Catholic Preaching

Catholic Preaching

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Catholic Preaching episodes

  • Justified by Grace Received By Faith Working Through Love, 28th Thursday (I), October 16, 2025

    Msgr. Roger J. Landry

    NYC Leonine Chapter, IESE Business School
    Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
    Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
    October 16, 2025
    Rom 3:21-30, Ps 130, Lk 11:47-54

     

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

    https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.16.25_Homily_1.mp3

     

    The following points were attempted in the homily: 

    • Meaning of faith and how we’re justified by grace, received by faith, working through love.
    • We’re supposed to live our faith rather than pretend as if we’re really living by faith in God like many of the Scribes and Pharisees.
    • The 350th anniversary of the apparitions of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque are an occasion for us to see how we are receiving and responding to the grace of God received by faith living out in love. Jesus spoke to her and through her to us about the way we respond to him in the Sacrament of Love, the Holy Eucharist.
    • Tonight is an opportunity to make him in the Eucharist the biggest difference in our life, to treat him with reverential, with passion, with holiness, with praise.

      •  

      The readings for tonight’s Mass were:

      Reading 1
      ROM 3:21-30
      Brothers and sisters:
      Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law,
      though testified to by the law and the prophets,
      the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ
      for all who believe.
      For there is no distinction;
      all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.
      They are justified freely by his grace
      through the redemption in Christ Jesus,
      whom God set forth as an expiation,
      through faith, by his Blood, to prove his righteousness
      because of the forgiveness of sins previously committed,
      through the forbearance of God–
      to prove his righteousness in the present time,
      that he might be righteous
      and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
      What occasion is there then for boasting? It is ruled out.
      On what principle, that of works?
      No, rather on the principle of faith.
      For we consider that a person is justified by faith
      apart from works of the law.
      Does God belong to Jews alone?
      Does he not belong to Gentiles, too?
      Yes, also to Gentiles, for God is one
      and will justify the circumcised on the basis of faith
      and the uncircumcised through faith.
      Responsorial Psalm
      PS 130:1B-2, 3-4, 5-6AB
      R. (7) With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
      Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;
      LORD, hear my voice!
      Let your ears be attentive
      to my voice in supplication.
      R. With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
      If you, O LORD, mark iniquities,
      Lord, who can stand?
      But with you is forgiveness,
      that you may be revered.
      R. With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
      I trust in the LORD;
      my soul trusts in his word.
      My soul waits for the LORD
      more than sentinels wait for the dawn.
      R. With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
      Gospel
      LK 11:47-54
      The Lord said:
      “Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets
      whom your fathers killed.
      Consequently, you bear witness and give consent
      to the deeds of your ancestors,
      for they killed them and you do the building.
      Therefore, the wisdom of God said,
      ‘I will send to them prophets and Apostles;
      some of them they will kill and persecute’
      in order that this generation might be charged
      with the blood of all the prophets
      shed since the foundation of the world,
      from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah
      who died between the altar and the temple building.
      Yes, I tell you, this generation will be charged with their blood!
      Woe to you, scholars of the law!
      You have taken away the key of knowledge.
      You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.”
      When Jesus left, the scribes and Pharisees
      began to act with hostility toward him
      and to interrogate him about many things,
      for they were plotting to catch him at something he might say.

      The post Justified by Grace Received By Faith Working Through Love, 28th Thursday (I), October 16, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

      20 min
    • Our Lady on Mission, Meditation for the 108th Anniversary of the Last Apparition in Fatima, October 13, 2025

      Msgr. Roger J. Landry

      National Blue Army Shrine, Ashbury, NJ
      108th Anniversary Celebration of the Sixth Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima
      October 13, 2025

       

      To watch a video of the meditation, please click below:

       

       

      If you prefer another video angle of the meditation, please click below: 

       

       

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

      https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.13.25_Our_Lady_on_Mission_1.mp3

       

       

      The following outline guided the meditation: 

