Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

August 6, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday when he will tell us the incredible gift God the Father wants to give us and what we need to do to obtain that gift. But then he will make plain to us the practical choices we need to make to seize that blessing and the whole Gospel hinges on whether we will be faithful and prudent stewards who do so or unfaithful and imprudent ones who don’t. Let’s enter into this dramatic conversation.

* Everything begins with Jesus’ extraordinary words, “Your Father is pleased to give you the kingdom!” He wants to give us his Kingdom, in this world and forever. Doing so, Jesus says, would give the Father great joy. He tells us, therefore, “Don’t be afraid any longer.” Sometimes we are afraid of God, we are afraid of displeasing him, we are afraid of our weaknesses and our capacity to choose against God, others and ourselves, we are afraid of the eternal consequences of our sinful choices. But Jesus encourages us not to be afraid, because his Father is delighted to give it all to us, shown in his sending his Son into the world to announce to us that the Kingdom is at hand, to teach us how to enter it, and, at great personal cost, to lead us there.

* Jesus wants us to be as happy about receiving that kingdom as God the Father is to give it. That’s why he tells us that we need to let go of a desire to build our own material kingdom here on earth and use everything we have to obtain God’s kingdom. “Sell your belongings and give alms,” he says. “Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy.” The way to seize the kingdom is through Christ-like charity, to use the money we have, the time we have, the goods we have, to lift others up. To love in this way is like transferring all we have to a celestial bank account that can never be taxed, where it will form an “inexhaustible treasure” that will never cease giving dividends. But Jesus wants us to make a choice as to whether we are going to build up this heavenly treasure or, like the fool in last Sunday’s Gospel, whether we will seek to build up towers for our grain and wealth here on earth. “For where your treasure is,” Jesus tells us, “there also will your heart be.” Is our heart really in God, in his kingdom and in his eternally secure treasure? Or is it this fleeting world?

* If our heart is really in God, Jesus next tells us how to prove it. He tells us, “Gird your loins and light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.” He wants us to be vigilant, alert, hungry for him, to light our lamps like the wise virgins Jesus described in a parable in St. Matthew’s Gospel, ready always for his return, to gird our loins like the Jews in the desert, ready to run out to meet and embrace him. A little later in the parable, he drives home the point with two other images. One is of a security guard. “Be sure of this,” he says. “If the master of the house had known the hour when the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into.” Jesus wants us to be as alert to his joyful arriva...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Murray Hill Conference Center

August 4, 2022

 

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Eucharistic Unity of Life, SJV and SJME

 

 

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chapel of the Wedding Feast of Cana

Murray Hill Conference Center, Manhattan

Thursday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. John Vianney, Patron Saint of Parish Priests

August 4, 2022

Jer 31:31-34, Ps 51, Mt 16:13-23

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Jeremiah, like Ezekiel, prophesied that God wanted to give us a new heart on which a new law would be inscribed, the law of the love of God, the law of the Holy Spirit. God would take out our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, a heart in which his divine law and loved would transform our humanity. This would be the new covenant Jeremiah describes. That prophecy came to fulfillment when the Son of God came into our world, as Jesus inaugurated the new and eternal covenant through his Passion, death and Resurrection.

* In the Gospel that Messiah and Son of God took a poll as to who people in general, and who the apostles, said he is. Peter, moved by a gift of God the Father, got the right answer and proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah and Son of God, but he hadn’t sufficiently pondered all that God had revealed as to how the Messiah would carry out his work, inaugurate the new covenant and perfect the prophecy of a heart transplant. He hadn’t adequately pondered what was revealed by the sacrifice of Abel, the sacrifice of Isaac, the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb, the just man beset by evil doers, the Suffering Servant led like a lamb to a slaughter, the innocent one whose beard was plucked, whose bones were counted, whose thirst was parched. Peter, though graced by God to see and name the deeper identity of Jesus, was thinking as human beings do, as Jews awaiting a political Messiah were, rather than thinking as God does. He was, in fact, thinking according to the way Satan thinks, who was horrified at the humility of the love of God, and was opposing the way Jesus would give us a new heart on Calvary at at the altar. That’s why Jesus, after having given Peter the name rock, changed it again temporarily to Satan, and told him to “get behind” him, since Peter was trying to lead Jesus according to Peter’s fallen, worldly categories.

