Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

May 19, 2021

Acts 20:28-38, Ps 68, Jn 17:11-19

 

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

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The following points were considered in today’s homily: 

* Today we continue to ponder the valedictory words of Jesus in the Upper Room and of St. Paul in Melitus. Jesus’ words were to the Father, but he said them aloud so that the apostles could hear them — and through them, we could hear them — and that we might “share [Jesus’] joy completely.” They were also given to us so that we might become Jesus’ glory through coming fully alive in him and so that the Father might be glorified in the Son through our having life and joy to the full in the Son. St. Paul’s words were to the presbyters of Ephesus, so that they could continue the work that St. Paul had laborered for “three years, night and day … with tears.” As we’ll see, St. Paul’s words were an echo of what Jesus prayed to the Father.

* Today Jesus stresses his relationship to the Father and to the world and the relationship he wishes us to have to the Father and the world.

* He says that he’s one with the Father and he wants us to be as united to each other as the Father and the Son are united. We will focus on this more tomorrow. What joy we have from being in loving communion with God and each other!

* He stresses twice that he doesn’t belong to the world and we shouldn’t belong to the world, emphasizing that we do not belong to the world “any more” than he does. Those are extraordinary words. He says that we’re supposed to have the same relationship to the world that he does and that we shouldn’t belong to the world any more than he. What joy we have when we are not enslaved to the world!

* He asks the Father to consecrate us so that we might belong — not to the world — but to the Father just like he belongs to the Father, just as Jesus does. To be consecrated means to be cut off from the profane (sacer) to be with (con) God to such a degree that we share the mission the Father gave the Son. Jesus wants to cut us off from the world to be united to him so that united to him we might come out of love for the world to continue his work, so that the world might be saved. What joy we have to belong to the Father like Jesus does!

* The way we will be consecrated to the Father is “in the truth” of his word. He is the Truth. He is the Word made flesh. To be consecrated in the truth means that we remain in him. It also means that we earnestly seek to remain in him through his Word, that we listen to his words as words to be done, words that help us to enter more deeply into the communion of God. That means we are “living the truth” and not attached to the world and the prince of this world, who is the father of lies. What joy we have because of the gift of God’s word, to know it, to live by it, to trust in it!

* To be consecrated means to belong to him, the Word made Flesh, to such a degree that we share his mission. His sending us into the world just as the Father sent him can only happen when we’re consecrated as a part of his Mystical Body, when we bring into the world the truth of his word. Pope Francis says famously in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel that we evangelize precisely because of the joy we have in our relationship with God, something we cannot keep to ourselves. We know the different Jesus makes and we want others to experience that same joy.

* He asks the Father to protect us, just as Jesus himself sought to protect us in the Father’s name. He says that the world will hate us because, like him, we do not belong to the world,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

May 18, 2021

Acts 20:17-27, Ps 68, Jn 17:1-11

 

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

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The following points were considered in the homily: 

* One of the most important things in life is to have a clear sense of our goal, our direction, our purpose. As the old aphorism goes, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.” Many people are lost, even in the midst of hurried journeying, because they don’t really have a clear sense of the ultimate direction of their life. St. Ignatius of Loyola called us to make decisions as if we were doing them before the Lord our Judge looking back over our whole life, because thinking in light of eternity can help us to discern what is truly important. The Imitation of Christ likewise urges us to live each day as if it is our last, because, one again, if we knew that our time was limited, we’d prioritize the important and let the unimportant pass.

* In today’s readings, we see two great examples of living with a clear purpose that comes from God.

* In the Gospel, taken from Jesus’ priestly prayer on Holy Thursday on which we will focus mystagogically through Thursday, we see why Jesus was living. He was living to glorify the Father. He asked God the Father to glorify him so that he could in turn glorify the Father. He glorified the Father by accomplishing the work the Father had given him to do, the work of revealing the Father’s love to the extreme in saving his sons and daughters. He also glorified the Father by leaving the disciples in the world so that they in turn could continue that saving work. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, the Light of the World, said that his disciples would reflect his light and that others, in seeing their good deeds of love, would glorify God the Father in heaven. The greatest glorification of God the Father would take place when Jesus was exalted on the Cross. And the most luminescent, greatest, most glorifying act on our part l is when we are lifted up on the Cross with Jesus, when we are willing to lay down our lives out of love for others, in simple deeds all the way to martyrdom. So Jesus’ glorifying of the Father was to accomplish his work of salvation, to reveal the Father’s name. God had revealed himself as “I am who am” to Moses, but when Jesus came, He-who-is revealed him to be God-with-us (Emmanuel) as God-who-saves-us (Jesus). To reveal the Father’s name meant to allow people to enter into an I-thou relationship with God’s person, to know him personally as the God who is with them to save them out of love. His whole mission was to introduce us into eternal life which is to know God in this way, a personal, loving knowledge that will last forever. That is the great glory of the Father when we, through that knowledge, become men and women fully alive (St. Ireneus).