      • Introduction
        • Today under rain that is evocative of the downpours that occurred in the Cova d’Iria 108 years ago, we joyfully celebrate the anniversary of the “exclamation point” of the Fatima apparitions: the “Miracle of the Sun” that took place on October 13, 2017. This Miracle involved a clear prediction, a solar phenomenon, and a scientifically inexplicable general dessication, all three of which combine in a compelling way to help skeptics gain confidence in Our Lady’s appearances and believers gain motivation to act on the message Our Lady came to Fatima to impart.
        • Let’s begin with the prediction. During the third apparition of Our Lady in July, ten year-old Lucia, prompted by the advice she had received from others, said to the woman from heaven, “I would like to ask who you are and whether you will do a miracle so that everyone will know for certain that you have appeared to us.” The woman replied, “In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want. I will then perform a miracle so that all may believe.” When Lucia related to others that response, suspense quickly began to build. In August, the Lady reiterated, “In the last month I will perform a miracle so that all may believe,” and in September, she said again, “In October I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.” By the time October 13 arrived, a vast throng of about 70,000 had assembled around the Cova d’Iria in Fatima as the children arrived to pray the Rosary. Those crowd included secularists, anticlerical forces, journalists and skeptics, all of whom wanted to be eyewitnesses, when no miracle took place, of what they termed an ongoing “fraud.” It had been raining incessantly since the previous night, the fields were soaked and muddy, and despite umbrellas, the people were drenched.
        • When the children arrived, slightly before 1 pm, the woman appeared, seen again only by the shepherd children. She said she wanted a chapel built, asked them to continue to pray the Rosary every day, revealed herself as “the Lady of the Rosary,” divulged that World War I would soon end, and called on everyone to amend their lives and ask God’s forgiveness. Then she rose toward the east and turned the palms of her hands toward the dark clouds that were obscuring the sun. Immediately the sun broke through the clouds and appeared to be an opaque grey disk that turned to silver. “Look at the sun!,” Lucia shouted, and people found to their surprise that they could peer directly at the intense sun without being blinded. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the sun whirled madly, “danced” like a giant circle of fire, careened toward earth and zig-zagged back to its normal position. People shrieked, wept and dropped to their knees in the mud and water. The colors of everything — the air and ground, trees, faces, and clothes — changed yellow, blue, amethyst, red and white. Soon the cry “miracle!” started being heard everywhere.
        • Some assert that it was a Mass hallucination. Atheist Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, admits, “It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination,” but then he went on nevertheless to propound that they all had to be hallucinating collectively because it would be “even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too — and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system.” But it’s not scientific or even reasonable to dismiss out of hand the data to which about 70,000 collectively attest and to pretend as if they were all simply deceived.
        • Here’s why the third part of the miracle, the one of dessication, is important. Many of the eyewitnesses described the intense heat of the sun as it careened toward earth. After the sun had returned to its place, they recognized that their soaked clothing and the drenched ground were all completely dry as if it had never rained. That physical reality doesn’t happen by mass hallucination or a spiritual vision. Engineers and physicists say that an extraordinary of amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up that much water so fast. Regardless of our incapacity to explain the data, it’s impossible to dispute it. 70,000 people, however, clearly saw — and felt — something, and the earth itself transitioned within minutes from saturated to dehydrated. All of this has led both faithful and skeptics present to conclude that the pre-announced miracle had in fact occurred and has moved so many others since, including the hierarchy of the Church, to find their testimony credible. And if that part of the children’s testimony proved true, then it certainly lends far greater believability to everything else that the children say that “the Lady of the Rosary” told them. It likewise should lead to a much greater commitment on our part to act on what Our Lady was permitted to come from heaven to earth to announce.
        • Our Lady appeared in Fatima as the Mother who received us at the foot of the Cross, with a message for us and for all her other children. She was coming not fundamentally to impart information, but formation, to lead us, as she led the shepherd children, to her Son. She came as a missionary from heaven, calling the pastorinhos and all of us to conversion, to consecration, to action because, as she said, the salvation of souls was at stake. Mary is the Queen of Apostles, the one St. John Paul II called the Star of Evangelization, and we see her fulfilling this role in Fatima. Her Son’s first words in his public ministry were “repent and believe in the Gospel,” and she came to Fatima to announce, “Penance! Penance! Penance!,” to ask the shepherd children, and through them all of us, to pray and make sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, and then to live our faith through entering into Mary’s own faith through entrusting ourselves to her immaculate heart. That’s what I want to talk about today: Mary’s work as a missionary, reminding us of the stakes of the Church’s mission and summoning us, at 7, 9 and 10, Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia, or at whatever age we presently are, to take seriously the missionary dimension of our baptism.
        • Joy to be here
          • My name is Monsignor Roger Landry. I’m National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, tasked by the Church in helping to promote missionary spirituality and identity among American Catholics and to involve us through prayer and sacrifices to share in the mission Christ has entrusted us all, to go and announce the Gospel to every creature, to call people to repent and believe, to proclaim “repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem,” to herald his kingdom and bring the gift of the salvation he won for us to all those who do not know it yet, or haven’t embraced it yet, or who, having once believed, have turned away. It’s ultimately to help American Catholics learn from our Lady’s example in Fatima how to participate in her Son’s mission out of love for him and out of love for all those he entrusted to Mary on the Cross.
          • It’s a great joy for me to be with you today here at the Blue Army Shrine, where for the last 47 years the World Apostolate of Fatima has helped the United States and the world ponder what Our Lady said and did in Fatima and resolve to live and spread the way she interpreted with urgency the living out of our faith in her Son today. I have always had a great devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. When I was a seminarian, I lived in Portugal for a summer learning Portuguese and almost every Saturday I would take the bus from Lisbon to Fatima to pray. I became great friends with a Portuguese family who likewise loved to go to Fatima on the 13th of each of month from May to October and so I accompanied them during that summer on those visits in which hundreds of thousands would come. After my ordination as a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, I was assigned to a Portuguese parish where everyone had an intense devotion to Our Lady of Fatima and so I sought to feed that devotion and was much nourished by it. On the first anniversary of my priestly ordination, the future Pope Benedict XVI, at the behest of St. John Paul II, published his brilliant commentary on the message of Fatima, especially the third part of the message, and I began to teach that lesson, in Portuguese and English, throughout southeastern Massachusetts and beyond. I likewise had the joy, when I was working for the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York, to host a huge event there — with a standing room only crowd in a room that fit 560 delegates — in the presence of the Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima apparitions and Mary’s call for peace. So to be here with you to celebrate our Lady, to thank God and her for her work, to invoke her intercession, and to strive to live in response to her message like Saints Jacinta and Francisco and Venerable Lucia is an enormous joy for me.