* To think as God thinks, not as others think: this is something that characterized the life and ministry of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, whom we have the joy to celebrated today. His most famous saying was “The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus,” and this is true in a subjective and objective sense. In Biblical mentality, the heart is not just a physical organ, but the center of the person where thoughts, will and emotions all converge. Jesus in giving us a new heart, in writing his law upon it, in pouring out the Holy Spirit into our hearts and making them clean, was helping us to think what he thinks, to will what he wills, to love what he loves, to feel what he feels. And the priest, subjectively, loves the heart of Jesus and seeks to become one with it, as St. John Vianney did. Objectively, the priest is the expression of the love of Jesus, because through the priest Jesus continues to love his people, to cleanse their and give them a new heart through the sacraments of Baptism and Confession, to nourish and strengthen the heart through the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. The priest of the new and eternal covenant, therefore, is meant to be an icon and agent of the Sacred Heart of Christ the Eternal High Priest.

* At this Mass, we prepare for a heart transplant. We recognize we need to be cleansed. We come to hear the word of God,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

July 30, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will get right to the heart of one of the most important questions any human being needs to answer: What I am living for? What am I working for? Many people live for money rather than for God. In the Gospel this Sunday, Jesus describes how we can easily make making money an idol, what the Book of Ecclesiastes in this Sunday’s first reading will call a “vanity of vanities,” or, in other words, an ultimate waste of time.

* Jesus made his point by means of the image of the rich farmer who just continued to build larger silos to store his crops, totally unaware that his life was soon going to be over and then none of it would matter. With increased urbanization, few of us today are farmers and therefore few of us would seek to build larger barns for produce, but many of us worry and some are even obsessed about increasing the size of our retirement accounts, pensions, bank statements and homes. Probably the most fitting equivalent of our grain bins would be the explosion of storage units everywhere. When we no longer need something for our day-to-day life, we just hoard it; we put it in a closet until we have no more room; then we move it to the cellar or attic, and when those prove inadequate, we just get big storage lockers. What we should be doing when we no longer need something for regular use is to give it away to someone who does. But even when we’re not using something, we still hold onto it. We still think we need it. Our possessions have come to own us, rather than the other way around.

* Jesus gives that parable about the farmer building larger grain bins unaware that he would soon die in response to someone in the crowd asking him, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Over the course of my priesthood I have been shocked at how many times I’ve had been asked to get involved in familial situations like the one Jesus was requested to resolve. This man obviously thought that his brother was wronging him and wanted Jesus, the just one, to intervene. I don’t hesitate to add that this man’s brother probably was wronging him. But underneath this appeal for justice, Jesus saw two things at play. First, the petitioner at a practical level was thinking that gaining the inheritance was more important than maintaining a good relationship with his brother. How many people today still think and act in these terms, allowing money or other vanities to separate them and keep them apart for years, decades or even to the grave! Second, Jesus saw that, despite what was likely a just request, the motivation underneath it was not justice but primarily greed disguised as justice. That’s why Jesus told not only the petitioner but the whole crowd: “Beware of all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions!”

* The problem for many of us and for so many of our contemporaries is that we think that life does consist in the abundance of possessions. We idolize the rich and famous. We watch programs and buy magazines about them, devouring whatever can give us a window into their life. We put in long hours of work to try to secure a little bit of it. While few of us spend much time setting our hearts on mansions,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

2022 Napa Institute, Napa, California

Conference Theme: “The Way, The Truth and The Life”

July 28, 2022

 

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To download the PDF slides of the talk, please click below:

The Power of the Powerless, Walking the Way of Truth

 

To download a copy of the notes that guided the talk, please click below: 

Napa 2022, Power of the Powerless Final Text

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

July 23, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.23.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday in which the disciples of Jesus ask him how to enter into the most fundamental consequential conversation of all: the dialogue with God we call prayer.

