Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Year C

June 12, 2022

Prov 8:22-31, Ps 8, Rom 5:1-5, Jn 16:12-15

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Today we celebrate the feast of who God is. Every Sunday is, in a very real sense, dedicated to God and therefore every Sunday really is Trinity Sunday. But since the 1300s, the Church has celebrated on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost a feast dedicated to the Holy Trinity, to help all of us focus more explicitly on who God is in his profound mysterious depths, and therefore on who we’re called to be made in His image and likeness. In an age when many forget about God, when aggressive secularists are trying to drive even conversation about God from public spaces, it is important for believers to be humbly bold not just in reminding society that God exists as the Creator of all, not just in revealing him and his name and nature, but setting an example of how to worship and thank him.

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus says to us, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you to all truth.” Jesus goes on to say that just as he has given us what he has received from the Father, so the Holy Spirit will give us what he has received from Jesus. Each of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity exists in an eternal communion of giving and receiving, of loving and being loved, and toward us, they seek to bring us into that dynamic. The Father sends the Son who reveals the Father. The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit helps us to relate to the Father and remember the Son, guiding us not only to truths like the wisdom of creation announced to us in the first reading from the Book of Proverbs and Psalm 8, but into the most important truth of all, the very truth of who God is.

* “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in a very important paragraph in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life” (CCC 234).  It’s the central mystery, note, not just with regard to what we believe but how we live. The Catechism goes on to say why: “It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’” The mystery of the Trinity enlightens the mystery of creation, the mystery of redemption, the mystery of Sanctification. It illumines every page of Sacred Scripture. It helps us to understand the commandments. It sheds light on the four last things. It reveals what is at the root of all of the sacraments and prayer.

* The Catechism paragraph concludes, “The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin.” Underneath the history of the world, underneath our own personal history from the moment of our conception in our mother’s womb until now and beyond, everything has developed within this mystery of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore, it’s crucial for us as human beings, not to mention believers, to pour ourselves — mind, heart, soul and strength — into the mystery of the Trinity. The teaching on the Trinity is not meant be some footnote on a Christian life, but a central part. The Christian life is meant to be a Trinitarian life. Your life, my life, is meant to be a Trinitarian life.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Holy Trinity Sunday, Year C, Vigil

June 11, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.11.22_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 as we celebrate Trinity Sunday.

* In the Gospel we’ll hear, Jesus will say to us, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of Truth, he will guide you to all truth.” Jesus goes on to say that just as he has given us what he has received from the Father, so the Holy Spirit will give us what he has received from Jesus. The Holy Spirit, whose outpouring on Pentecost we celebrated last Sunday, will guide us not only to truths but into the most important truth of all, the very truth of who God is.

* “The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity,” we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.” It’s the core mystery not just with regard to what we believe but how we live. The Catechism goes on to say why: “It is the mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental and essential teaching in the ‘hierarchy of the truths of faith.’” The Holy Spirit seeks to guide us into this truth at the top of the hierarchy and to help us to understand everything else in the faith in light of it. The Catechism paragraph concludes, “The whole history of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men ‘and reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin” (CCC 234). Therefore, it’s crucial for us as human beings, not to mention believers, to pour ourselves — mind, heart, soul and strength — into the mystery of the Trinity.

* Since the 1300s, the Church has celebrated on the Sunday immediately following Pentecost a feast dedicated to the Holy Trinity, to help all of us focus more explicitly on who God is in his profound mysterious depths, and therefore who we’re called to be made in His image and likeness. Even though every Sunday is in some sense dedicated to God and therefore is in some way Trinity Sunday, the Church has wanted us to have at least one Sunday in which we focus on this central mystery of Christian faith and life, the most fundamental and essential teaching in all the truths of the faith. In an age in which many forget about God, when aggressive secularists are trying to drive even conversation about God from public spaces, it is important for believers to be bold not only in reminding society that God exists, as the Creator of all, but to help reveal him and his nature.