* Someone who glorified God in this way and led many others to do so is St. Paul. Today and tomorrow we have his valedictory address to the Church in Ephesus, meeting with them at the port of Miletus. He describes his sufferings, tears and trials, the imprisonments and hardships that he endured and those that still awaited him, but through all of it, he says, he “did not shrink from telling you what was for your benefit,” “from proclaiming to you the entire plan of God,” from “bear[ing] witness to the Gospel of God’s grace,” doing so in the square and in private, “in public or in your homes.” That “Gospel of God’s grace” was that God was with them personally to save them, calling them to intimacy with him. As he said to the Romans elsewhere, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter

May 17, 2021

Acts 19:1-8, Ps 68, Jn 16:29-33

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel there’s a dramatic exchange, taken from the Last Supper, between Jesus and the apostles. Immediately before this scene, in what we heard on Saturday, Jesus had said that the hour was coming when he would no longer speak in figures of speech — parables — but would tell us clearly about the Father. He told them straight out that the Father loves them, that he had come from the Father into the world, and was about to leave the world to go back to the Father. That leads them to exclaim, in today’s continuation, “Now you are talking plainly, and not in any figure of speech. Now we realize that you know everything and that you do not need to have anyone question you. Because of this we believe that you came from God.” They imply that they had been waiting for Jesus’ clear and direct speech to believe and now that he was addressing them in this way they were convinced believers. Jesus, however, reminds them that faith has consequences with regard to the courage to live by faith. “Do you believe now?,” he retorts. “Behold, the hour is coming and has arrived when each of you will be scattered to his own home and you will leave me alone.” Jesus’ words would be fulfilled within hours as everyone scattered from Gethsemane and only one of them was with Jesus on Calvary. Faith isn’t merely an acceptance of certain declarations as true; it’s a total trust given to a person on the basis of which one believes in what the person says and does. They didn’t yet have the courage in Jesus, in his coming from the Father and returning to the Father, in his carrying out the Father’s plan of love, to remain faithful under trial. And Jesus told them both what would happen as well as how they would have their faith challenged, that they would fail “so that you might have peace in me.” He wanted them to maintain their peace in the crucible, the way the Blessed Virgin Mary did at the foot of the Cross despite her tears. Jesus summed up his words saying, “In the world you will have trouble,” just like he was about to experience imminently, namely of all the trouble caused by sin, “but take courage, I have conquered the world.” These words were said before Jesus’ resurrection, because he had already conquered the world in his incarnation, in the plan he was carrying out. The resurrection was the dramatic public sign of that victory that Jesus had already been achieving. The source of our courage is Jesus’ triumph, and that triumph was already being accomplished even as it seemed all was being lost. We need to believe in that triumph especially when we have trouble. Just like the apostles needed to hear Jesus’ words, “Take courage, I have overcome the world!,” when they saw him on Calvary, so we need to take courage when we see the places where the Church is being persecuted, when we see people wandering away from prayer and the Sacraments, when we see things that in the eyes of the world are simply disheartening. Jesus wants us to take courage because he in fact is triumphing, seeking to bring good out of evil, victory out of defeat.

* We know that the apostles left the Upper Room that night and weren’t courageous. Rather than remaining in his peace, they scattered. They weren’t focused on Jesus’ conquering the world but on how the world seemed to be conquering him. But as we know, 53 days later they would leave that same Upper Room and fearlessly proclaim Jesus eternal victory. The change happened through the gift that Jesus promised the F...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Edward Catholic Church, Palm Beach, Florida

Nuptial Mass of Kevin Corkery and Paulina Padilla

May 15, 2021

Rev 19:1.5-9, Ps 112, Rom 8:31-35.37-39, Mk 10:6-9

 

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

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The following text guided todays’ homily: 

There is great significance, in both sacred and secular contexts, to the fact that your wedding, Kevin and Paulina, is taking place on May 15.

