                      He shall have pity for the lowly and the poor;
                      the lives of the poor he shall save.
                      R. Lord, every nation on earth will adore you.

                      Reading II
                      Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

                      Brothers and sisters:

                      You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace
                      that was given to me for your benefit,
                      namely, that the mystery was made known to me by revelation.
                      It was not made known to people in other generations
                      as it has now been revealed
                      to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit:
                      that the Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same body,
                      and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

                      Alleluia
                      Matthew 2:2

                      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                      We saw his star at its rising
                      and have come to do him homage.
                      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                      Gospel
                      Matthew 2:1-12

                      When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea,

                      in the days of King Herod,
                      behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying,
                      “Where is the newborn king of the Jews?
                      We saw his star at its rising
                      and have come to do him homage.”
                      When King Herod heard this,
                      he was greatly troubled,
                      and all Jerusalem with him.
                      Assembling all the chief priests and the scribes of the people,
                      He inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.
                      They said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judea,
                      for thus it has been written through the prophet:
                      And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah,
                      are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
                      since from you shall come a ruler,
                      who is to shepherd my people Israel.”
                      Then Herod called the magi secretly
                      and ascertained from them the time of the star’s appearance.
                      He sent them to Bethlehem and said,
                      “Go and search diligently for the child.
                      When you have found him, bring me word,
                      that I too may go and do him homage.”
                      After their audience with the king they set out.
                      And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them,
                      until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.
                      They were overjoyed at seeing the star,
                      and on entering the house
                      they saw the child with Mary his mother.
                      They prostrated themselves and did him homage.
                      Then they opened their treasures
                      and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
                      And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,
                      they departed for their country by another way.

                      This card features the artwork Janielle Perez of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the grand prize winner of the 2025 Missionary Childhood Association (MCA) National Christmas Artwork Contest. 

                      The post Manifestation and Mission, The Solemnity of the Epiphany, January 4, 2026 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                      25 min
                    • Grafted Onto Jesus’ Family Tree, December 17, 2025

                      Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                      Chapel of The Pontifical Mission Societies USA, St. Petersburg, Florida
                      Mass of December 17
                      December 17, 2025
                      Is 49:2.8-10, Ps 72, Mt 1:1-17

                       

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

                      https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.17.25_Homily_1.mp3

                       

                      The following points were attempted in the homily: 

