Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

October 26, 2022

Eph 6:1-9, Ps 145, Lk 13:22-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.26.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

*  “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” someone from the crowd asked Jesus today. The response that a typical Jew at the time would have expected is “Yes!” because most Jews believed that only Jews — and Jews who faithfully kept God’s covenant — would make it. The interrogator likely thought he was among the few. But Jesus didn’t reply attempting to satisfy the person’s curiosity, because he hadn’t come from heaven to earth to answer the questions of inquiring minds. He had come from heaven to earth to save us, and so he responded not by saying how many are saved by how any is saved.

*  “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” he said. The word translated as “strive” is from the Greek word to “agonize” and it’s used in a tense that means “keep on agonizing.” It’s the same word we heard St. Paul use on Sunday when he called us to “fight the good fight” or literally “agonize the beautiful agony.” To get to Heaven, in other words, we need continuously to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to go into agony, to make the greatest, possibly most painful exertion of our life, to fit through a gate that is “narrow.” We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in an NFL training camp to make the cut, harder than gymnast works to make the Olympics and win the gold, harder than an immigrant father of large family works to ensure his family’s survival. To be a faithful Christian means to “agonize” to follow Christ always. There is no point that we can stop fighting to follow him and “live off the interest” of previous years of good discipleship. We are called to struggle, to keep fighting the good fight of faith, until the day we die. As Archbishop Sheen used to say, “If we’re not going uphill, we’re sliding downhill.” If we’re not swimming against the current of the world toward Jesus, we’ll be floating down stream over the falls. “Unless you pick up your cross each day and follow me,” he tells us, “you cannot be my disciple” (Lk 9:27,14:27). The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the Cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through. We need to agonize that way to fit through the narrow gate as if our whole life depended on it — because, in fact, Jesus says it does. In the midst of a culture that is consistently trying to water down our commitment to God, Christians who want to be faithful need to strive even harder to pick up the Cross God gives them each day and unite themselves to Christ on the Cross. Christ, himself, is the “gate to the sheepfold” (Jn 10:7,9). The reason why the gate is narrow is because it is the width of the crucified Christ.

* With words meant to shock us out of complacency, Jesus declares in St. Matthew’s version, “For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Few people, he implies, make the effort required to enter into life. Few agonize to enter through the narrow gate. Over the last few decades, people have gotten the notion that the Christian life is exactly the opposite of what Jesus describes today, that salvation is cheap and the Christian life smooth and easy. Most have been led to believe that they can “float” effor...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Anthony Maria Claret

October 24, 2022

Eph 4:32-5:8, Ps 1, Lk 13:10-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.24.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* St. Cyril of Alexandria, a fifth century doctor of the church, said about Christians that they are the ones who behave like God. Christians are not those who merely believe in the Trinitarian God revealed by Jesus Christ. Christians are the ones who seek to behave like God with God’s own help, with God’s own love. That’s the message that St. Paul gives to the Christians in Ephesus in today’s first reading: “Be imitators of God, as his beloved children, and live in love.” Christians are called not just to imitate God on the outside out of some type of duty, but having been loved in such a way by God, we seek to imitate that love, live in it, and live by it, allowing God to love others through us, together with our entire personality.

* St. Paul gets specific in his words to the Christians in Ephesus about how they’re supposed to imitate God. Having received God’s mercy — because God’s love for us is always merciful —  we are called to imitate that merciful love toward others. So St. Paul begins today, “Be kind to one another.” The word he uses in Greek, crestos, means that we care about somebody else’s needs just as much as we care about our own. If we were hungry, we’d be looking for something to eat, and therefore if someone else is hungry, we feed them. Just as we like to be clothed, we clothe others. Just like we hate to suffer and are grateful for the care for others, so we care for them. He calls us to be compassionate like God is, taking into consideration another person’s sufferings, even when we might not visibly see them. He tells us to “Forgiv[e] one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” This forgiveness is not just an extrinsic action in which we basically say, “I don’t hold any grudges,” because we know how God forgave us in Christ: by dying in order to take our sins away. Hence we’re called to real sacrifice to reestablish others to a right relationship with God and us. St. Paul adds, “Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” Christ’s love for others was sweet incense, a beautiful prayer that rose up to God, in some sense, his greatest worship. St. Paul wants us to imitate that worship, that self-giving loving sacrifice, and make of our life a fragrant offering, sweet smelling incense, rising up to God.