In the sacred context, May 15 is the liturgical feast of Saint Isidore the Farmer, whose marriage to Santa Maria de la Cabeza has been a model for more than 900 years of how spouses are meant to help each other grow in holiness and how the family is meant to be an image of God through becoming truly a loving communion of persons, patterning their very marriage after the love of God. The purpose of every sacramental marriage is for husband and wife to help each other to enter more deeply into the love and life of God that is eternal. The ultimate aim is heaven. From this day forward, each year when you celebrate the anniversary of your marriage on May 15, I hope that, beyond giving flowers or gifts or sharing a great meal, you will come to daily Mass to thank God for the gift of your marriage and there celebrate with the whole Church the feast of Saint Isidore, using it as an opportunity to recommit yourself to imitate wholeheartedly and perseveringly in your marriage the virtues that helped make Saint Isidore, Santa Maria and their marriage holy.

In the secular context, May 15 is International Family Day, an observance proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations to be marked for the first time in 1994 during the International Year of the Family. It is meant to be a day on which we focus on how, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms, “the family is the natural and fundamental group unity of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State” (16.3), and do so in the context of changing economic and social structures that are affecting the stability and structure of the family in different parts of the world.

Five years ago, in his exhortation on the family, “The Joy of Love” (Amoris Laetitia), Pope Francis said that the “welfare of the family is decisive for the future of the world and that of the Church” (31). Yet he noted that there are many shadows threatening the family that we can’t ignore.

He mentioned the “growing danger represented by an extreme individualism,” the “fast pace of life” that hinders “permanent decisions,” a limited or even false notion of freedom that “degenerates into an inability to give oneself generously to others,” a mindset that treats the ideal of a exclusive and stable marriage as “inconvenient” “tiresome” and an “entrapment … that could hamper the achievement of one’s personal goals” (33-34).

These dangers are multiplied, he continued, by what he calls a “legal deconstruction” of the family due to a gender ideology that “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family” and making human identity “the choice of the individual [that] can also change over time” (53, 56).

He concluded by saying that no sane person can think that the “weakening of the family as that natural society founded on marriage will prove beneficial to society as a whole” but rather that the undermining of marriage and the family “poses a threat to the mature growth of individuals, the cultivation of community values and the moral progress of cities and countries” (52).

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

May 15, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.15.21_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 us this Sunday. I should probably say “conversations” in the plural, since, depending upon where you live in the United States, you will have one of two Gospels. Those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Those everywhere else will have the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus, since the bishops in those ecclesiastical provinces decided in 1998 and 1999 to transfer the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday. They did so because they recognized that if they didn’t, Catholics who do not attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss this 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 eliminating that Catholics would hear Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17thChapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. That Catholics in the US do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension is unfortunate 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.

* But since there is not unity, 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.

* We’ll take the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter first, since it happened first in time. In it we have the awesome privilege not only to eavesdrop on the extraordinarily rich interpersonal dialogue Jesus had with God the Father the night he was betrayed but to enter into that conversation.

* In the section we have this year, Jesus mentions five things:

* Jesus prays first that God the Father would protect us that we may be one in communion just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one. A little later he asks the Father specifically to keep us from the evil one. The point is that the devil constantly seeks to divide us, whereas God wants to bring us into true communion with Him and each other. Any of us who really believe in Jesus, who love him, must pray and work for unity. The fact that Christians as a whole have been divided by so many schisms across the centuries, the fact that even Catholics are often divided into ideological camps, is a great scandal, one that Jesus wants us to help remedy.

* The second thing Jesus prays for is that we may share his joy completely. He came so that his joy might be in us and our joy be made complete. The Easter Season is meant to help us to focus precisely on that joy, the joy that flows from God’s love, from his continuous presence, and from his triumph over sin and death. If we don’t live the Christian faith with joy, we risk making the Good News seem like a lie.