                      • Today we begin the second phase of Advent dedicated to the proximate preparation for the celebration of the Lord’s birth. In the first phase of Advent, which runs from the first Sunday of Advent through December 16, we focus on the Lord’s “triple-coming” in history (Bethlehem), mystery (the sacraments and prayer), and majesty (on the clouds of heaven for the second coming), with a special accent on the third, and on how we’re called to run out to embrace him in each of these three ways so that, transformed by him, we begin to journey with him. Now we shift gears and we will begin traversing the events that happened just before our Savior’s birth. And so we begin with the immediate history from Abraham to Jesus that St. Matthew gives us in today’s Gospel.
                      • The genealogy of the Lord first shows us history: that the Word of God not only became man and dwelled among us but became “history.” He entered our human history. Jews were focused on genealogies and it was highly significant for St. Matthew to show that Jesus was a descendent first of Abraham and then of David. This communicated, respectively, that he was a Jew and he was an appropriate candidate to be the Messiah as a descendant of King David. (It also shows us how St. Joseph was part of God’s plans, since the genealogy of Jesus, according to the law and history, runs through St. Joseph.) The genealogy in St. Luke’s Gospel runs backward from Jesus through Joseph all the way to Adam, showing how Jesus was fully human, the new Adam.
                      • We know, however, that Jesus didn’t merely enter into history, but changed it, making it “salvation history.” That’s what the three phases of fourteen generations show us in St. Matthew’s genealogy today. They trace out for us the three main stages in salvation history. The progression from from the wandering Abraham to King David reveals the dignity to which God calls us all, to his kingdom, to greatness. God’s made us for this greatness. The middle 14 generations show how we squandered that greatness, ending up in slavery in the Babylonian exile. But the last 14 show us that God didn’t leave us there, but entered not just to bring us back to the beginning but to bring us forward to an even greater state, because now we know that how much God really does love us mercifully.
                      • We see this truth about salvation history clearly depicted in the genealogy. We see it in the mention of David and Solomon and several of their descendants, kings who squandered their dignity became great sinners. We see it also in the women mentioned. It was almost unheard of to mention the names of women in genealogies. But we see several women named: Tamar, who was a seducer and adulteress, deceiving her father-in-law into impregnating her (Gen 38); Rahab who was a prostitute in Jericho (Josh 2:1-7); Ruth who was not even a Jew but a Moabite whom the Book of Deuteronomy said shouldn’t be admitted into the assembly of the Lord (Deut 23:3); and Bathsheba, an adulteress, whom David seduced and who became the mother of Solomon (2 Sam 11). These are women despite their sins were grafted onto the tree of salvation history leading to Jesus. They point ultimately to the role of the last woman named — the sinless Mary — in bringing about salvation history, whose yes righted the sin of Eve and of other women and men throughout the centuries. The list of these men and women show us how Jesus wants to redeem all of us from the inside, from within history, turning even our sins into an opportunity for salvation.
                      • But the genealogy in a sense doesn’t stop there. God has entered into salvation history in order to walk with us, in order to lead us out of sin onto the path of wisdom and right judgment. In the first reading, we have the prophecy Jacob gave to Judah his son, calling him a “lion’s whelp,” a baby lion. That baby lion would eventually become the “lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David” (Rev 5:5), who in the Book of Revelation would open the scroll with its seven seals. That Lion comes to make us all part of his family tree, so that we can be grafted not only onto his history but also salvation history. St. Paul writes that we were “cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated one” (Rom 11:24) — and, in Christ’s case, cultivated for millennia. That’s meant to lead us to be “rooted in [Christ] and built upon him” (Col 2:7). We prayed in the Collect to begin Mass today, that Jesus, “having taken to himself our humanity, may be pleased to grant us a share in his divinity.” That is the prayer that we will make on Christmas morning. That is the prayer made every day at the altar when a drop of water is placed into the chalice filled with wine. That is ultimately Jesus’ work, leading us to become truly his image and likeness. As we prepare for communion with the Lord of history, let us ask him for the grace to do in us what he did with David and Solomon, with Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba, and make our names famous because of their association with Him, who loved us so much to make us his own!

