Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Lafayette, LA, Seminarian Summer Seminar

Our Lady of the Oaks Retreat House

Grand Coteau, Louisiana

August 2-4, 2021

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.2.21_SJV_and_Perseverance_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, New York

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

August 1, 2021

Ex 16:2-4.12-15, Ps 78 Eph 4:17.20-24, Jn 6:24-35

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today we enter together into the second week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mystery of his body and blood in the Eucharist, which Jesus taught for the first time in the Synagogue of Capernaum and renews for us live every third Summer. Last week we had the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which was a foreshadowing of the multiplication of the meal of the Last Supper throughout every land and time in order to feed the spiritually-infamished human race.

* At the beginning of today’s Gospel, we see that those who received that free meal were looking for another one. When they realized Jesus and his disciples were no longer with them on the northeastern side of the Sea of Galilee, they got into boats and rowed against the wind to Capernaum, where Peter, Andrew, James and John had had their fishing business, and had become, in the mind of Jesus’ disciples, his home base. They tried to make small talk about when and how Jesus had arrived there, but Jesus wanted to focus on far important things. “Amen, I tell you,” he said, “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs” — in other words, because you saw me perform a miracle and it’s led you to put faith in me and in my words — “but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” They came because of their material hunger and saw Jesus as a means to address their material hungers and needs. This is not evil in itself. Jesus would teach us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Many come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase medications, or find a job to help support loved ones. God wants to hear these prayers. He wants us to bring our needs to him. It wasn’t this that Jesus was criticizing. Jesus was criticizing the fact that they had stopped there, that they were concerned most about their material needs.

* Jesus tells them, and tells us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” So many people, good people, spend most of their adult lives working to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and their families. We all know how important that is, but Jesus is saying that as hard as we work to fulfill that duty of love, we must work much harder for the food that he will give us, the food of eternal life.

* What is that food that God puts on the table? What is that nourishment of eternal life? If most people spend forty hours a week or more, sometimes working two or three jobs for perishables, what is the imperishable nutrition for which Jesus tells us we should labor even more strenuously?

* There are four interconnected answers to that question:

* The first is knowing God’s Word. In the battles to which Jesus was exposed in the desert, Jesus was asked by the devil to turn stone into bread to feed his incredible hunger after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus responded by saying, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To work for this food means to strive to know, understand, treasure and put into practice all the words that come from God’s mouth to feed us.

* This leads directly to the second common interpretation of the food that endures to eternal life: Doing God’s will. Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent m...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, New York, NY

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form

August 1, 2021

1 Cor 12:2-11, Lk 18:9-14

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* St. Paul in today’s epistle tells us, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit makes possible our prayer and our profession of faith. We don’t know how to pray as we ought, as St. Paul teaches us in his Letter to the Romans, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, he has been poured into our hearts so that we might cry out, “Abba, Father” and “Jesus is Lord.” He does so not by putting words on our mouths, but by changing who we are as we pray, so that we, recognizing we’re beloved sons and daughters of the eternal Father, might turn to him with filial confidence, and, conscious of Jesus’ divinity, might relate to him as Lord and Savior. During the Last Supper, Jesus said that the he and the Father would send us the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, to remind us of everything he taught, and to convict the world with regard to sin, righteousness and judgment. This work of the Holy Spirit with regard to sin, holiness and the last things is crucial for us to pray aright and live aright. In today’s Gospel, Jesus presents us a parable that underlines this important point and helps us to examine whether we are truly living by the Holy Spirit.

* In the parable, Jesus 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 good religious man. He was going up to Jerusalem to the temple to pray, which was probably a journey of many miles. He, like his fellow Pharisees, never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith. 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 things, he tithed on his whole income. He was outwardly a role model. But there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, his conception of religious life, and his conception of others. The first clue is that Jesus said, “He spoke this prayer tohimself.” That doesn’t mean that he simply said it quietly so that he alone could hear, but, in a sense, he was directing the prayer not to God but to himself. He expressed thanks that he was not like so many others, who were thieves, rogues, adulterers and publicans. He rejoiced in what he saw was his virtue. But he failed to recognize was how proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable he was. He didn’t 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 he noticed praying in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners, canonizable among the corrupt.

* Jesus contrasts him with the other man, a tax collector, who went up to the temple to pray that day. Tax collectors 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 of their duties, they would routinely rip off their own 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 similar in some ways to an ancient mafia class ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

July 31, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.31.21_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, as we enter into the second of five weeks of meditation on the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, in which Jesus speaks to us prophetically about the reality of his presence in the Holy Eucharist and how we should respond to it.