          • Mary as Missionary
            • I want to speak about Mary as missionary. She was the first to receive Jesus’ mission within her life, and we know from Sacred Scripture how she could not keep Jesus her Son to herself. She was the first evangelized and the first evangelizer. As soon as the Archangel Gabriel departed from her in Nazareth, she, with great faith, departed, too, in haste, to Ein Karim, to care for her elderly cousin St. Elizabeth who was pregnant with St. John the Baptist in her old age. Jesus was only a few days old in her womb as she made the 70 mile journey down to Jericho and up to and through Jerusalem and down into the hill country of Judea. She was forming Jesus according to his humanity to be the itinerant preacher he would become before he even had the tiniest of feet. In the Mystery of the Visitation, she shows us the essence of a Christian missionary disciple, simply bringing Jesus to others so that he, who came into the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy made complete, might make others, like John the Baptist in the womb, leap for joy.
            • We similarly see Mary forming the whole Church for mission in the Room after Jesus’ ascension. Jesus had told the apostles and disciples to wait for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and so they wisely huddled around Mary in the Cenacle praying for the Holy Spirit to come and doubtless asking her, who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ virginal conception and never ran away from the Holy Spirit who was the spouse of her soul, how to be docile and cooperate with the Holy Spirit no matter what he asks. During those ten days of intense prayer, she would doubtless telling them many stories of Jesus’ infancy and three decades of hidden life that were eventually included when the Gospels were written down, so that they, with tongues fire, blown across the globe by the Spirit’s strong driving wind, might be able to base their lives too on the cornerstone who was her Son. She was forming them to be apostles, leading them to say a wholehearted fiat to her Son’s summons just like she had. For this reason, she is aptly called the Queen of Apostles and the mother of the Church’s mission, who perpetually intercedes for us to collaborate with the Holy Spirit in giving joint witness to Christ in the midst of the world.
            • But Mary’s role in the Church’s mission did not cease upon her Assumption into heaven body and soul. There she ceaseless prays for the Church, for the successors of the apostles, and for all the baptized, called by our baptism and strengthened by our confirmation to be missionaries, sharing the treasure of our faith with others, helping them by our own witness and words to repent and believe, to accept Christ’s gift of salvation and seek to announce it to others, to enter Jesus’ kingdom and try to bring the whole world to receive the same heavenly inheritance.
            • But she doesn’t just pray. As we know from history, she acts. She acted in Guadalupe in 1531. She acted in Lourdes in 1858. She acted in Fatima in 1917. And she’s acted in many other approved apparitions throughout the centuries. When she comes, as the Church teaches, she doesn’t bring anything truly new. As in every private revelation, what she gives us is the actualization of the Gospel, she reminds us of what is contained in the public revelation of the Church — Scripture and Tradition — and seeks to prod us to live it with new focus and fervor. That’s what she did in Fatima 108 years ago.
            • The message and the response
              • When St. John Paul II visited Fatima in 1982, on the first anniversary of Mehmet Ali Agca’s assassination attempt, he remarked that Our Lady’s words in the Cova da Iria can be summarized by Jesus’ words at the beginning of his public ministry: “Repent and believe in the gospel.”
              • “These are the first words,” the Pope said, “that the Messiah addressed to humanity. The message of Fatima is, in its basic nucleus, a call to conversion and repentance, as in the Gospel. … The call to repentance is a motherly one, and at the same time it is strong and decisive.”
              • John Paul II said she needed to give this call because we know “how many people and societies—how many Christians—have gone in the opposite direction to the one indicated in the message of Fatima. Sin has thus made itself firmly at home in the world, and denial of God has become widespread in the ideologies, ideas and plans of human beings. But for this very reason the Gospel call to repentance and conversion, uttered in the Mother’s message, remains ever relevant. It is still more relevant than it was [in 1917]. It is still more urgent.”
              • Mary’s message wasn’t that “others” needed to convert, but we all did. And she summoned us to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, true Good Samaritans, to those wounded by sin and the spiritual necrosis to which it leads. She wanted to involve us, once deeply converted, in the conversion of others.
              • In her first apparition, on May 13, she asked Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta, “Do you wish to offer yourselves to God, to endure all the suffering that He may please to send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which he is offended and to ask for the conversion of sinners?” Today, here, right now, she could be well asking us the same question.
              • On July 13 that year, she repeated her appeal, telling the pastorinhos, “Sacrifice yourselves for sinners, and say often this prayer, especially during any sacrifice: ‘O my Jesus, I offer this for love of you, for the conversion of poor sinners, and in reparation for all the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.’”
              • Then she showed them a vision of Hell, a clear reminder of the stakes involved in whether sinners, whether we, convert and begin to choose God. It was, as Lucia recalled, a “great sea of fire” in which “were demons and souls in human form,” emitting “shrieks and groans of pain and despair,” which Lucia said “horrified us and made us tremble with fear.” It was so frightening that had Our Lady not promised to take them to heaven, Lucia said, they “would have died of fear and terror.”
              • “You have seen Hell,” our Lady commented, “where the souls of poor sinners go. To save future souls, God wishes to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If people do what I tell you, many souls will be saved.”
              • That’s the essence of Mary’s mission in Fatima. Her Son Jesus had come into the world in her womb in order to save the human race, so that sinners might not perish but have eternal life. But there were many more on the broad road that leads to perdition than the narrow road that leads to life. And so Mary asked the shepherd children out of love to do reparation, to do the penance, for those who were in need of conversion. And then she asked them, and through them us, to consecrated ourselves to her Immaculate Heart. We will have a chance to talk more about Mary’s heart during the homily at Mass, but consecration to Mary’s heart is entrustment to a heart that is pure, a heart that says “let it be done to me according to your word,” a heart that treasures God’s word within. It’s the opposite of the heart we’re warned about in Psalm 95, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” To consecrate ourselves to Mary’s heart is not just to entrust ourselves to Mary’s intercession but to enter into the essence of Christian discipleship as Mary lived it. Mary indicates that doing so is a matter of life and death, of heaven and hell.
              • The Blessed Mother also showed the shepherd kids in the July apparition another vision — the famous “third secret of Fatima” — in which Our Lady pointed toward an Angel with a flaming sword who cried out in a loud voice, “Penance! Penance! Penance!,” a summons that beyond the symbolism needs little interpretation.
              • She also taught them a prayer known to many of us that we should say with ever greater fervor during this month of October. “When you recite the Rosary,” she said, “say at the end of each decade: ‘Oh My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Your Mercy.’” Mary taught us this prayer through the shepherd children not for our edification but because she’s concerned as a knowing mother about our and others’ eternal destiny.