                        •  

                        The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                        Reading 1
                        GN 49:2, 8-10
                        Jacob called his sons and said to them:
                        “Assemble and listen, sons of Jacob,
                        listen to Israel, your father.
                        “You, Judah, shall your brothers praise
                        –your hand on the neck of your enemies;
                        the sons of your father shall bow down to you.
                        Judah, like a lion’s whelp,
                        you have grown up on prey, my son.
                        He crouches like a lion recumbent,
                        the king of beasts–who would dare rouse him?
                        The scepter shall never depart from Judah,
                        or the mace from between his legs,
                        While tribute is brought to him,
                        and he receives the people’s homage.”
                        Responsorial Psalm
                        PS 72:1-2, 3-4AB, 7-8, 17
                        R. (see 7) Justice shall flourish in his time, and fullness of peace for ever.
                        O God, with your judgment endow the king,
                        and with your justice, the king’s son;
                        He shall govern your people with justice
                        and your afflicted ones with judgment.
                        R. Justice shall flourish in his time, and fullness of peace for ever.
                        The mountains shall yield peace for the people,
                        and the hills justice.
                        He shall defend the afflicted among the people,
                        save the children of the poor.
                        R. Justice shall flourish in his time, and fullness of peace for ever.
                        Justice shall flower in his days,
                        and profound peace, till the moon be no more.
                        May he rule from sea to sea,
                        and from the River to the ends of the earth.
                        R. Justice shall flourish in his time, and fullness of peace for ever.
                        May his name be blessed forever;
                        as long as the sun his name shall remain.
                        In him shall all the tribes of the earth be blessed;
                        all the nations shall proclaim his happiness.
                        R. Justice shall flourish in his time, and fullness of peace for ever.
                        Gospel
                        MT 1:1-17
                        The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ,
                        the son of David, the son of Abraham.
                        Abraham became the father of Isaac,
                        Isaac the father of Jacob,
                        Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.
                        Judah became the father of Perez and Zerah,
                        whose mother was Tamar.
                        Perez became the father of Hezron,
                        Hezron the father of Ram,
                        Ram the father of Amminadab.
                        Amminadab became the father of Nahshon,
                        Nahshon the father of Salmon,
                        Salmon the father of Boaz,
                        whose mother was Rahab.
                        Boaz became the father of Obed,
                        whose mother was Ruth.
                        Obed became the father of Jesse,
                        Jesse the father of David the king.
                        David became the father of Solomon,
                        whose mother had been the wife of Uriah.
                        Solomon became the father of Rehoboam,
                        Rehoboam the father of Abijah,
                        Abijah the father of Asaph.
                        Asaph became the father of Jehoshaphat,
                        Jehoshaphat the father of Joram,
                        Joram the father of Uzziah.
                        Uzziah became the father of Jotham,
                        Jotham the father of Ahaz,
                        Ahaz the father of Hezekiah.
                        Hezekiah became the father of Manasseh,
                        Manasseh the father of Amos,
                        Amos the father of Josiah.
                        Josiah became the father of Jechoniah and his brothers
                        at the time of the Babylonian exile.
                        After the Babylonian exile,
                        Jechoniah became the father of Shealtiel,
                        Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel,
                        Zerubbabel the father of Abiud.
                        Abiud became the father of Eliakim,
                        Eliakim the father of Azor,
                        Azor the father of Zadok.
                        Zadok became the father of Achim,
                        Achim the father of Eliud,
                        Eliud the father of Eleazar.
                        Eleazar became the father of Matthan,
                        Matthan the father of Jacob,
                        Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary.
                        Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.
                        Thus the total number of generations
                        from Abraham to David
                        is fourteen generations;
                        from David to the Babylonian exile, fourteen generations;
                        from the Babylonian exile to the Christ,
                        fourteen generations.

                        The post Grafted Onto Jesus’ Family Tree, December 17, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                        10 min
                      • Heeding the Baptist’s Call to Do The Father’s Will This Advent, Third Tuesday of Advent, December 16, 2025

                        Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                        Chapel of The Pontifical Mission Societies USA, St. Petersburg, Florida
                        Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent
                        December 16, 2025
                        Zeph 3:1-2.9-13, Ps 34, Mt 21:28-32

                         

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

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.16.25_Homily_1.mp3

                         

                        The following points were attempted in the homily: 