* At the beginning of the Gospel, we see that those who received Jesus’ free meal in the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fish, on which we focused last Sunday, were looking for another free meal. Jesus called them out on it, because he wanted to help them grow in faith. “Amen, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs” — in other words, because you saw me perform a miracle and it’s led you to put faith in me and in my words — “but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” They came because of their material hunger and saw Jesus as a means to address their material hungers and needs. This is not evil in itself. Jesus would teach us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Many come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase medications, or find a job to help support loved ones. God wants to hear these prayers. As a loving Father, he wants us to bring our needs to him. It wasn’t this that Jesus was criticizing. Jesus was criticizing the fact that they had stopped there, that they were concerned most about their material needs.

* Jesus tells them, and tells us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” So many people, good people, spend most of their adult lives working to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and their families. We all know how important that is, but Jesus is saying that as hard as we work to fulfill that duty of love, we must work much harder for the food that he will give us, the food of eternal life. What is that food that God puts on the table? What is that nourishment of eternal life? If most people spend forty hours a week or more, sometimes working two or three jobs for perishables, what is the imperishable nutrition for which Jesus tells us we should labor even more strenuously?

* There are four interconnected answers to that question:

* The first is knowing God’s Word. In the battles to which Jesus was exposed in the desert, Jesus was asked by the devil to turn stone into bread to feed his incredible hunger after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus responded by saying, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To work for this food means to strive to know, understand, treasure and put into practice all the words that come from God’s mouth to feed us.

* This leads directly to the second common interpretation of the food that endures to eternal life: Doing God’s will. Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to accomplish his work.” That’s why it’s unsurprising that Jesus later in this Bread of Life Discourse at the Capernaum synagogue, will say, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

July 31, 2021

Lev 25:1.8-17, Ps 67, Mt 14:1-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.31.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Over the course of the last ten days we have pondered, through the use of Jesus’ seven different parables, what the Kingdom of God is and how we enter it. He taught us about good soil and the three types of insufficient soil: stubborn, superficial and dissipated by pleasure or fear. He taught us that the Kingdom comes into contact with both wheat and weeds, that the dragnet of the Church encompasses both “good” and “bad” fish. We saw these parables played out yesterday in Nazareth, where the stubbornness and superficiality of Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes against both seed and Sower in the synagogue is contrasted with the faith of Mary and Joseph. We see it play out again today in the forest of thorns in the flesh of Herod and the receptivity of St. John the Baptist, who had made God his treasure and pearl. It’s important for us to see the huge contrast between the slavery that bound Herod even though he was externally a free king with the power to determine life and death and the freedom of John the Baptist, even though he was arrested, bound, imprisoned and eventually martyred. And it’s important for us to see the contrast of Herod’s actions and those of God as seen in the practice of the Jubilee in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ words in the Nazarene Synagogue.

* King Herod was so enslaved by lust and ego. We see this in his not only cavorting with but stealing and marrying the wife of his half-brother Philip. The book of Leviticus had said clearly, “You shall not have intercourse with your brother’s wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother” (Lev 18:16). Herod had gone to Rome to visit his brother and while there seduced his sister-in-law, persuaded her to leave his brother, divorced his own wife and married her. To make the incestuous matters worse, Herodias was Philip’s and Herod’s niece as well. For all these reasons it was not right, as John the Baptist said, for Herod to have Herodias as his wife. His lust led to the eclipse of his conscience. With a string of violent verbs, the evangelist tells us that Herod had John arrested, bound, and imprisoned. He wanted to kill him, St. Matthew tells us, but he feared the people. He was eaten alive by fear. Eventually Herod would kill John when his vindictive putative bride pimped her princess daughter to do a striptease before her step-father/uncle and all his drunken courtiers to seduce him into vowing to give her anything she wanted. And when she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, Herod gave the command. And to the Aramaic tune of Happy Birthday to You, the soldiers brought in, instead of birthday cake, the Baptist’s severed head and presented it to this lustful, power-hungry, self-important little assassin. But while that day was a tragedy for Herod and all those participating in his Satanic liturgy where lust ruled instead of sacrificial love, where immoral oaths dominated over the truth, it was a triumph for John the Baptist: in essence, his spiritual birthday in which he was born into eternity and we believe leaped for joy again. John the Baptist was free to say the truth because he was free ultimately of the fear of death. When Herod hears of Jesus, eaten alive by fear, he thought he was John the Baptist, saying, “He has been raised from the dead,” the very words the angels will use at the tomb about Jesus’ resurrection.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Blessed Solanus Casey, OFM Cap.

