Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Rome Experience for Seminarians, Rome, Italy

Mini-Course for the Eucharistic Revival

“This Is My Body Given For You: Priests as Catalysts for the Church’s Eucharistic Revival”

June 29, 2022

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

June 26, 2022

1 Kings 19:16,19-21, Ps 16, Gal 5:1.13-18, Lk 9:51-62

 

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The text that guided the homily was:

* In just over a week, we will celebrate Independence Day, which is perhaps our country’s most notable national holiday, and gives us an annual opportunity to focus on the meaning of freedom and to recognize what is required to remain free. That consideration is all the more relevant after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Those overturned decisions had established, or reinforced, a notion of freedom that asserted that older, stronger, more politically influential people should have the right to choose even to kill smaller, totally vulnerable, voiceless human beings at the same stage of development each of us once was in our mother’s wombs. Casey had even asserted, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” an understanding of freedom that we now see harming individuals and our society as, for example, some think we are free to redefine our sex and have everyone else in society support that decision. That’s why it’s so providential that today that we are able, with the help of the readings the Church gives us on this 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, to consider what freedom truly is. This consideration of freedom is also essential for us to learn how to live a truly Eucharistic life as we finish this retreat and enter more deeply into the Church’s Eucharistic Revival.

* “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” St. Paul emphasizes in the second reading from his letter to the Galatians. With those few words, the apostle points to two of the most crucial truths for us to grasp in the Christian life: what Christ gained for us and what our freedom is for. All that Jesus has done for us — by entering the human race as an embryo, by his life, his teaching, the sacraments he instituted, his enormous suffering, gruesome death and glorious resurrection — was to set us free, free from the power of sin and from the death to which sin always leads. But that liberation by Christ has a purpose: Christ has set us free “for freedom,” so that we might live in the “glorious freedom of the children of God” (8:21), so that we might love others as he has loved us, fulfill our vocation to become holy as he is holy, merciful as he is merciful, and perfect as he is perfect, growing fully into his image and likeness. He has liberated us in order that we may truly be free, but remaining free and growing in freedom are not a given. Many misuse their freedom to enslave themselves, by becoming addicts, for example, to drugs, or to pornography, or even to getting our own way all the time. That’s why St. Paul tells us, “So stand firm [in freedom] and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” Christ has opened up the prison cell and led us out into the light, but now we need to use that great gift of freedom to continue to follow him more and more into the light rather than to return to the self-imposed darkness of the servitude of sin and egocentrism.

* Several years ago when I was pastor of St. Anthony’s in New Bedford, MA, one Sunday there was a new parishioner sitting all alone in the front pew. He was a short guy wearing a tank top with huge muscles and tattoos all over his arms. You could tell readily that he really hadn’t been to Mass in a while; he was c...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

June 26, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.26.22_Contagiously_Sharing_the_Gift_of_the_Eucharist_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

June 24-26, 2022

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

June 25, 2022

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

June 25, 2022

 

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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 we return to the Sundays of Ordinary Time after the six Sundays of Lent, the Seven Sundays of Easter and the special post-Pentecost feasts of the Holy Trinity and the Body and Blood of the Lord. In the Gospel the Church gives us, we encounter Jesus’ focus on his Mission, his calling to each of us to share his focus, and the rejection some people give to that vocation. It’s an important help for us so that we may notonly accept but embrace the journey Jesus is asking each of us to make with him in life.

* The Gospel passage begins with St. Luke’s telling us that Jesus had “resolutely determined,” he literally “fixed his face,” on Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the place where he will complete his salvific mission. Jesus was now laser-beamed on his passion, death and resurrection, which would constitute the new Passover on which he would lead his chosen people, and he wanted us to receive the fruits of that triumph and join him in passing from death to life. The evangelist tells us that he sent messengers ahead of him to a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there, because he wanted to include the Samaritans in his saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” But because Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, St. Luke tells us, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above their receiving their Savior. And when the apostles James and John, whom Jesus had nicknamed the Boanerges brothers, the Sons of Thunder, sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John. The failure of both the Samaritans and the Boanerges teaches us a valuable lesson: Often people can put their own grievances, their own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. They can put conditions on God’s saving work: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Or like John and James we can get distracted by others’ rejecting Jesus that we in fact do the same. Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans and apostles of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. He tells us, for example, in St. Matthew’s Gospel that whenever we refuse to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, care to the sick, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked and visits to the imprisoned, we fail to welcome him in need (Mt 25:31-46). We also see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