* St. Paul contrasts that type of life and prayer with what he suggests is the foul and fetid odor that some lives that do not imitate God as beloved children emanate. He says that “immorality, any impurity or greed must not even be mentioned about among you. Because this is idolatry.” It’s a powerful point. None of us wants to engage in idolatry, because we believe in God and love him. But whenever we are immoral, we’re de facto worshipping an idol. When we’re acquisitive, we’re putting our treasure not in growing to be more and more like God through receiving his own grace, but placing it in some material thing. Impurity is a type of corrupted love in which fail to see and reverence God in others. Such a life, he says, begins with obscenity or silly and suggestive talk, which he says is out of place among God’s holy ones. The devil often wants us to start with such things inane conversations and make them grow, just like violent crime normally flows from situations where graffiti and broken windows are left unatte...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

October 23, 2022

Sir 35:12-14.16-18, Ps 34, 2 Tim 4:6-8.16-18, Lk 18:9-14

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.23.22_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* One of the classic practices when one goes on a retreat is to meditate about one’s death. Since we never know the day or the hour when Christ will come for us, and pondering the end of our life helps us better to learn how to live, to focus on what really matters in life, to prioritize what’s truly important, and to order our choices wisely. As helpful as that practice is, there’s an even more useful one: it’s to enter into the holy thoughts and prudent preparations of the saints as they prepare for death. Today, in the second reading, we are given the privilege to read what is essentially St. Paul’s last will and testament. He was in a Roman prison, preparing for execution and writing what he thought might be his final words to his spiritual son St. Timothy. He said he was already being poured out as a sacred sacrificial offering to God — as the Romans used to finish their sacrifices by pouring wine on the ground to the pagan gods — and that the time of his departure from this life was near. In one phrase, one of the most powerful and memorable lines in Sacred Scripture and human history, he summarized all he sought to do in his life since his conversion outside the gates of Damascus. He wrote. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” As we think of our life and the time of our eventual departure from it, St. Paul would be urging us, like he urged the young St. Timothy, to make these three things our priorities, so that we might echo them throughout our life and at the hour of our death.

* The first thing he says is, “I have fought the good fight.” He points to the truth that the Christian life isn’t easy. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s a battle. The word he uses for fight is the Greek word for agony. He says he’s agonized through the “good and beautiful agony.” St. Paul heroically and agonizingly battled through multiple imprisonments, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, labors, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, anxiety for the Churches, betrayals, abandonments and more (2 Cor 11:23-28). But he never gave up the fight. He competed like a champion. And he wanted to help strengthen St. Timothy. He was indicating that in the Christian life, we have to struggle against our weaknesses and failings, we need to war against the devil, principalities and powers and unending infernal attempts to turn us from God, against the temptations, obstacles and difficulties others and human life in general can place in our way to make it harder to live and share our faith. Despite all the punches that he took in life, St. Paul told St. Timothy in today’s passage, “The Lord stood by me and gave me strength.” The same Lord will stand by us. That’s why St. Paul could write to St. Timothy at the end of his first letter, “Fight the good fight of faith” (1 Cor 12:6). The Christian life is meant to train us to be fighters, to be strong and resilient, to be heroic like Jesus, like Paul, like the martyrs young and old throughout the centuries, because we recognize that God is standing by us to give us strength and that we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Phil 4:13). St. Paul wants St. Timothy and each of us to be as stout in the spiritual life as the top boxers and MMA fighters are in the ring. And we’re living at a time in which that strength is ever needed.