* The third thing Jesus mentions is that the world will hate us, just like it hated Jesus,

Fr. Roger J. LandrySacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanFeast of St. MatthiasMay 14, 2021Acts 1:15-17.20-26, Ps 113, Jn 15:9-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.14.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today on this feast of St. Matthias we talk about one of the most important realities of our faith: the transmission of the Gospel and our role in it. St. Matthias was the one chosen by God to take the place of Judas after Judas’ betrayal of Jesus and suicide. There was a need to have someone step into his shoes to spread the Gospel to others. They nominated two people and allowed God to choose by lot. This was a familiar practice for the Jews because it was the way priests were chosen for service in the temple. The 800-1000 priests who were assembled at a given time for a week’s service in the Temple all wrote their name on rocks and the rocks were put into a big container and shaken until one came out. The name on the rock would be the one chosen to preside over the morning or evening sacrifice or to serve at the altar of incense. In this case, they put the names Matthias and Joseph also called Barsabbas (Son of the Sabbath) or Justus (the Just One) on rocks and shook them out. the lot fell to Matthias and he was constituted among the apostles. We see here something important for us to grasp. God doesn’t always choose the people who would seem most likely. Just as no one would have predicted that among the apostles there would be — instead of rabbis and scribes and Pharisees — fishermen, tax collectors and relative nobodies, so here if it were a decision solely of men rather than of God, it would make little sense that Matthias would have been chosen above someone who had already earned two nicknames because of the way he lived the faith. But God’s ways are not our ways.

This truth is doubly important since, as we discerned in the Collect (Opening Prayer) of this Mass, we’ve all been chosen by God similarly to St. Matthias. “O God who assigned Saint Matthias a place in the college of Apostles,” we prayed, “grant us, through his intercession, that, rejoicing at how your love has been allotted to us, we may merit to be numbered among the elect.” Out of all the people on earth, we are two of seven to have been mysteriously allotted to be aware of God’s love incarnate in Christ and one of seven to have been chosen to receive the plenitude of love through the Sacraments and fullness of revelation in the Catholic Church. It’s not that we’re better than others, or loved more by God than others, just like God didn’t love Matthias more than Joseph-Justus-Barsabbas. But we were allotted to become more aware of that love of God — “Just as the Father loves me,” Jesus says today, “so I love you” — and to have the chance to live in it through Christ’s Mystical Body. But with that gift comes a task: it’s to pass the knowledge of that treasure on. Just like God chose the Jews as the people to receive his revelation so that one day that light could be brought to all nations, so God has allotted each of us to receive the gift of himself, his words, his presence, his love, so that we may bring those gifts to others and others to God. Our names have been written on him who is the “stone rejected by the builders who has become the cornerstone.” Our names have been written on the rock on whom Jesus built his Church and are united in communion with Peter and his successors.

The reality, however, is that many Catholics treat Joseph-Justus-Barsabbas as if he were their patron saint! They say, “Whew! Thanks be to God that he chose someone else to spread the faith so that I can just sit shyly on the sidelines!” They don’t believe that they’ve been chosen to spr...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Solemnity of the Ascension, Year B

May 13, 2021

Acts 1:1-11, Ps 47, Eph 1:17-23, Mk 16:15-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.13.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily:  

* Today we can look at the three principal things that the Church normally marks on the Ascension, the three chief aspects of this mystery we ponder when we meditate on the second glorious mystery of the Rosary: the reality of heaven and Christ’s ascent there; his great commission to the apostles and the Church to continue his work; and the parting gift, the perpetual blessing he gives us to help us complete that mission and one day join him in heaven with many others, the Holy Spirit. And as the Ascension this year falls on May 13, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, we can examine how Our Lady helps us to live each of these three realities.