July 30, 2021

Lev 23:1.4-11.15-16.27.34-37, Ps 81, Mt 13:54-58

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.30.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Over the past eight days, Jesus has been illustrating the truth of the Kingdom of God and how to enter it through seven parables of the Sower and the Seed, the Weeds and Wheat, The Mustard Seed, the Leaven, The Buried Treasure, the Pearl of Great Price and the Dragnet. Collectively they were meant to show us how to receive and respond to God’s work in our life: that we should receive his action on good and fruitful soil, seize the incredible privilege given to us like we would a pearl of great price or a treasure buried in a field, watch it grow like a mustard seed, and recognize that our choice has great consequences: that in the Church there will be both wheat and weeds, good (beautiful) fish and bad (rotten) fish, depending upon how we respond to God’s work. Today in the scene from Jesus hometown of Nazareth we see these lessons illustrated.

* When Jesus stands up to read from the prophet Isaiah and give a homily in the Nazarene Synagogue on the Sabbath, the people seem to receive what he says on rocky soil but it really is hardened soil by the wayside. They are astonished, not so much by his words, but by who was saying them.  “Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary? Where did this man get all this?” They were totally hardened to the possibility that someone they had basically grown up around could be the Messiah, as Jesus’ words, remembered for us by St. Luke, attest. And that’s what led to their taking offense at him and eventually seeking to kill him by tossing off of the precipice on which the upper city of Nazareth had been built.

* But in Nazareth, we also find good soil. We find it in the Blessed Virgin Mary, the soil of whose receptive response not just produced fruit, but the Blessed Fruit who is the Word of God made flesh. She was one whom, as soon as she was aware of what God was asking through the Angel Gabriel, replied, “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” the sincere paradigmatic refrain of everyone with truly good soil. We find good soil also in St. Joseph, who, as soon as the Angel told him in not to be afraid to take Mary, his wife, into his home after she had become pregnant by means other than through him, did as the angel of the Lord had commanded. Mary and Joseph show us what good soil looks like, how the wheat grows up in the midst of weeds and how in God’s net are found both “good” and “evil”, how what starts small can save the world, how one or two fiats can lift up the world, and how to consider everything else as loss compared with the joy of choosing God as the treasure and pearl of great price.

* It’s worth noting that Jesus sought to do his work among his fellow Nazarenes in the synagogue on the Sabbath, in the midst of their worship. That’s where Jesus seeks to do so much of his saving work, sowing his seed and hoping to transform those who receive him on good soil, that he can sow them in the world as mustard seeds or place them as leaven who have chosen God as the treasure he is. God seeks to transform us through worship to be able to complete his work in the world. We see that in all of the liturgical feasts he prescribes for the Jews in the first reading. He gives them a list of celebrations, but what’s striking is the rhythm of “work” and “rest” he prescribes and how God seeks to incorpo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York

Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of SS. Martha, Mary and Lazarus

July 29, 2021

Ex 40:16-21.34-38, Ps 84, Lk 10:38-42

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.29.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Joy at the new feast of SS. Martha, Mary and Lazarus, inscribed in the General Roman Calendar by Pope Francis this January 26, 2021.

* We had previously celebrated just Martha on this day, because of the conflation and confusion since the time of Pope St. Gregory of the Great of Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene and the anonymous sinful woman who washed Jesus’ feet in the home of Simon the Pharisee (Lk 7). We never celebrated St. Lazarus with a feast. Today we have a chance to celebrate all three.

* But not just to celebrate them. In the Collect (Opening Prayer) that the US Bishops have given for this Memorial, taken from the Common of Saints (4), we pray that God “we, who celebrate the memory of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus, may also imitate without ceasing their deeds.” This is the means by which God will “spur us on to a better life.” So today it is fitting to focus on the deeds of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus so as to imitate them non-step.

* We know well the deeds of Martha. She loved the Lord and worked for him. Cleaning. Preparing the Meals. Writing Him. Running Out to See Him after Lazarus’ death. Jesus in today’s Gospel cautions her about doing these deeds of love “worried and anxious” but she did them all the same. In a similar way, we need to work to be hospitable to the Lord and to all he sends. We must do the work he gives us and seek to please him.

* We likewise know well the deeds of Mary. She recognized Jesus had come to their home to feed and not be fed and she sat as his feet as a gourmand to his gourmet. She knew he was the one thing necessary and the better part and chose him. We’re called to imitate that deed of receiving all God wants to give, in our prayer and throughout our life. We also see, as we ponder every Holy Tuesday, that she spent 300 days aromatic nard anointing him out of love for his death and resurrection. We are called ceaselessly to hold nothing back with regard to Jesus, not just to give him something, but to try to give him all we are and have, with love.