* The second thing St. Paul declares is, “I have finished the race.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

October 23, 2022

Sir 35:12-14.16-18, Ps 34, 2 Tim 4:6-8.16-18, Lk 18:9-14

 

To listen to today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.23.22_MC_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* In retreats, there is the classic practice of praying about the last things and reflecting upon our death, since we never know the day or the hour and because remembering that we will die helps us to learn how to live, to evaluate what really matters and to prioritize what’s truly important. As helpful as that practice is, there’s an even more helpful one: to enter into the holy thoughts and fitting preparations of the saints as they prepare for death. Today in the second reading, we are able to enter into the St. Paul’s last will and testament. He was in a Roman prison writing what he thought might be his final words to his spiritual son St. Timothy. He said he was already being poured out as a sacred sacrificial offering to God and that the time of his departure from this life was near. In one phrase he summarized all that he sought to do in his life since his conversion. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” The three things that the apostle indicated are, God-willing, three accomplishments each of us should be able to echo at the end of our life, by aiming to live them each day throughout our life.

* The first thing he says is, “I have fought the good fight.” The Christian life isn’t easy. It’s a battle. The word he uses for fight is actually the Greek word for agony. He’s agonized through what he describes as the “good and beautiful agony.” We see in St. Paul’s life that he agonized, he fought, through multiple imprisonments, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, labors sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, anxiety for the Churches, betrayals, abandonments and more (2 Cor 11:23-28). But he never gave up the fight. In the Christian life, we have to struggle against our weaknesses and failings, we need to war against the devil and his unending attempts to turn us from God, and we also need to fight against those who make it difficult for us to live and share our faith. St. Paul competed well, he competed like a champion, he never gave up. He told St. Timothy later in today’s passage, “The Lord stood by me and gave me strength.” The same Lord will stand by us. That’s why St. Paul could write to St. Timothy at the end of his first letter, “Fight the good fight of faith” (1 Cor 12:6). The Christian life is meant to train us to be fighters, to be tough and resilient, because we recognize that God is standing by us to give us strength and that we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Phil 4:13).

* The second thing St. Paul declares is, “I have finished the race.” One of the reasons why St. Paul was able to do so much for the Lord was because he always had a sense of urgency. He recognized that the Christian life is not one where we sleep the fat morning, pass the day sitting down on a recliner, and have plenty of time to take naps in comfortable hammocks. The Christian life isn’t a leisurely saunter following in Jesus’ footsteps. It’s a race! It’s a life-long marathon. St. Paul ran that race all over the ancient world, throughout the Middle East, Asia and parts of southern Europe. Most of us are not called to anywhere near the same total on the pedometer as he amassed, but we are called to live our faith with similar urgency. We’re called to hasten to God, to hasten to serve others, to hasten to grow in and share our faith. Just as the love of Christ impelled him, so we’re called to say and show, caritas Christi urget nos.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

October 22, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.22.22_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 Jesus will speak to us about the importance of prayer in general and praying for mercy in particular. He does so by means of a famous parable in which he describes two men who went up to the temple to pray.

* The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, “Thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The man was what most people would deem today a religious man. He was going up to Jerusalem to the temple to pray. He, like his fellow Pharisees, never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith but as much as they could. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain items, he tithed his whole income. He was outwardly a role model. But there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, his conception of the faith, and his conception of others. The first clue is that Jesus said about him, “He spoke this prayer to himself.” That doesn’t mean that he simply said it quietly so that he alone could hear, but, in a sense, he was praying the prayer to himself, not to God, that his prayer, like his life, had himself in the center. The man thanked God that he was not like so many others, whom he said were thieves, rogues, adulterers and publicans. He rejoiced in what he saw was his virtue, but he failed to recognize that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He failed to see his own sinfulness. He didn’t ask God for mercy, because he didn’t think he needed it. Compared to so many around him, and the other person praying in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners.

* Jesus contrasts this man’s prayer with that of the other man, a tax collector, who went up to the temple to pray that day. Tax collectors or publicans were hated by their fellow Jews not just because they were collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in carrying out their duty, they would routinely rip off their people for greed. They were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep, and many of the tax collectors were ripping off the poor precisely in order to live well. They were in general corrupt, similar to an ancient mafia class that the authorities with whom they were conspiring would do nothing to stop. One would think that someone in such circumstances who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and of so many people who lived around him, wouldn’t pray at all. For him to pray, some might argue, was hypocritical. But he knew that even if others might never forgive him, God might, and he knew he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance at all, no self-importance, and great humility, he stayed in the back of the temple, beat his breast and cried, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” He was totally conscious that he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but knew that the Lord was kind and merciful, that the Lord’s mercy endures forever, and with great repentance prayed for that gift.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Blessed Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi, Martyr