* The first reality we celebrate today is heaven. Today we celebrate the day Jesus returned home, to the place from which he came to earth to save us. He returned differently than he left, taking our human nature with him across the threshold of death into life. 43 days before his Ascension, during the Last Supper, Jesus told his closest followers about this connection between his ascension and our assumption. He said, “I am going to the Father, … the one who sent me” (Jn 14:17, 16:5). But he also said, “You have faith in God, have faith also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” Heaven is the place where Christ has prepared for us so that we might rejoice with him forever. “He mounts his throne to shouts of joy” and he wants us to be able to experience that joy. Jesus often spoke about the great joy of heaven. He took his contemporaries’ most popular celebration — an eight-day sumptuous wedding banquet — and used it time and again to describe the unending joy of the eternal wedding banquet (Mt 22, Mt 25, Lk 12, Rev 19, Rev 21). St. Paul and Isaiah affirm that “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor the human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9; Is 64:4). This is what St. Paul prayed that the Ephesians realize in today’s second reading, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” Heaven is our hope. Heaven is our glorious inheritance. But it’s a hope and an inheritance to which we’re “called.” To obtain it, we have to respond to that call, by following Christ the Lord all the way, through a life of faith in him, in imitation of the love with which he loved us. And that begins with our desire. Our focus on Jesus’ Ascension, not just today but every few days when we pray the Glorious mysteries of the Rosary, is meant to stoke our desire. We heard St. Paul tell us on Easter Sunday: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:1-2). We are called to seek the things that are above, to hunger for heaven, for God, for eternity. This Solemnity of the Ascension is meant to stoke our desire for Christ’s face, to see him with the eyes of our heart enlightened.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Memorial of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, St. Pancras, St. Leopoldo Mandic, Blessed Alvaro del Portillo

May 12, 2021

Acts 17:15.22-18:1, Ps 148, Jn 16:12-15

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.12.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, on the eve of the “Decenarium of the Holy Spirit” that begins tomorrow on the Solemnity of the Ascension,  Jesus speaks to us about how the Holy Spirit “will guide you to all truth” because “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” Kindergarteners are not taught calculus, quantum physics or advanced semiotics for a reason, because they cannot handle it yet. There are various steps in learning and assimilation and God knows how he has made us. The transition from natural religion to the Covenants of the Old Testament was an enormous step in the learning curve; from Old Testament to New Covenant another. But that learning continues. It continued for the Church at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, helping Christians not only to understand the significance of so much Jesus taught and did but to learn how to align their lives to that truth. That growth continues for each of us. The Holy Spirit continues to want to lead us to all truth, making explicit what was implicit in what has already been given and making vibrant what has remained dormant. Are we open to that continued formation?

* This is a key work of the Holy Spirit. St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem, he uses the expression “Spirit of Truth” 42 times and how the Holy Spirit helps us to know, love and live the truth another 56, far more than any other expression. In a relativistic age, and one desperate for a New Evangelization, St. John Paul II focused on the mission of the Holy Spirit with regard to the truth more than under any other title. He wrote there, “It becomes clear that this ‘guiding into all the truth’ is connected not only with the scandal of the Cross, but also with everything that Christ ‘did and taught.’ For the mystery of Christ taken as a whole demands faith, since it is faith that adequately introduces man into the reality of the revealed mystery. The guiding into all the truth is therefore achieved in faith and through faith: and this is the work of the Spirit of truth and the result of his action in man. Here the Holy Spirit is to be man’s supreme guide and the light of the human spirit.”

* We see the Holy Spirit’s work in and through St. Paul as together with the Spirit the Apostle sought to lead the Athenians from what they knew into something much deeper. He began with their religiosity, surrounded by the statues of all the pagan gods, and praised their wisdom in the statue dedicated to the god they didn’t know. The statue to the Unknown god comes from the time of Epimenides who, according to Athenian legend, had been brought by them from Crete to rescue Athens after one of the leading families had murdered someone at the altar in the temple and soon the city began to suffer from political strife, a plague and various sorts of pollution, all of which the Athenians understood as a curse. Epimenides suggested that there might be a god unknown to them who would be willing to help Athens if proper sacrifices were made to him, and so the Athenians built many altars and made many sacrifices and the city was saved. Epimenides as a poet had written, “They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. But you are not dead: you live and abide forever, for in you we live and move and have our being.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Tuesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

May 11, 2021

Acts 16:22-34, Ps 138, Jn 16:5-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.11.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus says something truly shocking, something that is one of the most important things ever said about the Holy Spirit: “I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” Jesus is basically declaring that if we have a choice between Him and the Holy Spirit, we should choose the latter. That’s how important he says the Holy Spirit is. The great joy is that we don’t have to have to choose between the two. It is crucial, however, for us to ponder the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life and to examine whether we’re docile to the help He wants to give us to live by faith.