* God has revealed himself as a Trinity, a loving communion, one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He’s not a distant life force. He’s not an arbitrary omnipotent despot. As St. John wrote in his first letter, “God is love” (1 John 4:16), a declaration that strongly implies that the one God somehow had to be a Trinity of Persons. For God to be love, he could not have been solitary, because no one can love in a vacuum. In love, there is always one who loves, one who is loved, and the content of their love for each other. God the Father and God the Son, in all eternity, loved each other so much that their love generated (“spirated”) a third person, the Holy Spirit. They exist in an eternal communion of persons ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Pentecost Sunday

June 5, 2022

Acts 2:1-11, Ps 104, Rom 8:8-17, Jn 14:15-16.23-26

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Ten days ago, we pondered how Jesus, before he ascended to the Father, enjoined the apostles not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the “promise of the Father” about which they had heard him speak, for “in a few days,” he said, “you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:5). The apostles and the other followers of Jesus very wisely huddled around Mary in the same Upper Room in which Jesus had given them his Body and Blood, the same Upper Room in which they had barricaded themselves after Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, the same place wherein he had appeared to them on Easter Sunday. And it was there that they all “devoted themselves with one accord to prayer.” They prayed together with Mary to learn from her how to get ready to receive the “promise of the Father,” for it was she who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ virginal conception and who continually lived as a Spouse of the Holy Spirit, receiving and responding to his inspirations in an exemplary way.

* During these days they doubtless contemplated the words of Sacred Scripture, how the Spirit of God hovered over surface of the deep and helped bring creation out of chaos (Gen 1:2), how God through the Prophet Joel had promised, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and your daughters will prophesy” (Joel 3:1-2), how God through the Prophet Ezekiel had said, “I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ez 36:26-28), how through the Prophet Jeremiah God had declared, “I will put my law within them and I will write it upon my hearts.” During these days they similarly would have pondered Jesus’ words about how he had first told the Samaritan woman and later those present in the Temple area, “Let the one who believes in me drink. Just as Scripture says, ‘From within him will flow rivers of living water,’” and St. John tells us, “He said this about the Spirit whom those who believed in him were going to receive” (Jn 4:10.13-14, 7:37). They would have meditated on the many things he had said to them at the Last Supper, including the passage we have in today’s Gospel, that the Father and He would send them another Advocate or Paraclete, who would teach them all things, remind them of everything Jesus taught, guide them into all truth, teach us what we ought to say, bear witness to and glorify Jesus, convict the world about sin, righteousness and condemnation, and dwell in us and be in us (Jn 14:6,16,26; Jn 15:26; Jn 16:8,13-14; Mt 10:17-20). They would also have prayed what Jesus said and did on the night of the Resurrection, when he walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room, breathed on them just like God had breathed into Adam at the beginning of Creation, and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

* United with Mary as their retreat director, they prayed and they waited. Jesus hadn’t told them how long they were to remain in prayerful expectation of the fulfillment of the Father’s promise. So their first holy hour stretched into a day of recollection. They eventually went to bed and awakened and prayed a whole second day. They might have thought that, just as God the Father had had them wait until the third day for Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit would come after three days that seemed like an eternity. But he didn’t come. So they prayed a fourth day. A fifth day. Now it was taking on the form of a retreat. A sixth day. They were doubtless wondering if the Holy Spirit would come on the s...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily in anticipation of Pentecost Sunday

June 4, 2022

 

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

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This is the text that 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 on Pentecost Sunday. As we celebrate the birthday of the Church and the anniversary of when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles and Mary as tongues of fire, the Church this year has us consider the words of Jesus during the Last Supper when he promised, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,” adding, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.”

* The word Advocate, Parakletos in Greek, means a helper, consoler, champion, upholder, supporter, proponent, protector, someone who speaks on our behalf, lawyer or defense attorney, and was used in that context in Roman and Greek settings. In both languages it means literally someone called to stand beside us, to intercede for us. Jesus was our first Advocate and he says that God the Father sends us the Holy Spirit as “another Advocate” to be with us always, to help, console, uphold, support, protect and defend us.