* The deeds of Lazarus are inconspicuous but very important. Like St. Joseph, he was not a garrulous man, with no words recorded. All we know about him is that he was raised by Jesus from the dead on the fourth day and thereafter was a marked man, with the same people who were plotting to kill Jesus seeking to kill him. But thereafter, resuscitated, he became a living sign of Jesus’ power over death. To imitate ceaselessly his deeds is to become a living sign of the resurrection, with its joy, its courage, its prophetic hope of eternal life with Jesus.

* As we celebrate their feast and seek ceaseless to imitate their deeds, we do so not just individually but together as they welcomed Jesus into their home, into their lives, and sought to live in friendship with him in their individual work and witness. Today in the first reading we have an image of what they sought to do in Bethany in the description of the Dwelling, which as the place of God’s presence, served as a proto-tabernacle. When the Cloud (the Shekinah) came down upon the dwelling, they stayed with the Lord; when the Cloud left, they followed the Lord. It’s a sign of how we’re supposed to pray with Jesus, like Mary at his feet,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Blessed Stanley Rother

July 28, 2021

Ex 34:29-35, Ps 99, Mt 13:44-46

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.28.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we have two short parables that summarize the essence of the Christian life, pointing, however, to a reality that too few actually realize and live. They indicate the fundamental Christian choice and the joy with which we’re supposed to make and renew it. The parables are simple enough to understand. The first is of a poor peasant who happens to find a buried treasure in the midst of his work in someone else’s field. There were no real banks to speak of in ancient Palestine. People would often bury things of value in secret locations in fields. There was no sense of “finders keepers, losers weepers” then; whatever was discovered in a field belonged not to the discoverer but the owner. That’s why the man needed to buy the field. It’s quite obvious that the one selling had no idea that an ancient treasure was buried on his property. He didn’t place the same value in the field as much as his peasant did and so he sold it. For the peasant, selling all he had in order to get the money to buy the field was nothing compared to what he knew he would be gaining. The second parable is of a wealthy merchant actively searching for precious pearls, going from place to place in pursuit of something truly valuable and beautiful. Finally he found the pearl of his dreams, whose worth was unsurpassable, but whose owner valued it less than the money and property he would get in exchange. And so the wealthy merchant sold all that he had before, doubtless houses, gems and other valuables, to obtain that pearl of great price.

* We see a few fundamental lessons about the kingdom of God in these parables.

* The first is that the Kingdom is a treasure greater than any other. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21). He told us in that same Sermon that many of us seek to “store up for [ourselves] treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” but he wanted us to “store up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven,” a treasure not measured in clothing that moths can wreck, metals that rust can corrode, or money that thieves or taxes can take. Jesus is telling us that our heart must be set on God, and not just in general, but set on him more than an aging professional athlete wants to win a championship, more than an ambitious politician seeks to win high office, and more than a man in love will do everything he can to win over and marry the woman he can’t stop thinking about. Is our heart set that way? Do we really treasure God?

* The second lesson is that to obtain the treasure isn’t cheap. We have to give up things, and not just things that we don’t want or value, but things that are precious. In the parables, each sells all he has, all his valuables. Jesus says that to enter his kingdom, we must deny ourselves, pick up our Cross, lose our life, sell what we have and give to the poor, love our enemies, give our cloak and not just our tunic, and even be willing to leave father and mother, children and lands, for his sake and the sake of the Gospel. The price is steep! But it’s nothing compared to what we’re getting.

* That leads to the third lesson. Despite the cost, it’s still the greatest bargain of our life. It’s like trading in a small house in a crowded, unsafe neighborhood for a Mansion at the bay,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

July 27, 2021

Ex 33:7-11.34:5-9.28, Ps 103, Mt 13:36-43

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.27.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There’s been a progression in the eight Parables Jesus gives us in the 13th Chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. They go from focusing on the power of the seed of the Word of God to bear 30, 60, 0r 100 fold fruit in those with good soil, to showing how the growth of the Kingdom happens, as a mustard seed or leaven, once someone really begins to bear that fruit. Today Jesus says that once we receive Him as the Seed sown in us, once we become united with him, he seeks in turn to sow us together with him in the field of the world, as “children of the kingdom.” At the same time, however, he describes in today’s Parable of the Weeds and Wheat (the first part of which we had on Saturday) that while God the Father sows us like wheat as children of the kingdom of the world (united with Christ), so the “Enemy” sows like weeds the “children of the Evil One.” How are we supposed to relate to this reality as wheat and weeds, of children of the kingdom versus those of the evil one?