* The Holy Spirit remains the “great unknown” not just in the life of so many of the Christian faithful. Next Monday we will encounter the scene in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul came to Ephesus and met some disciples. He asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They responded, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Pope-emeritus Benedict, at World Youth Day in Australia in 2008, said, “The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity,” and confessed that it was only as a young priest teaching theology that he began not only to recognize the importance that the Holy Spirit should play in his life as a priest and professor but that he came to know him intimately. He added, “It is not enough to know the Spirit; we must welcome Him as the guide of our souls, as the ‘Teacher of the interior life’ who introduces us to the Mystery of the Trinity, because He alone can open us up to faith and allow us to live it each day to the full.” And we don’t have to be a member of the Charismatic Renewal to allow the Holy Spirit to become that teacher and guide. If we wish to understand the faith, if we wish to live it, if we wish to pass it on, we must allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, even if we, like Joseph Ratzinger, are beginning as adults. For us, the “great unknown” must become the “great known,” the teacher, the leader, the consoler, the advocate.

* The importance of the Holy Spirit in our life as Catholics cannot be overstated. Jesus tells us this in today’s Gospel when he emphasized that it was good that he left us because in comparison with the gift of His ongoing recognizably physical presence, the gift of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our life is more important. That’s how crucial the Holy Spirit is meant to be in our life as disciples and apostles. Benedict told the Church down under, “The Holy Spirit is the highest gift of God to mankind.”

* As Catholics, especially as we prepare for the decenarium of the Holy Spirit that will begin in two days on the Ascension, we need to ask ourselves how should we be seeking to grow in our docility to this highest gift of God?

* Jesus in the Gospel today says about the Holy Spirit that “when he comes he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation: sin, because they do not believe in me; righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” We learn three very important works of the Holy Spirit, among others:

* He will convict the world with regard to sin. Sin, Jesus says, is ultimately the failure to believe in him.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Memorial of Saint Damien of Molokai

May 10, 2021

Acts 16:11-15, Ps 149, Jn 15:26-16:4

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.10.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus continues to teach us, in the continuation of his Last Supper Discourse in John 15, the means by which we will remain in him as branches on the vine and remain in his and the Father’s love by keeping his commandment to love others as he has loved us, to the point of laying down our life for them. On Saturday he told us that we would be persecuted and hated by all. In today’s Gospel, he says that we will be expelled from houses of worship and that people will kill us thinking that they’re doing a divine service. These will all be means to enhance our trust in him. He says that he has told us all of this — on the eve of his Crucifixion, but which the Church looks back on now in the light of the Resurrection — so that “when their hour comes you may remember that I told you” and “not fall away” out of fear. In the midst of those challenging words, he does give us an extraordinary remedy: God the Holy Spirit. “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,” Jesus tells us, “he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.” We will not be orphans. We will be assisted by God himself to give a joint testimony of fidelity to Christ and enter into his faithful witness to the Father. This joint testimony, no matter the circumstances, is the heart of the Christian life.

* In the first reading, we see that witness taking place for the first time in Europe, as Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke went to Philippi to proclaim where the Jews would assemble on the Sabbath when there was no Synagogue, by the river. Even though obviously none of those evangelists had been with Jesus physically “from the beginning” of his public ministry, they had been with him in a far more meaningful way, with him, the Word, from before the foundation of the world. He had them in mind from before the foundation of the world to receive Him within and to bring Him to the ends of the earth. And one of the Holy Spirit’s tasks was to remind them of everything Jesus had taught. Jesus, similarly, has had each of us in mind from that same beginning and the same Holy Spirit has been sent to us.

* There’s a beautiful and theologically very rich expression that St. Luke uses to describe Lydia who had come to the river that day from Thyatira. St. Luke tells us that she was a dealer in purple cloth, which meant she was very wealthy, because purple was pretty much restricted to the imperial family since purple dye was so costly to obtain, needing to be harvested one drop at a time from a toxic Aegean shellfish. Therefore, in Christianity, she would have had a lot to “lose” insofar as Christians were so generous in sacrificing what they had for the needs of the brothers and sisters. St. Luke tells us that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.” Not her ears, but her heart. It means she was interiorizing into the center of her personality what Paul was saying, that she was loving, willing and embracing what she was coming to know. The same Holy Spirit who was testifying with and through Paul and his companions was opening up her heart at the same time so that she would be able to receive the seed of the word on good soil and bear much fruit. Lydia heard with great attentiveness of heart,