              • In August, Mary repeated the summons with a holy candor that’s impossible to sugar coat: “Pray, pray a lot and offer sacrifices for the sinners. You know that many souls go the hell because there is none who pray for them.”
              • In her last appearance in October, she repeated her appeal for people to recite the Rosary “every day” and emphasized, “It is necessary that they ask pardon for their sins” and “don’t offend our God and Lord.”
              • Just like St. John Paul interpreted the Fatima message in the key of repentance and faith, so did his successor.
              • Writing in 2000, the future Pope Benedict underlined, “Our Lady’s call to conversion and penance, issued at the start of the twentieth century, remains timely and urgent today.” Her “insistent invitation” to penance, he said, “is nothing but the manifestation of her maternal concern for the fate of the human family, in need of conversion and forgiveness.”
              • The key words of what Mary revealed, he said, were prayer and sacrifice “to save souls” and the “threefold cry ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’” These, he said, are a repetition of the call to repentance and faith that began Jesus’ public ministry and began our Lent. To understand Fatima and our own day, he said, “means to accept the urgency of penance, of conversion, of faith.”
              • In response to Mary’s appeal, Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta prayed with fervor, fasted heroically, and offered themselves and their sufferings as alms for the conversion of others. What will we do?
              • It’s always moved me to ponder why Mary appeared to children ages 7, 9 and 10. Obviously part of that answer is mysterious, but it’s likely because most of her older children — then and still now — routinely ignore this summons of her Son that she recapitulates. It’s very inspiring how Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia immediately acted on this summons. They prayed the Rosary for sinners. The recited between the mysteries of the Rosary the “O my Jesus” prayer Mary herself taught them. From the beginning of the apparitions, Francisco began to pray almost constantly to “console Jesus for the sins of the world.” One night, when his father discovered him sobbing in his room, Francisco gave the reason: “I was thinking of Jesus who is so sad because of the sins that are committed against him.” Jacinta was so convinced by the vision of the reality of Hell of the importance of saving sinners from it that she began to pour herself into prayer and practice various corporal mortifications. “Pray, pray much and make sacrifices for sinners,” Mary had told her. “Many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.” Jacinta responded, as did her brother, by prostrating themselves in prayer for hours, kneeling with their heads humbly bowed to the ground. They made all types of physical sacrifices, wearing tight cords around their waist, scourging themselves with stinging nettles, abstaining from water on hot days and other penitential practices. When both caught the terrible 1918 flu that took the lives of tens of thousands, they offered all of their sufferings for the conversion and salvation of sinners. Having been told by Our Lady that she would take him to heaven soon, Francisco declined hospital treatment, bearing enormous pain with a smile and without complaint. Our Lady appeared to Jacinta and asked if she wanted to stay on earth a little longer to convert more sinners. She said yes. So the little girl allowed herself to be dragged from clinic to clinic, to have two of her ribs removed without anesthesia, valiantly sacrificing herself as a victim for the conversion of sinners and for the Holy Father, whom she knew from the third vision would suffer much. When Saint John Paul II beatified them in Fatima in 2000, he lifted them up as an example to the whole world of what Christ-like and Marian love for the salvation of others looks like. He stressed that their lives demonstrate that children can be heroically virtuous and reach “the heights of perfection” at a very young age, and if they can, so can all of us. Echoing the words of our Lady, the Pope reminded all children of God, however young, “Our Lady needs you all to console Jesus, who is sad because of the bad things done to him; he needs your prayers and your sacrifices for sinners.” This isn’t a new message. This is the Gospel. And our Lady was calling us to live it!
              • But it’s not enough for us, like the pastorinhos, to fast, to pray, to do various mortifications for the conversion of sinners. Those are super important and doubtless please God very much. But we are called, like the World Apostolate of Fatima has sought to carry out since the 1950s, to spread Mary’s reiterated call of her Son to conversion and consecration, to penance and holiness. We are called to a global mission. We’re called to live out fully the meaning of our baptism and Christian life, to love others as Christ has loved us, and to give our life so that they might not perish but have eternal life.
              • World Mission Sunday
                • This upcoming Sunday is World Mission Sunday. It’s the day annually that the whole Church prays to the Harvest Master for missionaries, the laborers for his harvest, when we pray for the fruit of that harvest, and for all of us to recognize that we are those harvesters. I’ve always found very powerful the call of the first apostles. After Jesus had told the disciples to pray to the Lord of the Harvest for laborers, Jesus prayed all night. And in the morning, he came down and called from among those who were praying to the Harvest Master, the twelve apostles by name. There’s a very important lesson contained here. When we pray to the Harvest Master, we’re praying ultimately for ourselves, so that we will respond to the Harvest Master’s call, roll up our sleeves and get to work.
                • Our Lady is someone who has been praying for her Son’s harvest from the first time he asked his Church to do so. She has recognized that she is indeed meant to be a laborer and from heaven she labors still. And she’s imploring us, like she did the three Portuguese kids 108 years ago, to commit ourselves to working hard, each day of our life, for this end. To convert and believe. To pray and sacrifice. And then to preach by word and witness and strengthen the efforts of all those in the Church’s mission who are trying to bring her Son’s salvation to the ends of the earth.
                • This morning Pope Leo did something truly unprecedented. He became the first Pope to record a video message for World Mission Sunday, something that can be played before every Mass everywhere in the world, in which he asked all Catholics to “help me help missionaries across the globe.” He called us to pray and to sacrifice for the missions. The young shepherd children prayed and made physical sacrifices. We’re called to pray, mortify and make financial sacrifices, so that the Church, made in the image of Mary, cooperating with her prayers and following her lead, can be the sacrament of salvation, bringing others to embrace the redemption won at such a great price by her Son. Mary is the model of the Church’s maternal love for everyone for whom her Son gave his life.
                • John Paul II wrote about Mary’s role in our mission today: “Today, as never before, the Church has the opportunity of bringing the Gospel, by witness and word, to all people and nations. … Like the apostles after Christ’s Ascension, the Church must gather in the Upper Room ‘together with Mary, the Mother of Jesus,’ in order to pray for the Spirit and to gain strength and courage to carry out the missionary mandate. We too, like the apostles, need to be transformed and guided by the Spirit. … The whole Church is invited to live more intensely the mystery of Christ by gratefully cooperating in the work of salvation. The Church does this together with Mary and following the example of Mary, the Church’s Mother and model: Mary is the model of that maternal love which should inspire all who cooperate in the Church’s apostolic mission for the rebirth of humanity” (Redemptoris Missio 92).
                • The apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima are an extension of Mary’s maternal love that are meant to inspire us just as much as the first apostles, just as much as Saints Jacinta and Francisco and Venerable Lucia, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the Church’s mission of salvation today. In Our Lady of Fatima’s school, the Church learns to consecrate itself to the mission of her Son. Continuing her work in the Upper Room, she helps the Church prepare new generations of apostles. She continues that work, today, here.