* He will give us a specific form of assistance. Just as Jesus would tell Pontius Pilate the following day that he had come to “give witness to the truth,” so he told the apostles that the help the Holy Spirit would be the “Spirit of truth,” who would “guide you to all truth” (Jn 16:13), “teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (Jn 14:26). The Holy Spirit, like Jesus, would be our Advocate not by serving us like a mob attorney tries to defend his criminal mafiosi, but by helping us to know the truth, love the truth, live the truth, spread the truth and enter into communion with Jesus, who said, “I am the Truth.” He will help us to live in the real, real world, together with God, even in the midst of environments that will be filled with lies or following the infernal inspirations of the one Jesus calls the “liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).

* How much we need the Holy Spirit’s help! How grateful we need to be for the gift of the Holy Spirit to tell the truth about God, about us, about others, about the world. We’re living at a time of assaults against the truth, not just opposition to revealed truths or the truths of the natural law, but a time of spin, of fake news, of believing and spreading lies. We see this attack against the truth not only in the disinformation campaigns of communist governments, but we also in the euphemisms that support the practice of abortion or in the attempt not only to allow those who are confused about their identity to think that they’re girls trapped in boys’ bodies and vice versa and to force everyone else to lie by pretending that they really are what they confusedly think they are.

* That’s why the great refrain of Pentecost, taken from Psalm 104, is, “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!” In the context of so much pain and violence flowing from hatred like we have seen recently in Uvalde, Buffalo and the Ukraine, so much despair, pain and suicides flowing from meaninglessness, so much confusion flowing from politically correct lies as well as the failure boldly to teach the truth, we need the Holy Spirit to come to renew us and through us the Church and the world.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx

Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 29, 2022

Acts 7:55-60, Ps 97, Rev 22:12-14.16-17.20, Jn 17:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.29.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord. I had the privilege to do so in Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, at the place where traditionally the Ascension is believed to have occurred. The Lord’s Ascension on the 40th Day after Easter is a time for us to stoke our desire for heaven, where he has gone to prepare a place for us. It is an occasion for us to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which he instructed us to do before he was taken up, which the members of the early Church faithfully did around Mary in the Upper Room, and which the Church continues to do every year in the decenarium (ten days) of prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit each year in anticipation of Pentecost. And it’s a chance for us to focus on the mission Jesus has given to us as he ascended, to be, together with the Holy Spirit, his witnesses to the end of the earth, proclaiming the Good News that the Son of God not only took on our humanity, entered our world, lived, worked, taught, healed, fed, forgave, suffered, died, rose and ascended, but is with us always until the end of time.

* These three main focuses of Ascension are reinforced by the Church on the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles has us ponder St. Stephen, who “filled with the Holy Spirit, looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God [the Father],” and then, as the stones were raining down upon him, cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” The Holy Spirit helps us to look intently upon, to concentrate on, heaven and the glory of God and to get us to entrust ourselves into Jesus’ lovingly scarred hands. In the second reading from the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of the Bible, that sense of consecration to Jesus is strengthened. The ascended Jesus tells us, “Behold, I am coming soon,” and “the Spirit and the Bride,” the Holy Spirit guiding the Church, say in response, “Come! … Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!” Jesus’ ascension into heaven is not a time for us to say “goodbye!” and then move on to our own pursuits, like those referred to in Jesus’ parable who say to each other, “The Master is long delayed” and proceed to get drunk and take advantage of others (Mt 24:48). Rather it is a time for us to grow in longing for the Lord, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in saying, “Come!,” and to give witness to Jesus in words, in life, and even in death like St. Stephen.

* In the Gospel, taken from Jesus’ great, intimate priestly prayer on Holy Thursday, we see that Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, rather than focusing on his imminent suffering, was instead praying for us, praying for each of these three realities. He was praying that we would be united with him in heaven. “Father,” he implored, “they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see the glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” He prayed for that the witness that he was summoning us to give would be fruitful. “Holy Father,” he said, “I pray not only for them,” meaning the apostles, the first wave of those he would send out to continue his mission, “but also for those” — namely us — “who will believe in me through their word.” He had previously prayed to God the Father in this great Priestly Prayer, with words we heard last year and that come immediately before today’s passage, “I gave them your word.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, C, and for the Ascension, C, (Vigil)

May 28, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.28.22_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.