* “Lord, teach us to pray,” one of Jesus’ disciples asks at the beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel. On its face, it seems like a straightforward-enough request, but when one understands well the context in which it would have been asked, it would be similar to Michael Jordan’s asking someone to teach him how to dribble a basketball. The Jewish disciples of Jesus already should have been experts on prayer. The whole of what we call today the Old Testament was one long instruction on how to pray: Abraham, Moses, Samson, David, Elijah, Esther all teach us by example. The 150 psalms were a prayer book the Jews sang over and over with inspired words, the prophetic books contain many examples of prayer, and the wisdom literature shares the fruit of much prayer and contemplation on the mysteries of God. The history of the Jews and the whole Hebrew Bible was a school of prayer. Yet Jesus’ disciples, fully educated in that school, knew that there was something different about Jesus’ prayer that they hadn’t learned from the rabbis in the synagogues or the levitical priests in the Temple. His example of prayer — going off to the desert, heading up on a mountain, stealing a corner in a garden, often spending all night — enticed them to ask him to teach them his secret. Implicitly they knew that the type of prayer to which God was calling them was more than merely making some time for God, or reflecting on the Torah or putting the sacred words of the Psalms on their lips. So they turned to Jesus to ask him to teach them this special art, and Jesus didn’t let them down. This weekend we learn from the same Master.

* One cannot exaggerate the importance of prayer in a life that’s truly and fully Christian. St. John Paul II, in his 2001 Pastoral Plan for the Church in the new millennium, said, “Prayer cannot be taken for granted. We have to learn to pray: as it were learning this art ever anew from the lips of the Divine Master himself, like the first disciples: ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’” He went on to emphasize what happens if we don’t learn that art. “It would be wrong to think,” he said, “that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life. Especially in the face of the many trials to which today’s world subjects faith, they would be not only mediocre Christians but ‘Christians at risk’ … of seeing their faith progressively undermined,” something we see when Catholics drift away from the faith because they were often not finding God and entering into intimate existential dialogue with Him through the practice of their faith. So St. John Paul said, “It is therefore essential that education in prayer should become in some way a key-point” of everything the Church does, because “learning this Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy … but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity” (NMI 32-34). For our faith to be truly alive, we must learn from Christ how to pray to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Monica Parish, Kalamazoo, MI

Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

July 19, 2022

Mic 7:14-15.18-20, Ps 85, Mt 12:46-50

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* As we conclude the parish Mission this morning, celebrating the 20 years of perpetual Eucharistic adoration here at St. Monica’s and asking the Lord, at the beginning of the new national Eucharistic revival, not to help expand Eucharistic love here in this parish but to allow the Eucharistic faith, amazement and love present here to radiate infectiously to other parishes across the Diocese and country, the readings the Church gives us in the Liturgy of the Word today help us to focus on a couple crucial realities to our Eucharistic faith.

* In the first reading, we conclude our biennial three-day focus on the Book of the Prophet Micah, through whom God sought to bring to conversion around 730 BC. The people of Judah had lost their way. They were doing their will, rather than God’s. Rather than worshipping the Lord, they were adoring idols. Rather than loving their neighbor, they were treating them with hardened hearts and defrauding them. They weren’t keeping the commandments or being faithful to the covenant. They were not doing justice, loving mercy, or walking humbly with God, as we pondered yesterday. God’s response to Judah’s infidelity was fidelity and mercy. On behalf of the people, Micah turns to God and prays, “Who is there like you, the God who removes guilt and pardons sin for the remnant of his inheritance; who does not persist in anger forever, but delights rather in clemency and will again have compassion on us, treading underfoot our guilt? You will cast into the depths of the sea all our sins; you will show faithfulness to Jacob, and grace to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from days of old.” God responded by showing his mercy and love. Even after the people continued to disobey him and do their own thing, such that they were vulnerable to attack by the Babylonians and were taken into exile, God “brought back the captives of Jacob,” as we prayed in the Psalm. Eventually God sent his only Son as the incarnation of his kindness, named “Yeshua” in Hebrew, literally “God saves.” For us we see that even though we are living through a period of widespread ingratitude, indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, as he himself described to St. Margaret Mary, God has remained faithful, and continues humbly to give himself to us on the altar. That is an extraordinary witness of his merciful love and desire to save. In response to his fidelity, we are moved to reply to widespread ingratitude by always and everywhere giving him thanks and praise, to indifference by making him in the Eucharist the greatest difference in our life, to irreverence by approaching him with awe and piety, to coldness by treating him with ardent love, to sacrilege by constantly purifying ourselves through the gift of the Sacrament of Confession to receive him well, to scorn by showering him with praise.