                  • The post Our Lady on Mission, Meditation for the 108th Anniversary of the Last Apparition in Fatima, October 13, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                  35 min
                • A Heart Filled With Hope Like Our Lady’s, Votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima, October 13, 2025

                  Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                  National Blue Army Shrine, Ashbury, NJ
                  108th Anniversary Celebration of the Sixth Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima
                  Votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima
                  October 13, 2025
                  Jud 13:17-20.15:9, Lk 1:46-55, Lk 11:27-28

                   

                  To watch a video of the homily, please click below:

                   

                  To watch a video of the homily (and of the Mass in which it took place), please click below:

                   

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

                  https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.13.25_Homily_on_Our_Lady_of_Fatima_Hope_and_Consecration_1.mp3

                   

                  The following text guided the homily: 

                  Today’s celebration of the culmination of Our Lady’s Apparitions in Fatima and the great Miracle of the Sun is unlike any other in Church history, because it is taking place in the first Jubilee of Hope in ecclesiastical annals. And like any Church holy year, it’s meant to influence everything the Church does during that time. And the theme of hope has a great deal to do with what Mary said and did and tried to provoke all of us to do 108 years ago in Fatima.

                  What Hope Is

                  What is hope? When Pope Francis gave us his Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee of Hope, he didn’t define what hope is, because he said, everyone already has an idea of what it is. When Pope Benedict published his encyclical on hope in 2007, he likewise did not give us a clear definition of hope, but he did give us a very important clue. Quoting St. Paul who in his letter to the first Christians in Ephesus reminded them that before the Gospel arrived in their famous city, they were “living without hope” because they were “living without God in the world” (Eph 2:14), Pope Benedict implied that hope is precisely “living with God in the world.” We know that this is true. Everything changes when we know that Christ is with us. Think about any challenge you’re facing now, or any major challenge you have faced in life, if you could see Jesus present with you, if you would hear him whispering into your ears or your heart, “Don’t be afraid. I am with you. We will meet this challenge together. Remember, nothing is impossible for God,” would we not be filled with enormous hope that that challenge won’t have the last word? St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who built an empire of hope for Italian immigrants in New York City and then spread hope in 67 missions in 11 different countries, did it all based by echoing the hope St. Paul’s gave witness to in his Letter to the Philippians: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (4:13). To recognize that God-with-us, Emmanuel, is still very much with us, and that he can strengthen us to do even the humanly impossible, that with faith in him the size of a mustard seed we can even transplant mountain ranges, we are filled with hope not matter how tall those mountains seem to be.

                  The Hope Mary Gave the Shepherd Children

                  This is something Our Lady came to teach us in Fatima in summoning us to consecrate ourselves to her Immaculate Heart. I’ve always been blown away by what Mary taught the three young shepherd children, 7-year-old Jacinta, 9-year-old Francisco and 10-year-old Lucia. She had shown them a vision of hell where poor sinners go. She had given them a glimpse of the destruction that would come from atheistic communism. She had even permitted them to see how much the Church would suffer, with a vast city of Christian corpses and even a bishop in white assassinated.