* Depending upon where you live, that conversation may be different this Sunday, because those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will hear the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter, while those everywhere else will hear what those in the states I just mentioned heard on Thursday, the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus. The reason for the confusion is in 1998 and 1999, bishops in most regions of the United States decided to transfer the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday, believing that if they didn’t, Catholics who seldom attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss celebrating liturgically this very important event in the Lord’s life. Ironically, however, in making that decision to move the Ascension to the 43rd day after Easter, the bishops in those provinces were preventing Catholics from hearing Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. Catholics in the US unfortunately do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension and I would urge that just as the Church is praying for unity to be restored to the celebration of Easter between Catholics and Orthodox, so we might pray and speak to our bishops about restoring unity on the celebration of the Ascension on the 40th

* Since there is not unity, however, please permit me to say something about both Gospels, conscious of the fact that since Jesus is our interlocutor in every prayerful and consequential liturgical conversation, everything is intrinsically coherent.

* In the Gospel for the Ascension this year, taken from St. Luke’s, Jesus tells his apostles and first disciples, “You are witnesses,” and instructs them in his name to preach “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, … to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” This is the good news that in St. Mark’s version of the Ascension Jesus said they would “go into the whole world … to … proclaim to every creature.” This is the way that, according to St. Matthew, they would “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them” in the name of the Trinity and “teaching them to carry out all” that Jesus commanded. Jesus could have stayed on earth until the end of time crisscrossing the globe after every lost sheep, but as he ascended, he placed his own mission in our hands. He took the training wheels off our discipleship and removed any excuses we might have to pass the buck of sharing and spreading the faith. His confidence and trust in us, despite our weaknesses, is astonishing. He wanted to incorporate us into — and actually entrust to us — his mission of the redemption of the world. But he didn’t leave us orphans (Jn 14:18). St. Luke gives us a beautiful image and detail in this Sunday’s Gospel passage, that Jesus “led them out as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them. As he was blessing them, he parted from them and was taken up to heaven” (Lk 24:50-51). Jesus departed in the very act of blessing us. And he’s seeking to transform us into his incarnate benediction of the world through how we become his witnesses a...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil

May 21, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.21.22_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.

* Throughout the Sundays of the Easter Season, the Church has us focus on how Jesus intends us to share in the newness of life that comes from our communion with Him risen from the dead. In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks to us about two things he died and rose from the dead to give us: love and peace. Our hearts were made for love and for peace — and will remain restless until we have them. But love and peace are not things that we can just wish into existence. No matter how many songs and poems we write about them, or talk and dream about them, they are realities that cannot be conjured or fabricated. We will not truly experience them until we follow the means Jesus describes in the Gospel. He who is the Prince of Peace and who is Love personified describes for us this Sunday the path to obtain both.

* But before we examine what Jesus says, it’s important to focus on the stakes. We live in a world that is torn by the lack of peace. It’s easy to point to the Russian atrocities taking place in Ukraine, but there are also horrible conflicts taking place in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Nigeria and even the West Bank in the Holy Land. In several communist countries — China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — the people live oppressed and in fear of imprisonment and death and even Cardinals are arrested on trumped up charges. Even in the United States, there’s a lack of peace, as 18-year-olds murder innocent people in Buffalo supermarkets, those clamoring for social change torch cars and businesses, pro-life offices are burned down by Molotov cocktails, Churches suffer vandalism, and hundreds of thousands of our littlest brothers and sisters in the womb have their lives gruesomely terminated in the womb. This lack of peace is one of the most obvious manifestations of a lack of love, in which we objectify, label, dehumanize and oppose others rather than will their good.

* But it’s not the only sign of a crisis of love. So many people do not feel they’re loved. St. John Paul II famously said at the beginning of his pontificate, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” People suffer when they don’t experience the love of a mom and dad, especially when they’re young. They suffer when they experience rejection from those on whom they have a crush as young people. They suffer when relationships, engagements, even marriages break up. They suffer when they have only utilitarian friendships and contacts. They suffer when they’re alone. Some out of suffering the lack of love try to distract themselves through addictions to booze and drugs, others to porn and fantasy, others to promiscuity. Others, tired of living without love, thinking that others won’t care or trying to draw attention to their pain and loneliness, take their lives. The crisis of love is real and enormously costly to individuals and all of society.