                        • The essential dynamism of Advent is that Christ is coming, we need to make straight the paths to go out to meet him, and, having encountered him, to be transformed by him so deeply that we begin to journey with him henceforth. The Lord comes with his mercy and we go out to meet him in such a way that we will “turn with” him who is God-with-us. As we begin today the “twelve days before Christmas,” today’s readings help us to make the conversion necessary, to lower the mountains of our pride and fill up the valleys of anything spiritual shallowness that shirks from seeking to become holy like God is holy.
                        • In the Gospel, Jesus gives a parable of two sons. The first refuses to do the father’s will but eventually repents and does it, whereas the second merely gives lip service, saying he’ll do it but not following through. This is an illustration of what Jesus had said elsewhere, that it’s not enough for us to say “Lord, Lord,” but we need to “do the will of [his] Father in heaven.” Jesus illustrates the choice with regard to St. John the Baptist. He came preaching conversion, a message that the prostitutes and tax collectors were acting upon but many of the scribes and elders were not. Similarly, it’s important for us to ask ourselves whether we’ve acted on John’s call to conversion like so many across the centuries have in Advent. All of Advent, in the words of St. John the Baptist, is meant to bring us to change our behavior, not just to say “Amen!” to the Lord but to make our life an illustration of it. The real model of this, of course, is Mary, who, as we were able to ponder a little yesterday on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, not only said, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” but then let her entire life develop in accordance with that word. Regardless, today’s parable could be called the parable of a second chance: that after an initial refusal, or many failures to do what God was wanting, he has now given us this Advent in order to go out and work in the vineyard, building his kingdom, bringing others to the same type of conversion in correspondence to grace as we have done.
                        • In the first reading, we see not only the need to conversion but the help and hope God gives us. God through Zephaniah pronounces woe on the “rebellious,” “polluted” and “tyrannical” city that “hears no voice,” “accepts no correction,” “has not trusted in the Lord” and “has not drawn near to her God.” These are four different descriptions of sin. Sin is a failure to listen to God’s voice and obey it, as Pope Benedict powerfully described in Verbum Domini. When we sin, we often become too proud to receive fraternal correction even for our own good. We fail to trust in God and in his promises. And we marginalize him or withdraw from him. This Advent we’re called to do the opposite: to listen, to seek correction from God and others, to trust ever more in the Lord and draw close to him. Zephaniah describes that if we seek to do this, God will meet us with his mercy. He will “change and purify the lips of the peoples,” he says, so that “they may all call upon the name of the Lord,” “serve him with one accord” and “bring offerings” to him. He promises to create a “remnant” that will be “humble and lowly,” who will “take refuge in the name of the Lord,” who “shall do no wrong and speak no lies,” who shall not speak with deceitful tongues but “pasture and couch their flocks,” essentially who will speak the truth and do their job, serving God, their families and others. The remnant God is creating consists of those who say “yes” to his will.
                        • Today as we prepare for Holy Communion, we thank the Lord for giving us the command to “do this in memory of” him and we ask for the grace not just to mouth our responses but to make our whole life a wholehearted existential yes!

                          •  


                          The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                          Reading 1 Zep 3:1-2, 9-13
                          Thus says the LORD:
                          Woe to the city, rebellious and polluted,
                          to the tyrannical city!
                          She hears no voice,
                          accepts no correction;
                          In the LORD she has not trusted,
                          to her God she has not drawn near.
                          For then I will change and purify
                          the lips of the peoples,
                          That they all may call upon the name of the LORD,
                          to serve him with one accord;
                          From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia
                          and as far as the recesses of the North,
                          they shall bring me offerings.On that day
                          You need not be ashamed
                          of all your deeds,
                          your rebellious actions against me;
                          For then will I remove from your midst
                          the proud braggarts,
                          And you shall no longer exalt yourself
                          on my holy mountain.
                          But I will leave as a remnant in your midst
                          a people humble and lowly,
                          Who shall take refuge in the name of the LORD:
                          the remnant of Israel.
                          They shall do no wrong
                          and speak no lies;
                          Nor shall there be found in their mouths
                          a deceitful tongue;
                          They shall pasture and couch their flocks
                          with none to disturb them.
                          Responsorial Psalm PS 34:2-3, 6-7, 17-18, 19 and 23
                          R. (7a) The Lord hears the cry of the poor.
                          I will bless the LORD at all times;
                          his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
                          Let my soul glory in the LORD;
                          the lowly will hear me and be glad.
                          R. The Lord hears the cry of the poor.
                          Look to him that you may be radiant with joy,
                          and your faces may not blush with shame.
                          When the poor one called out, the LORD heard,
                          and from all his distress he saved him.
                          R. The Lord hears the cry of the poor.
                          The LORD confronts the evildoers,
                          to destroy remembrance of them from the earth.
                          When the just cry out, the LORD hears them,
                          and from all their distress he rescues them.
                          R. The Lord hears the cry of the poor.
                          The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;
                          and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.
                          The LORD redeems the lives of his servants;
                          no one incurs guilt who takes refuge in him.
                          R. The Lord hears the cry of the poor.