* In the Gospel, when people tell Jesus that his mother and his relatives (the Hebrew and Aramaic words for brother was used for all relatives) were outside the crowded house where he was teaching and were hoping to speak to him, he used it to stress an important point of what he in mercy had come down from heaven to establish. Stretching out his hands toward his disciples, Jesus said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister and mother.” Jesus had come down from heaven to found a family and hi...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Monica Parish, Kalamazoo, MI

July 18, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.18.22_Eucharistic_Form_of_Christian_Life_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Monica Parish, Kalamazoo, MI

Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis

July 18, 2022

Mic 6:1-4.6-8, Ps 50, Mt 12:38-42

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* In the Gospel, the Scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a “sign.” A sign is a miracle pointing to something else, namely Jesus’ authority to preach and do what he was saying and doing. We know that by this point in the Gospel, Jesus had been working miracle after miracle: immediately before he had cured a man with a withered hand and cured another who was blind, mute and possessed. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept what those miracles signified and the authority of Jesus’ words and deeds to which they testified. So they kept asking for other ones. Perhaps they were waiting until a supposed miracle attempt might fail so that they would be able to feel justified in their rejection of Jesus. Jesus cut to the core of why they were asking for such a miracle, saying, an “evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign.” A good and faithful generation would have already taken seriously all of the miracles and words that Jesus had done and would have grasped that he himself was the sign for which the Jews, awaiting the Messiah and his messianic deeds, should have been looking.

* But Jesus nevertheless says that the one sign that would be given to the evil and perverse generation that constantly seeks another sign is the Sign of Jonah. On the one hand this certainly points to his death, burial in the belly of the earth, and resurrection on the third day, his most definitive miracle. That sign would be given to all, but, as we know, some would nevertheless refuse to believe it. The fundamental meaning of the sign of Jonah, however, is conversion. Jonah was himself a convert — he had run away from the mission the Lord had given him, before converting through his three days in the belly of a whale and then calling the pagan Ninevites to conversion. And we remember how the Ninevites responded: they all repented, from the king down to the pets, and fasted in sackcloth and ashes. Jesus told them that he was greater than Jonah and, therefore, a greater sign of conversion. If the pagans of Nineveh had changed their ways at the preaching of Jonah on the first day, then the supposedly “good and faithful” religious Jews of his day should have much more readily changed when they heard Jesus’ preaching “Repent and believe in the Gospel” and working so many miracles to back up his message. Jesus added that the Queen of Sheba had traveled a great distance with many caravans in her retinue in order to hear Solomon’s wisdom — she had in fact traveled 1,660 miles or, at a pace of 15 miles a day, for 110 days, nearly four months, each way — but that his wisdom was greater than Solomon’s. His listeners, however, weren’t willing to travel any intellectual or moral distance to come to the truth.

* The chief problem with the Scribes and Pharisees is not that they didn’t want to convert “in general.” They marked Yom Kippur each year and piously recognized their need for atonement just like everyone else, but they wanted to convert on their own terms and in their own way. They didn’t want to convert in the way God wanted and to begin to do what he was asking. We see that problem laid out starkly in the reading from the Prophet Micah and in the Responsorial Psalm. God through Micah puts words on their lips about the type of repentance they were willing to do and were already doing: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow before God most high?

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Monica Parish, Kalamazoo, MI

July 17, 2022

 

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