* In response to the yearnings for peace and love...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph Church, Fall River, MA

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 15, 2022

Acts 14:21-27, Ps 145, Rev 21:1-5, Jn 13:31-35

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.15.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

This is the text that guided today’s homily: 

Throughout the Easter Season, we ponder the revolutionary aspect that Christ’s resurrection has in the big picture of the salvation of the world and is meant to have in your life and mine. Christ has truly risen and that means that sin and death do not have the last word, but God, holiness and eternal life do. In today’s passage from the Book of Revelation, we get an image of the “new heaven,” “new earth” and “new Jerusalem,” that Jesus’ resurrection makes possible. The One sitting on the throne, the image of God the Father, says, in fact, “Behold, I make all things new.” Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, in other words, has changed everything. “The old order,” we’re told, “has passed away.” But this newness is not just supposed to be a future reality for which we hope. It’s meant to be a present, life-changing reality here and now. That comes about because the Risen Lord Jesus remains with us, infusing every human reality, including the most challenging ones, with divine meaning. The loud voice from the throne says, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them as their God.” In the Easter Season we focus on how the Risen Lord Jesus is with us always until the end of time, accompanying us, enlightening us, strengthening us, nourishing us, forgiving us, uniting us to him and helping us to fulfill his saving Mission, sending us forth to help others, who are living according to the “old order,” experience that same revolutionary newness and enter into relationship with him who dwells Risen among us.

In the Gospel today, Jesus, the One who makes all things new, speaks to us about the way we will experience that newness. With words he proclaimed during the Last Supper that the Church ponders in the light of his Resurrection, he tells us, “I give you a new commandment. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” Up until that point, as you know, the Jewish people, even Jesus’ followers, had lived by the two-fold commandment that God had given them in the Old Testament, on which Jesus said all the law and the prophets depend: to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Jesus’ “new commandment” was new in both respects. First, it would start not with our loving God with all we have, but God’s loving us so much that he entered the human race, taking on our humanity so that he could give it, down to the last drop of his blood, to save us forever.

Everything begins with “as I have loved you.” God’s love for us shown in Christ changes and refreshes everything. That’s the radical newness that will never be out of date. When we think about Jesus’ birth, growth, preaching and teaching, miracles, suffering, death and resurrection, we cannot treat them just as the mind-blowing historical facts that they are; each was done out of love for us, out of love for you and for me. When we were being held hostage by sin, the Good Shepherd loved us so much that he heroically entered the world to rescue us, giving his life to set us free, and rising on the third day out of love as well so that we might share with him that triumph into eternity. If Liam Neeson’s daughter in the Hollywood Blockbuster Taken recognized the love of her dad in all he died to free her from human traffickers in France, how much more should we recognize Jesus’ incredible love in...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA

Nuptial Mass of Daniel Bruce Marshall and Carina Ann Borges

May 14, 2022

Gen 2:18-24, Ps 34:2-9, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 19:3-6

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

In God’s providence, there are no coincidences.

From before the foundation of the world, the same Jesus who visited a wedding in Cana of Galilee made plans for May 14, 2022, to come here to Saint Anthony of Padua Parish in New Bedford, to unite you, Daniel Bruce Marshall and Carina Ann Borges, in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

He formed each of you, just as much as he did Adam and Eve in today’s first reading, to be a “suitable partner” for each other.

He created you “from the beginning” so that you would leave your father and mother and cling to each other and become, by his power, no longer two but one flesh, in an indissoluble reality that no human being — or even all other human beings on the planet — will ever be able to separate.

He who brought you together, as an organist and a cantor, to provide music for the 2017 Diocese of Fall River Pro-Life Bootcamp, wants to help you continue to accompany each other and make beautiful music in a liturgy of life. This is the means by which, as we sung in today’s Psalm, you may together magnify the Lord, glorify and bless him at all times with his praise always in your mouth, savoring how good the Lord is, radiant with joy.