October 21, 2022

Eph 4:1-6, Ps 24, Lk 12:54-59

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.21.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we shift gears in our biennial two-week liturgical meditation on St. Paul’s deepest and most eloquent Epistle. Since a week ago yesterday, St. Paul has been sketching out in the first three chapters of the Letter the theology of Christ’s whole mission, which can be summarized as his work to “sum up,” to reconcile “all things in himself, in the heavens and on earth.” In the last three chapters of his missive, he begins to draw moral consequences for how we’re supposed to participate in that reconciliation between us and God and in God with each other. God’s ultimate plan in Christ is to form us as a family, as a true communion of saints. In today’s passage, St. Paul pushes on that accelerator.

* He urges us to “live in a manner worthy of the call [we] have received,” the call to be — as he said last week — “holy and immaculate in [God’s] sight” and describes the virtues we need to respond to his call for reconciliation: first, humility, because pride always separates us from God and from others; second, meekness, so that we will have the self-discipline to control our anger and choose the good; and third, patience (makrothumia) so that we can “bear with one another through love.” These are the means by which we can “preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” Then St. Paul sketches what I might call the theological grounds of our unity: that in Christ we have been made “one Body.” We have become temples of the “one Spirit.” We all have the “one hope of our call” to eternal communion with God and others. We are all disciples of the “one Lord.” We each have the “one faith” or trust in God and his promises. We have the “one baptism” that has made us spiritual siblings. We all recognize our divine filiation of the “one God and Father of all,” who is over all (omnipotent), through all (provident) and in all (omnipresent). God who calls us to live in a manner worthy of our calling to be in a loving communion with him and others will give us all of the means we need — and these are the means! And these means are not merely individual; as we prayed in the Psalm, we are a “people that longs to see [God’s] face.”

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the signs of the times. Just as we are able to interpret meteorological indicators and adapt our clothing and associated behavior, so Jesus wants us to perceive the signs of his kingdom and make similar adjustments to live in accordance with his calling to that kingdom, a kingdom of unity, holiness, charity and peace. He gives the analogy of making peace with adversaries before the judge sentences us to prison, communicating that as we’re walking through life toward our judgment, we should reconcile now, we should love now in deeds. This is a mystery hidden to the wise and the clever of the world, as we prayed in the Alleluia versicle but revealed to the childlike, who forgive easily. God who wants to reconcile all things in Christ wants us to reconcile whenever we see to settle something with a brother or sister who shares with us the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace and the one Body, Spirit, hope, Lord, faith, baptism and God and Father of all. The pilgrimage of life is meant to be a kairos of mercy received and shared and we need to reconcile with God and others along the way.

* Today we have a great example of someone who read th...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thursday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Paul of the Cross

October 20, 2022

Eph 3:14-21, Ps 33, Lk 12:49-53

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.20.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the first reading, St. Paul prostrates himself before God the Father in prayer begging him to grant the Christians in Ephesus and us to send the Holy Spirit to strengthen us in our inner self — strengthen us in mind, will and conscience — to help us allow Christ his Son to dwell in our hearts, and, rooted in love, to have the courage to understand “the breadth and length and height and depth [of] the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and “be filled with all the fullness of God.” Several early saints interpreted the breath, length, height and depth as the dimensions of the Cross, which is fundamentally not a sign of pain but of the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that bore that pain for love of us. St. Paul was praying to the Father to raise us as his children by the Holy Spirit to be strengthened by the Cross, to allow Christ his Son to abide in us and to help us to understand that cruciform dimensions of the Christian life so as to open ourselves to the fullness of the God of love. It’s an extraordinary prayer, begging for a fullness St. Paul himself had already tasted when he himself admitted he had been crucified with Christ and the life he was living in the flesh he was living by faith in the Son of God who loved him and died for him, a fullness he called “God’s power and wisdom.”