                          Alleluia

                          R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                          Come, O Lord, do not delay;
                          forgive the sins of your people.
                          R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                          Gospel Mt 21:28-32
                          Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people:
                          “What is your opinion?
                          A man had two sons.
                          He came to the first and said,
                          ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’
                          The son said in reply, ‘I will not,’
                          but afterwards he changed his mind and went.
                          The man came to the other son and gave the same order.
                          He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir,’ but did not go.
                          Which of the two did his father’s will?”
                          They answered, “The first.”
                          Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you,
                          tax collectors and prostitutes
                          are entering the Kingdom of God before you.
                          When John came to you in the way of righteousness,
                          you did not believe him;
                          but tax collectors and prostitutes did.
                          Yet even when you saw that,
                          you did not later change your minds and believe him.”

                          The post Heeding the Baptist’s Call to Do The Father’s Will This Advent, Third Tuesday of Advent, December 16, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                          9 min
                        • Crowned with Everlasting Joy, Third Sunday of Advent (A), December 14, 2025

                          Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                          Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
                          Third Sunday of Advent, Year A
                          December 14, 2025
                          Is 35:1-6.10, Ps 146, James 5:7-10, Mt 11:2-11

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

                          https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.14.25_Homily_1.mp3

                           

                          The outline for the homily was: 

                          • On this Gaudete Sunday, we have the great messianic prophecy of Isaiah about joy.
                            • Desert and parched land will exult
                            • Steppe will rejoice and bloom
                            • They will rejoice and bloom with abundant flowers and rejoice with joyful song.
                            • They will see the glory of the Lord.
                            • The eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf will be cleared, the lamp will leap and the mute will sing.
                            • They will meet with joy and gladness
                            • They will be crowned with everlasting joy. This is what we’re made for — not just fleeting but everlasting joy. That will be our great victory.
                            • Isaiah then gives the way we are to prepare for this
                              • Strengthen feeble hands
                              • Make firm weak knees
                              • Say to the frightened: be strong fear not!
                              • The reason: God is coming with vindication and divine recompense to save you.
                              • James tells us that we need to be patient for the full development of this, with hearts firm, like the prophets, like a farmer waits for the harvest, full of hope with the early and late rains.
                              • In the Gospel, we see that there was a problem with patience.
                                • Controversy as to whether this impatience was with John or with his disciples.
                                • I believe it was with John’s disciples, who were doubting whether Jesus was the Messiah, “the one who is to come,” and were still clinging to John in prison.
                                • They were upset because the Messiah was supposed to set prisoners free and John was still in jail.
                                • Regardless they go with the question, and Jesus replies by saying, “Go and tell John what you see and hear. The blind, lame, lepers, deaf, dead all receive miracles and the poor have the Gospel proclaimed to them, the Messianic checklist from Is 61. Blessed is he who takes no offense at me.
                                • There was an issue of trust and Jesus’ messianic priorities.
                                • Many have had a problem with Jesus’ meekness. His patience. His priorities. He tolerates things we wouldn’t. Because he was coming to save us. He was coming to have our ears opened to his voice, our eyes to his image, our legs to follow him. That is a great source of joy.
                                • Jesus took the occasion to praise John
                                  • He wasn’t a swaying reed
                                  • He wasn’t dressed in fine clothing
                                  • He was a prophet, and the greatest of prophets, who prepared the way of the Lord.
                                  • Greatest born of woman. Abraham. Moses. Mary.
                                  • But least in the kingdom of heaven is greater. Greater because of their connection to the King. They are children of God by baptism. This, too, is a great source of joy.
                                  • Message
                                    • To trust in the promises and experience already the joy of their fulfillment.
                                    • To be patient, with steadfast hearts.
                                    • Mass
                                      • The place where all of this takes place.
                                      • In the midst of a world that sometimes might seem barren, this is where we are meant to rejoice with joyful song, as we see the humble glory of the Lord and splendor of our God. This is where we meet our God who has come to save us, to open our eyes, and ears, and tongues, and strengthen our limbs. This is where we are reinforced in our identity as sons and daughters of God, as members of the royal family, indeed as sons and daughters in the Son. This is the foretaste of being crowned with everlasting joy as we meet with joy and gladness.
                                      • This is the place where we act on the imperative of Gaudete Sunday in today’s entrance antiphon: Rejoice always in the Lord! Again, I say, rejoice!