He knew, as you know, and as St. Paul reminds us in today’s epistle, that without the love he has placed in you for each other, your life, rather than becoming a canticle of self-giving, echoing the spousal love song of creation and redemption, might have ended up being just a “noisy gong and clashing cymbal.”

In God’s plan there are no coincidences and part of the complementary vocation he has given you to the Sacrament of Marriage involves his joining you on May 14.

In your plans, May 14 was chosen because it was the closest Saturday to May 13, the Memorial of Our Lady of Fatima, who began appearing to the three shepherd children in the Cova d’Iria on that day in 1917. It was God who inspired in you that desire and love for our Lady, who, in her final appearance on October 13, 1917 (exactly one hundred years before your first unofficial date!) came together with St. Joseph holding the child Jesus as the baby Jesus was blessing the 70,000 present. This happened, as Lucia dos Santos, one of the three shepherd children, later commented, to show the importance of the family by presenting before the world the model of the Holy Family of Nazareth.  “God,” she wrote, “entrusted to the family the sacred mission of co-operating with Him in the work of creation, … a sacred mission that makes two beings one in a union so close that it does not admit of separation… [and from which] God wishes to produce other beings.” In a letter to one of my professors in Rome, the future Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, Lucia made plain just how important the family is in the plans of God, for which she believed Our Lady of Fatima appeared to appeal to us to take more seriously. “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family,” she firmly stated. “This is the decisive issue.”

And so it is beautiful, inspiring, and wise for you to want to consecrate your marriage today to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, to become warriors within the Church militant in that final battle between God and Satan, sanctity and sin, love and envy, life and death. Indeed, marriage and the family, made in God’s image and likeness,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil

May 14, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.14.22_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 the Fifth Sunday of the Easter Season. We will enter into Jesus’ words given during the Last Supper, looked at through the knowledge of the resurrection. Jesus speaks to us of his and the Father’s glory and the way it will be manifested. “Now,” he says, “is the Son of Man glorified and God [the Father] is glorified in him.” That glorification begins, paradoxically, with what Jesus himself would suffer right after saying those words: his arrest, trial, crucifixion, death and resurrection. While humanly humiliating, it is ultimately the fullest epiphany of who the God of love is, allowing his creatures even to try to murder him in order to save those murderers. As St. Paul would write to the first Christians in Corinth, Christ crucified seems scandalous to Jews and foolishness to pagans but actually puts the full power and wisdom of God on display (1 Cor 1:22-24). Or as the same apostle penned to the Christians in Philippi, Jesus became obedient even to death on a Cross but “therefore” God highly exalted him so that every knee should bend and every tongue confess to the glory of God the Father that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil 2:1-11). Jesus’ crucifixion, rather than being the most embarrassing and lowest moment in human history, is actually, when looked at with faith, the greatest revelation of who God is, because God is ultimately love and Golgotha shows it. This is why, for example, when Jesus allows a glimpse of his glory to be seen by Peter, James and John during the Transfiguration, he is seen talking to Moses and Elijah about “the exodus he was to accomplish in Jerusalem,” about his leading us through the new and eternal Passover by his passion, death and resurrection. That glory was

foreseen when Jesus’ garments were dazzling white on Tabor such that no bleach on earth could make them, but it was displayed fulfilled when he was stripped of his garments and bathed in blood on Calvary, because there is no greater love than laying down one’s life for one’s friends. God’s great glory is doing so.

* As we see, however, in this Sunday’s Gospel, that’s not the application Jesus gives of his glory. Rather than focusing on divine love exalted among two thieves, he describes the love he wants to see in and among us. “I give you a new commandment,” he says, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” God’s glory is meant to be manifested not just on the Cross but in the way we lay down our lives in love for each other, in supreme moments of heroism and in ordinary daily moments of self-giving sacrifice. Just as it is paradoxical that God’s glory would be shown in a gruesome public crucifixion by his own creatures, so it is surprising that Jesus says it will be shown by the very behavior of those creatures who, receiving his love, remain in it, and share it to the same standard as that with which they were loved by God. God’s glory, in other words, is shown by loving as God loves. To return to the same passage of St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians in which Paul says that Jesus’ obedience to death is his great exaltation, the apostle urges the Christians to be of the “same m...