June 25, 2022

Is 61:9-11, 1 Sam 2:1.4-8, Lk 2:41-51

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* In 1969 Pope St. Paul VI moved the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from August 22 to the day immediately after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart in order to highlight the connection between the two feasts. Yesterday with Catholics across the world, we prayed with devotion, “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine.” If we wish to have a heart like Jesus’, we can learn so much from Mary, who shows us how to respond to the love of Jesus’ heart and be transformed by it. Mary’s heart was the one that Jesus heard from the first moment his human ears began to function. Hers is the heart that most received and best reflects her Son’s love and today is a day on which we seek not only to admire her, not only to imitate her, but to enter into her loving relationship with her Son. Today we say, with St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort and St. John Paul II who used to pray this every morning, “Praebe mihi cor tuum, O Maria!,” “Give me your heart, O Mary!”

* Mary wants us to have such a heart. Jesus wants us to have such a heart. In 1917, when Mary appeared to the three shepherd children in Fatima, SS. Francisco and Jacinta Marto and their cousin, the Servant of God Sr. Lucia Santos, she said to them, “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” She invited all of us to consecrate ourselves to her heart as an antidote to the sin that leads to what she showed the children in three visions: to hell, to the destruction wrought by atheistic communism, and to the persecution of the Church and even attacks against the Holy Father. In order to live out well our consecration to Jesus’ Sacred Heart we do so through consecration to her Immaculate Heart. United with her, we enter into the consecration of her Son to the Father for our sanctification (Jn 17).

* Today we contemplate her heart, a heart that was full of grace because it was full of God. It was a heart full of thanksgiving, one that “rejoiced heartily,” as we see prophesied in Isaiah, because her joy was in God who clothed her with the robe of salvation, wrapped her in a mantle of justice, adorned her like a bride bedecked with jewels. Her heart constantly exulted in the Lord, as we see in her Magnificat, which fulfills what we heard in Hannah’s praise in 2 Samuel. It was a contemplative heart that, as we heard at the end of today’s Gospel, “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” She cherished in her heart the words that came to her from God and pieced them together like a priceless mosaic, a treasure that kept paying out dividends within her, pondering God’s word so profoundly that that word could take on her flesh.

* One of the best meditations on Mary’s immaculate heart and one of the best ways to learn from it is the Preface of the Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary taken from the most beautiful liturgical book in the Latin Rite: the Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It gives us eight adjectives that describe her heart and chart for us the path to a heart like hers. The Preface reads: “You gave the Blessed Virgin Mary a wise and obedient heart, that she might perfectly carry out your will, a new and gentle heart, in which you were well pleased and on which you inscribed the law of the New Covenant. You gave her an undivided and pure heart that she might be worthy t...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

June 25, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.25.22_Entering_More_Contemplatively_into_the_Prayer_of_the_Mass_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

June 24, 2022

Ez 34:11-16, Ps 23, Rom 5:5-11, Lk 15:3-7

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* When Peter DeKeratry wrote me last October seeing whether I would be available to come to preach a retreat for the Knights and Dames of Malta here in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City June 24-26, 2022, I was very excited that the retreat would fittingly begin on June 24, the day the Church each year celebrates the Birth of Saint John the Baptist, the patron of the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and Malta. Neither he nor I had looked ahead at the liturgical calendar and the rare occurrence that the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which takes place on the Friday after Corpus Christi Sunday, would likewise fall on June 24. Because the Solemnities of the Lord Jesus take precedence over the Solemnities of the saints, the Church, as you know, moved the celebration of the birth of St. John the Baptist to yesterday. But I think St. John the Baptist is smiling. In life the Precursor to the Lord’s birth, time in the desert, preaching and death, humbly and proudly said about Jesus, “He must increase; I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). His whole life was to point to Jesus and say, “Behold the Lamb of God!” And he would be very happy, as his birthday present, to cede June 24 to the cousin and Lord whom he loved and to whom he wants to lead all those who look to him as patron. And so tonight we behold the Lamb of God together with John as that Lamb points to his heart and says to us, as he said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in June of 1675, “Behold the Heart that has so much loved men.”