* The first thing we should ponder is what it means to be in a relationship of filiation. At first glance, it might seem that this parable points to an almost Calvinist notion of predestination, that we’re born either of God or of the devil. But in the spiritual case, what we’re talking about is a relationship of adoption. Through baptism, we become adopted children of God (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5). There’s a choice on God’s part to extend to us this supreme gift and there’s an acceptance of it on our part and a desire to live as chips off the old divine block. Similarly with the devil, there’s an offer on his part — seldom explicit, but through temptation — and an acceptance by free men and women to live according to the world and the flesh. This is something we can see. In the middle of the field of the world there are religious sisters, pious prayerful grandmothers and many innocent children on the one hand and Porn makers, abortion doctors, and drug cartel leaders on the other. Today is an opportunity for us to examine the principle on the basis of which we’re living, whether we’re seeking to live as children of the Father, righteous and shining like the sun, or whether, rather than good wheat that nourishes others, we’re growing more like weeds under the influence of evil.

* The main point of the parable is about what to do with the weeds. The slaves ask their Master, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” And he shouts, “No!,” lest “you pull up the weeds [and] uproot the wheat along with them.” Out of concern for the wheat, for the children of the kingdom, he urges patience until the harvest. In order to understand better Jesus’ message, it helps to know something about wheat and weeds (called lolium) in the Holy Land. The wheat and the weeds Jesus was likely pointing to are indistinguishable during the early phases of growth. Not even expert farmers can tell the difference between them. When they grow enough to distinguish between them, their roots are so intertwined that you can’t separate them without ripping out the wheat by the roots as well. So one needs to let them grow, take them all out and then separate them on sifting tables, lest the good wheat be contaminated by the toxic fruit of the weeds. By this parable Jesus is saying that the same patience and prudence have to be exercised with the proclamation of the kingdom. The good seed and the bad seed,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Memorial of SS. Joachim and Anne

July 26, 2021

Sir 44:1.10-15, Ps 132, Mt 13:16-17

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.26.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, on the day after the inaugural heavily-indulgenced celebration of the World Day of Prayer for Grandparents and the Elderly, we have the chance to celebrate the feast of the Grandparents of God, SS. Joachim and Anne. We know very little about them. We receive their names from the gnostic Pseudogospel of St. James, which is highly unreliable but perhaps can be counted upon to get a few facts right, like their names and the fact that they conceived Mary very late in life after both thought that they would die childless and in the Jewish mentality of the time, publicly under a supposed curse of sterility of God. But after Joachim fasted and prayed in the desert and Anne wept a double lamentation, God’s angel came to them and announced they would conceive. If this is true, we can ask, why would God have waited so long? The answer is, I think, to increase their longing, to increase their awareness that every child comes from God. When children are conceived when parents are young, they can frequently think that it was just a result of a biological act and that God was really little involved. But God is always involved in the conception of every child, but sometimes it’s only when children come under rarer circumstances — after much prayer, after multiple miscarriages. much later in life, even miraculously post-menopausally — that we become more aware of it. And we know that the conception in St. Anne’s womb was unlike any other in human history, as her long-awaited daughter was conceived without any stain of original sin, would go on to become the most famous woman of all time, and would give birth not only to the long longed for Messiah but the Son of God himself. The Lord often has us persevere in prayer, sometimes for decades, in order to purify us and strengthen us, and often to give us something far greater in response to a holy desire than we would have ever dared to dream.

* In the first reading today, Sirach, in a lyric of praise for our “godly ancestors,” reminds us that their “wealth remains in their families, their heritage with their descendants,” that “their family endures through God’s Covenant with them” and “their glory will never be blotted out.” How true these words are about SS. Joachim and Anne! It’s easy for us to focus today on their biological relationship to Jesus, that they were the grandparents according to the flesh of the long-awaited Messiah, of the Savior of the world. But once, when an anonymous woman cried out from the crowd in praise of Mary, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!,” Jesus replied that there was something far greater than Mary’s physical relationship with her Son. “Blessed rather,” Jesus said, “are those who hear the Word of God and act on it,” as Mary had. I have great confidence that the source of Joachim’s and Anne’s happiness is not just or principally the genes they bequeathed to Jesus through their immaculately conceived daughter, but the faith they passed on to their daughter, the faith that had been tried over decades and strengthened, the faith that allowed her to conceive Jesus in her heart before she had ever conceived him in her womb. This points to a central truth that all grandparents, parents and everyone called to spiritual paternity and maternity — like we are, Sisters — need to grasp, that the most important heritage we pass on is our faith. For those in the world, the most important wealth shouldn’t be houses,