* In the Gospel, Jesus speaks about the fire he had come to earth to ignite, and links it to “the baptism with which [he] must be baptized,” which is the baptism of blood on the Cross. He said he was in “anguish” until that baptism be accomplished and the fire begin blazing. His love on the Cross is meant to be a fire of love that is meant to light the world ablaze, the type of love that will transform and strengthen us within. It’s a living flame that will eventually unite all people in the love of the Father who sent his Son to form a loving family, but that union will happen only when people allow themselves to be “burned” and “transformed” by Christ’s love. Many are afraid of the fire, afraid of zeal. That’s why Jesus says that he has come not to “bring peace but division,” because he and the fire of his love would be a sign of contradiction dividing even family members; this is not because Christ is a divider, but when someone in a family opts for Christ, others who want to be first get jealous and angry, and that’s what divides. This was true in the early Church. Often when Jews converted to Christianity, they were disowned by their family. Still today when a Muslim converts to Christianity in Pakistan and various other fundamentalist Muslim countries, or a Hindu converts in certain fundamentalist areas in India, a contract is put out on them, and most often by the members of his or her own family. There are those who find the all-consuming fire of Christ’s love a threat and the sinful reaction to other’s coming alive in love does divide. But the love of Christ burning in the family is able to forgive and to heal, so that all members of the family, God-willing, will grow stronger in faith, allow Christ to remain in their home, and come to the celestial home of the Father from whom every family on earth takes its name.

* This mystery of the Cross was proclaimed very powerfully by the saint the Church celebrates today, St. Paul of the Cross. As a young boy, when he was complaining about things,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and Companions

October 19, 2022

Eph 3:2-12, Is 12:2-6, Lk 12:39-48

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.19.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks about the characteristics of a “faithful and prudent steward” whom he implicitly contrasts with an unfaithful and imprudent one. The faithful and prudent steward has two basic qualities. First, he is vigilant for the Master’s presence and lives in such a way as if the Master is always present. Second, he gives to others the Master’s food at the proper time. The unfaithful and imprudent steward is one who says “My Master is delayed in coming” and instead of nourishing others starts to abuse them, beginning to “beat the menservants and maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk.” Jesus asks, “Who, then, is the faithful and prudent steward whom the Master will put in charge of his household?,” and he wants us to be among them. He reminds us, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” None of us, in other words, has been entrusted with “little,” but “much” and “more.” But the Lord wants us to recognize the gifts we have received and be good stewards of them in giving to others of the storehouse with which he has entrusted us.

* So what are those gifts with which we’ve been entrusted and what is the type of stewardship that a faithful and prudent servant carries out with regard to them? In today’s first reading, St. Paul describes that treasure and that prudent and faithful stewardship.  “You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for your benefit,” he wrote to the Christians in Ephesus. “Of this I became a minister by the gift of God’s grace… to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ and to bring to light for all what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God, … so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the Church.” He was constantly in God’s presence because he was in God’s grace, which is our sharing as creatures in the life of God. And the Lord had blessed him with the gift of revelation and he needed to dispense it as food to others, lavishing them on the feast of the fact that “Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same Body, and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” The treasure is Christ’s salvific will. St. Paul’s stewardship was to preach it to all the nations. St. Paul knew that he had been given “even more” for this task, and that’s why he was speaking “with boldness of speech and confidence of access through faith in [Christ].”

* This stewardship of the revelation of the Lord and the need to dispense it to the nations is the background for the feast we celebrate today. The eight Jesuits whom we call the North American Martyrs — Jesuit Saints Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, John de Lalande, John de Brebeuf, Anthony Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Noel Chabanel — had the task, in the early 1600s, to bring the Gospel, the treasure of the mystery hidden in times past, to New France, which encompassed most of eastern Canada as well as some of the areas of upstate New York. Practically speaking, it meant carrying the word of Jesus Christ to the native Americans — the Hurons, the Algonquins, the Mohawks, the Iroquois — who by the time the Jesuits arrived in 1625 had already earned a reputation for resisting missionaries and making them martyrs. St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist

October 18, 2022

2 Tim 4:10-17, Ps 145, Lk 10:1-9

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.18.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily:  