                  After these vision, Mary said to them, “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go,” a clear indication that Hell is a real possibility of human freedom and doesn’t seem to be empty. “To save them, God wishes…,” she continued, and told them about a specific practice. I think it’s worthwhile to pause to consider what we think would have been fitting for her to indicate: what practice would be a remedy for Hell and an antidote for the sinful choices that lead there? Well-formed Christians might posit several reasonable guesses: Repent and believe in the Gospel. Prayer. Frequent Confession. Live faithfully the promises of our baptism. Keep the Commandments. Live a Eucharistic life. Love God and neighbor. Care for the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, ill and imprisoned. Our evangelical brothers and sisters might say: Confess with your lips and believe with your heart that Jesus is Lord and accept him as Lord and Savior. Prior to the Fatima apparitions, I don’t think any of us, even if we were given 100 guesses, would ever have come up with the answer Mary actually gave.

                  Consecration to Mary’s Immaculate Heart and Its Connection to Hope 

                  The means by which God wished to establish to save sinners from Hell, she said, was “devotion to my Immaculate Heart” throughout the world. “If what I say to you is done,” she emphasized, “many souls will be saved and there will be peace.” Our Lady went on specifically to request that Russia — which in 1917 was experiencing the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution — be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart, lest Russian communism “spread its errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.” Atheistic communism, for our Lady, was not a neutral political system, but a violent conceptual attack on God and on those made in his image that would bring incalculable harm, as we saw over the course of the 20th century.

                  But we have to ask what it means to consecrate ourselves, or particular countries, or the world to Mary’s Immaculate Heart? It means first and fundamentally to entrust ourselves to Our Lady, to belong to her, to enter into a covenant with her. At a deeper level, consecration to her “immaculate heart” means to beg her to help make our heart like hers, since Jesus declares that “the pure of heart shall see God” (Mt 5:8). The future Pope Benedict, commenting in 2000 on Mary’s message in Fatima, said that Mary’s is a “heart that, with God’s grace, has come to perfect interior unity and therefore ‘sees God.’ To be ‘devoted’ to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means therefore to embrace this attitude of heart, which makes the fiat—‘your will be done’—the defining center of one’s whole life.”

                  In the Preface for the Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the Compendium of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary that we are celebrating today, there is a beautiful commentary on the characteristics of Mary’s heart that one seeks to embrace through consecration. “You gave the Blessed Virgin Mary,” you will hear me pray later, “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 to be the Virgin Mother of your Son and to rejoice to see you forever. You gave her a steadfast and watchful heart, so that she could endure without fear the sword of sorrow and await in faith the resurrection of her Son.” A heart that’s undivided and pure like Mary’s, that’s wise and obedient, that’s faithful and watchful, is a heart that gives a wholehearted yes to God. It’s a heart that treasures God within. Such a heart “open to God, purified by contemplation of God,” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 2000, “is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind. The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Savior into the world.”

                  This is the type of heart that God wants each of us to have. It’s a heart that, like in the Gospel today, hears the Word and observes it so much that that world, pondered and treasured, takes on her own flesh. It’s a heart that, like Mary prayed in her Magnificat which we used as the response to the first reading, bursts out with joy for all that the Almighty in his goodness does for us.

                  God wishes, Mary said, to establish throughout the world devotion to her heart, so that our hearts will freely entrust themselves to her love and seek to emulate her wholehearted fiat to God’s will, word and work in our life.

                  This is, in short, the means by which to live with hope. To live with God in the world is to live like Mary, to grasp that through preserving sacramental and sanctifying grace that comes to us through the Sacraments, through pondering and treasuring God’s word, especially through receiving in Holy Communion the same Emmanuel whom Mary bore in her womb for nine months — he just looks different and is now risen from the dead — we are able to live with God and therefore live with hope in the world. Mary’s immaculate heart was “full of grace” and therefore, because grace is our participation as creatures in God’s own life, it was “full of God.” If we through consecration to Mary’s heart learn to live with a heart like hers, we, too, will be full of hope because we will be full of God. And we will be capable, like Mary, our Mater Spei or Mother of Hope, to bring that hope to the world. She said to the Shepherd Children, “my Immaculate Heart will triumph!,” which cannot but be a profound source of hope to all of us, that despite the evils we still very much encounter in the world, Mary’s trust in God will be validated, that Jesus’ eternal victory on Calvary, his resurrection, his promise of eternal life will have the last word.

                  Consecrating the World to Hope

                  But we have to ask: What does it mean to “Russia” or the “world” — we can think of all war torn areas today — to Mary’s Immaculate Heart, as Mary also requested? How can we consecrate others or foreign countries? This means prayerfully and perseveringly — not just as individuals but the whole Church in unison — entrusting all peoples to Mary’s intercession and maternal care, seeking to transform the world one person at a time to become more Marian in relation to God. This consecration happened according to the wishes of our Lady, the surviving seer Lucia confirmed in 1989, when St. John Paul II, in union with the bishops across the globe, consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart on March 25, 1984. In his beautiful, nearly 1000-word prayer of consecration that day, St. John Paul II begged Mary to “accept the plea that we make in the Holy Spirit directly to your heart and embrace … those whose act of entrustment you too await in a particular way,” a clear reference to Russia. “Before your Immaculate Heart, we desire, together with the whole Church, to unite ourselves with the consecration that, for love of us, your Son made of himself to the Father (Jn 17:19). … The power of this consecration lasts for all time and embraces all individuals, peoples and nations. … Help us to live in the truth of the consecration of Christ for the entire human family of the modern world. … Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today.”