* The Sacred Heart of Jesus, as Pope Benedict in a 2008 Sunday Angelus greeting, is the “center of the faith.” That might seem a little overstated, if we erroneously understand devotion to the Sacred Heart as something that basically began in the 1670s with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Pope Benedict, however, understood it far more broadly: The Heart of Christ, he declared, “expresses in a simple and authentic way the ‘glad tidings’ of love, summarizing the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption in itself. … God desired to enter into the limits of history and the human condition. He took on a body and a heart; thus we can contemplate and meet the infinite in the finite.” Benedict called every person to find his or her “center” in Jesus’ Sacred Heart, which he poetically said constitutes a “source of truth and goodness from which to draw in the flux of the different situations of everyday life and its toil. Everyone of us, when he pauses for a moment of silence, needs to feel not only the beating of his own heart, but more deeply, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible to the senses of faith and yet more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world.”

* Tonight many of us begin a retreat focused on the Eucharistic Jesus as the Heart of the Church’s Charity. We will be pondering together how to grow in Eucharistic faith, amazement, love and life. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council taught that the Eucharistic Jesus is the source, summit, root and center of the Church’s faith and life. And so we have to ask: how is it simultanteously true that the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the “center of our faith” and the Eucharist is the center, root, source and summit of the faith? It’s because Jesus himself connects his Real Presence in the Eucharist to devotion to His Sacred Heart.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Francis de Sales Chapel

Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center

Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta

Opening Dinner Keynote

June 24, 2022

 

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The following text guided the talk:

* It is a real joy to be with you tonight here in Oklahoma City for this St. John the Baptist Feast Day Reception, made even more solemn by the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart.

* We turn to the Lord tonight in the midst of this wonderful meal and thank him for the gift of hunger, which opens us up every day in humility and gratitude to taste and see his goodness. With providential love he never ceases to respond to our filial prayer to give us each day our daily bread. He fills the hungry with good things and this bodily hunger continually reminds us how to yearn for every word that comes from his mouth, how to hunger and thirst for righteousness, how to make doing his will our food and drink, how to look with compassion on our brothers and sisters who are under- or malnourished in body or soul, and most of all how to crave the eternal wedding feast. In speaking about his self-gift in the Holy Eucharist in the Synagogue of Capernaum the day after the miracle of the multiplication of five loaves and two fish and exactly a year before he fulfilled his words during the Last Supper, Jesus told us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” He wanted to transform our natural hunger into a supernatural one, for what he called the True Manna that the Father would give, what he taught us to ask the Father to bestow when he taught us how to pray in the Our Father, “Give us this day our epi-ousios or supersubstantial Bread.”

* Helping us traverse the bridge between natural and supernatural nourishment is one of the reasons why, I think, Jesus did so much of his saving work at meals. He unveiled his glory for the first time during a wedding banquet in Cana. He embraced sinners at table in the houses of Matthew the Publican and Simon the Pharisee. He deepened friendships over food in Bethany with Martha, Mary and Lazarus. He showed his lavish generosity on hillsides by multiplying loaves and fish. He anticipated and began the new and eternal Passover at table in the Upper Room, going from natural to supernatural through the words of consecration, a wondrous passage he repeated when he revealed Himself to the disciples in Emmaus through the Breaking of Bread. And over breakfast at a seashore he taught the apostles as shepherds how to tend and feed his sheep materially and spiritually and as fishers of men how to fill the nets to the breaking point.

* Jesus wants to make meals like the one we’re having tonight a sacred banquet, where, when two or more of us gather in his name, he joins us to continue his saving work. It’s here where, as we break bread, fruit of the earth and work of human hands, he seeks to make us companions, cum-panis. It’s at table, as we share our lives with each other, that he seeks to bring about a true convivium modeled and pointing to the sharing of life that is meant to take place at the altar, where he seeks to make us “one body, one Spirit” and be brought to fulfillment in the table of God the Father’s eternal home. So how good it is that we are here together, with each other, with the Lord, and we pray, with St. John the Baptist and all those interceding for us at the unending banquet of heaven!

* Peter DeKeratry has asked me to speak to you tonight about the banquet given by Christ with imperishable food, the True Manna, his flesh and blood given for the life of the world....