* Today on this feast of St. Luke the evangelist, it’s worthwhile to ponder the life of this secondary author of a quarter of the entire New Testament. He was a young doctor, very likely in Antioch in Syria. St. Paul calls him a “beloved physician” (Col 4:14). At some point, however — it seems to have occurred at Troas — he began to accompany St. Paul, based on when he started to use the word “we” in the Acts of the Apostles (16:11). He gave up his medical career in order to become a “co-worker” (Philemon 24) of St. Paul. He loyally stayed with St. Paul until the end, being the sole coworker in prison in Rome with the apostle at the end of his life when St. Paul wrote today’s first reading to St. Timothy. There’s no indication at all that he was a leading light during St. Paul’s missionary journeys. He was simply a companion and a helper. But after St. Paul died, he wrote down for a friend — “Theophilos,” who could have been one person, or could have stood for all of us, as a “God-lover” — what he remembered. Little did St. Luke know when he was writing his orderly account for Theophilos that billions of people would eventually read it. As a continuation of the 72 lay “non-apostle evangelizers” Jesus sent out in the Gospel, St. Luke just wanted to share the faith — and God did the rest. “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us,” he wrote in the introduction to the Gospel that bears his name, “I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.” Then he continued the story with a second book, a sequel, about how the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles and the early Church to continue Jesus’ mission, what eventually became entitled the Acts of the Apostles.

* St. Luke wanted to write things down so that we would be certain about the things of the faith. Without his efforts, so many aspects of Jesus’ teaching we may never have learned. We wouldn’t know the details about John the Baptist’s conception and birth or the drama of the scenes of the Annunciation, Visitation, Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and the Finding of Jesus in the Temple. We wouldn’t know of the beautiful scene of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. We wouldn’t know of today’s Gospel and the mission of the seventy disciples. We wouldn’t have entered Bethany with Jesus to hear Jesus’ words to Martha and Mary about choosing the better part and the one thing necessary. We wouldn’t have the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We wouldn’t have the scene of the healing of the ten lepers, the encounter with Zacchaeus, Jesus’ interrogation by Herod, or two of Jesus’ seven last words. We wouldn’t have the scene of Emmaus, which is in some sense summarizes all that Jesus continues to want to do in the Church. So today we thank God for the great gift that he has given us through the faithful cooperation of the beloved physician who became St. Paul’s coworker faithfully to the end, as St. Paul tells Timothy in today’s first reading.

* But we should focus in a particular way about how his “orderly account” is all about how Christ has come as the Divine Physician to share his healing mercy with u...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch

October 17, 2022

Eph 2:1-10, Ps 100, Lk 12:13-21

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.17.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, there is a huge contrast between two types of riches, two types of inheritance, two types of legacy, one very often sought by those who are spiritually worldly, the other counseled by Jesus; one ultimately a patrimony of monopoly money, the second an endowment of God. It’s important for us to enter into this scene which is as relevant today as it was what someone in the crowd shouted the question to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus’ response to the man’s request for Jesus to command his brother to give him his share of the inheritance is, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance. He was the one who told the Parable of the Prodigal Son, of course, which begins with a hunger for an inheritance that leads one to treat his father as if he were already dead. All sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, or the things of this world, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10). Jesus gave an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins:  “Take care to guard against all greed,” Jesus says, “for … one’s life does not consist of possessions.” He then tells a parable about the rich fool who was blessed with a bountiful harvest who instead of sharing any of his good fortune with those who were hungry after the harvest of grain had filled up the barns he already had, decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones in an unbelievable building project of selfishness. The man egocentrically said to himself, “As for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years.” He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. And that led to other excesses as he convinced himself to “rest, eat, drink and be merry!” Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus drew the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.”

* We’re living in a culture of the grain bin. We obsess about storing treasures or even junk up for ourselves, constantly building new storage facilities to house the stuff that can no longer fit in our homes, rather than giving the stuff we don’t need away. Perhaps the most ubiquitous grain bin of all are financial portfolios, where so many focus, even sometimes obsess, about seeing them grow, while often few think nearly as much if at all about how to share those blessings with others, especially those in desperate need. To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls us to become rich in what matters to God. In the passage right after today’s section, which unfortunately is not included, Jesus tells us: “Sell your belonging and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”