                  He then implored her to deliver us from famine, nuclear war, incalculable self-destruction, sins against the life from its very beginning, hatred, the demeaning of human dignity, every kind of injustice, readiness to trample on God’s commandments, attempts to stifle the truth, loss of awareness of good and evil, and sins against the Holy Spirit. “Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit,” he continued, “to conquer all sin: individual sin and the ‘sin of the world,’ sin in all its manifestations,” so that “the infinite saving power of the Redemption, the power of merciful love, may … put a stop to evil [and] … transform consciences.” He finished by entreating, “May your Immaculate Heart reveal for all the light of hope.”

                  Mary’s Immaculate Heart indeed reveals the light of hope! That’s why to live this Jubilee Year well, we must live it according to what Mary revealed 108 years ago in Fatima. We must live together with Mary and make or renew our consecration to her within her consecration to her Son. And not just entrust ourselves to her maternal intervention in our life, but also our families, neighborhoods, parishes, dioceses, countries, and the various countries of the world to her in prayer, so that they, too, may see the light of hope that radiates from her heart. Saint John Paul II taught us all how to consecrate ourselves each day to Mary’s immaculate heart. He would pray each morning, using St. Louis de Montfort’s consecratory formula, “I am all yours, O Mary, and all I have is yours. I receive you into the whole of my life. Give me your heart!” I likewise try to pray that prayer every day in my morning holy hour. During this Jubilee, we should all be seeking constantly to renew that consecration, which helps us to live with hope, to live with Jesus in the world, and to share his light.

                  Following Our Lady of Fatima as Pilgrims of Hope

                  There’s one other connection between this Jubilee of Hope and what Mary came to Fatima to announce. While Popes Francis and Benedict didn’t define hope for us in precise terms, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has. It tells us, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Hope is the spiritual muscle that helps us to relate to desire God and heaven, to trust in Jesus’ promises and to rely on the Holy Spirit.

                  These were the characteristics of Mary’s immaculate heart. She loved and longed for God, desired his kingdom to come and hungered to dwell with him forever. She trusted in God’s promises even when God’s angel told her she would conceive a Son without a man, that that Son would not only be hers but miraculously God the Father’s, that that Son would reign over the house of David forever, even when he was being crucified on Calvary. And she totally relied on the Holy Spirit, who overshadowed her at Jesus’ virginal conception and continued to guide her throughout life. To consecrate ourselves to Mary’s heart is to choose to imitate her hope in God, to desire heaven, to trust in Jesus fully, and to live by the Holy Spirit.

                  That’s why Pope Leo, in his homily for her Assumption two months ago in Castel Gandolfo, said, “Mary, who the risen Christ carried body and soul into the glory, shines as an icon of hope for her pilgrim children throughout history,” and echoed St. Bernard in calling her “the living fountain head of hope” as well as the Second Vatican Council in saying she is “a sign of certain hope and comfort to the pilgrim people of God” (LG 68).

                  The theme of this Jubilee Year is “Pilgrims of Hope” and Pope Leo preached: “Pilgrims need a goal that orients their journey: a beautiful and attractive goal that guides their steps and revives them when they are tired, that always rekindles in their heart a desire and hope. On the path of life, our goal is God, infinite and eternal Love, fullness of life, peace, joy and every good thing. The human heart is drawn to such beauty and it is not happy until it finds it; and, indeed, it risks not finding it if it gets lost in the middle of the ‘dark forest’ of evil and sin.”

                  But then he said we cannot forget the grace God has given us so that we can have a heart filled with him. He said, “God came to meet us, he assumed our flesh fashioned from the earth, and has carried it with him into the presence of God, or as we commonly say ‘into heaven.’ … Inseparable from him is also the mystery of Mary, the woman from whom the Son of God has taken flesh, and of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. … Just as Jesus said ‘yes,’ so also Mary said ‘yes;’ she believed in the word of the Lord. All of her life has been a pilgrimage of hope together with her son, the Son of God, a pilgrimage which, through the Cross and Resurrection, has reached the heavenly homeland, in the embrace of God. For this reason, while we journey forward, as individuals, families and communities, especially when the clouds come and the road seems difficult and uncertain, let us lift our gaze, let us look at her, our Mother, and we will rediscover the hope that does not disappoint!”

                  Yes, today, supported by this Jubilee, we turn to Our Lady of Fatima as our fountain head and mother of hope. We consecrate ourselves anew to her heart that longs for God, that desires holiness, happiness, and heaven, that trusts in all her Son’s promises and journeys with the fire of the Holy Spirit. We ask her prayers to help us, just like she did Saints Francisco and Jacinta and Venerable Lucia, to live with God in the world always so that we will witness the fulfillment of our hope, the triumph of her Immaculate Heart and the light of hope that will never set.