                                        •  

                                        The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                                        Reading 1
                                        Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10

                                        The desert and the parched land will exult;

                                        the steppe will rejoice and bloom.
                                        They will bloom with abundant flowers,
                                        and rejoice with joyful song.
                                        The glory of Lebanon will be given to them,
                                        the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
                                        they will see the glory of the LORD,
                                        the splendor of our God.
                                        Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
                                        make firm the knees that are weak,
                                        say to those whose hearts are frightened:
                                        Be strong, fear not!
                                        Here is your God,
                                        he comes with vindication;
                                        with divine recompense
                                        he comes to save you.
                                        Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
                                        the ears of the deaf be cleared;
                                        then will the lame leap like a stag,
                                        then the tongue of the mute will sing.

                                        Those whom the LORD has ransomed will return

                                        and enter Zion singing,
                                        crowned with everlasting joy;
                                        they will meet with joy and gladness,
                                        sorrow and mourning will flee.

                                        Responsorial Psalm
                                        Psalm 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10.

                                        R. (cf. Is 35:4)  Lord, come and save us.

                                        or:
                                        R. Alleluia.
                                        The LORD God keeps faith forever,
                                        secures justice for the oppressed,
                                        gives food to the hungry.
                                        The LORD sets captives free.
                                        R. Lord, come and save us.
                                        or:
                                        R. Alleluia.
                                        The LORD gives sight to the blind;
                                        the LORD raises up those who were bowed down.
                                        The LORD loves the just;
                                        the LORD protects strangers.
                                        R. Lord, come and save us.
                                        or:
                                        R. Alleluia.
                                        The fatherless and the widow he sustains,
                                        but the way of the wicked he thwarts.
                                        The LORD shall reign forever;
                                        your God, O Zion, through all generations.
                                        R. Lord, come and save us.
                                        or:
                                        R. Alleluia.

                                        Reading 2
                                        James 5:7-10

                                        Be patient, brothers and sisters,

                                        until the coming of the Lord.
                                        See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth,
                                        being patient with it
                                        until it receives the early and the late rains.
                                        You too must be patient.
                                        Make your hearts firm,
                                        because the coming of the Lord is at hand.
                                        Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another,
                                        that you may not be judged.
                                        Behold, the Judge is standing before the gates.
                                        Take as an example of hardship and patience, brothers and sisters,
                                        the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.

                                        Alleluia
                                        Isaiah 61:1 (cited in Lk 4:18)

                                        R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                                        The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
                                        because he has anointed me
                                        to bring glad tidings to the poor.
                                        R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                                        Gospel
                                        Matthew 11:2-11

                                        When John the Baptist heard in prison of the works of the Christ,

                                        he sent his disciples to Jesus with this question,
                                        “Are you the one who is to come,
                                        or should we look for another?”
                                        Jesus said to them in reply,
                                        “Go and tell John what you hear and see:
                                        the blind regain their sight,
                                        the lame walk,
                                        lepers are cleansed,
                                        the deaf hear,
                                        the dead are raised,
                                        and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.
                                        And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”

                                        As they were going off,

                                        Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John,
                                        “What did you go out to the desert to see?
                                        A reed swayed by the wind?
                                        Then what did you go out to see?
                                        Someone dressed in fine clothing?
                                        Those who wear fine clothing are in royal palaces.
                                        Then why did you go out?  To see a prophet?
                                        Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.
                                        This is the one about whom it is written:
                                        Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;
                                        he will prepare your way before you.
                                        Amen, I say to you,
                                        among those born of women
                                        there has been none greater than John the Baptist;
                                        yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

                                        The post Crowned with Everlasting Joy, Third Sunday of Advent (A), December 14, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                        15 min

                                      About Catholic Preaching

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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.

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