                   

                  The readings for today’s Mass were:

                  A Reading from the Book of Judith

                  All the people were greatly astonished. They bowed down and worshiped God, saying with one accord, “Blessed are you, our God, who today have brought to nought the enemies of your people.” Then Uzziah said to her: “Blessed are you, daughter, by the Most High God, above all the women on earth; and blessed be the Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth, who guided your blow at the head of the chief of our enemies. Your deed of hope will never be forgotten by those who tell of the might of God. May God make this redound to your everlasting honor, rewarding you with blessings, because you risked your life when your people were being oppressed, and you averted our disaster, walking uprightly before our God.” And all the people answered, “Amen! Amen!” When they had visited her, all with one accord blessed her, saying: “You are the glory of Jerusalem, the surpassing joy of Israel; You are the splendid boast of our people.

                  Responsorial Psalm — The Almighty Has Done Great Things For Me

                  “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

                  A Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke

                  While he was speaking, a woman from the crowd called out and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.” He replied, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”

                  The post A Heart Filled With Hope Like Our Lady’s, Votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima, October 13, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                  28 min
                • Becoming Lazarists and Missionaries of Charity, 26th Sunday (C), September 28, 2025

                  Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                  Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
                  Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
                  September 28, 2025
                  Amos 6:1,4-7, Ps 146, 1 Tim 6:11-16, Lk 16:19-31

                   

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

                  https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.28.25_Homily_1.mp3

                   

                  The following text guided the homily: 

                  • Today Jesus gives us all a parable that begins with a rich man who was adorned in royal purple clothes and exquisite priestly linen who dined sumptuously each day. In the first reading, the prophet Amos describes people in Jerusalem who slept on beds of ivory — just think about what that cost! — eating lambs and calves, having jam sessions on harps, drinking wine not from glasses but from bowls, and anointing themselves with the best oils, the ancient version of the best skin care products, perfumes and colognes. These figures are those whom many in our culture are trained to aspire to emulate, to be rich and carefree, woofing down lamb, veal, filets and caviar, guzzling down precious aged wine and liqueurs, having private concerts of the finest musicians, dressing to the nines like royalty and sleeping on beds made out of the trunks of elephants. Today we’d add garages full of fancy automobiles, private jets, stables of horses, marble floors, and perhaps golden toilet seats. It all sounds pretty good to materialist ears.
                  • But in a huge wake up call, God through Amos proclaims “woe” to those who live this way and the Lord Jesus in the parable describes how the rich man ended up going to hell, across an unpassable chasm from eternal happiness, in torment because of flames and tortured over the fate of family members living the same vain lifestyle. Through today’s readings, especially by the Gospel parable, God communicates to us quite clearly that he wants us to live differently. He does not want any of us to remain unmoved when we hear the story of Lazarus, covered with sores, being licked and consoled by the compassion of stray dogs, longing to eat just the rich man’s leftovers. He does not want any of us to remain unstirred, either, by the desperation of the rich man after he dies. What Jesus wants us to realize is not simply the state each of them is in, but the fact that each predicament was totally preventable.
                  • In the Parable, the rich man goes to Hell not because he was rich, not because he had earned his money in an immoral way, not because he had been asked by Lazarus for help and refused, not because he had sent dogs to pester Lazarus or had done anything at all evil to him. He went to Hell because when there was a poor man at his gate, he simply did nothing. He was condemned not because of anything he had done, but precisely because of what he hadn’t done: he was so caught up in himself that he didn’t make any effort at all to help out a man who was struggling and dying in his midst. He simply ignored him.
                  • In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:31-46), Jesus made clear that when he judges us, he will separate us into two groups on the basis of how we have treated the poor and needy among us. To those on his right who will be saved, he will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of the world, for I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned and you cared for me.” But to those on his left, he will declare with infinite sadness, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, because I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, naked and you gave me no clothes, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, ill and in prison and you didn’t care for me.” The condemned will poignantly ask, “Lord when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger or a prisoner and not minister to your needs?” Jesus will then reply, “As often as you failed to do this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you failed to do it to me.” Jesus identifies with the poor man. In the Alleluia verse, we sang St. Paul’s words to the Corinthian Christians about how Christ, “though he was rich, became poor for our sakes, so that by his poverty we might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). Christ became poor so that in caring for him in the disguise of the poor, we might become rich in what matters. The rich man in today’s Gospel went to Hell because in neglecting the dying poor man at his doorstep, he was neglecting God himself. In failing to love his neighbor, he was failing to love God and in fact failing to love himself properly, too. This point was made once by the brilliant late Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, who once told a group of wealthy donors, “The poor need you to stay out of poverty, but you need the poor to stay out of hell.” Or as Archbishop Charles Chaput, the retired Archbishop of Philadelphia, has often said: “Either we care for the poor or go to Hell.” Jesus’ message is clear.
                  • This is a message many of us need to hear. Many of us are accustomed to thinking about how God wants us to change simply in terms of the bad behavior we know he wants us to excise from our life, like the bad thoughts we have, the mendacious or malicious words we say, the wayward deeds we commit. But, as we note at the beginning of each Mass, these are not all the sins we commit. We confess to Almighty God and to each other that we have sinned not just in our thoughts, words, and deeds, but in “what I have failed to do … by my own most grievous fault.” Few of us spend much time, however, examining ourselves on these failures. We omit the omissions, the acts of love we should have done but didn’t do. The lesson Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is that, like the rich man, it’s not enough for us not to do evil, but we also have to do good, to sacrifice ourselves for those who are needy, to look past ourselves, identify their needs, and do what God makes possible to remedy them.
                  • This is a challenge today because we’re now living at a time in which — on account of technological advances in television, cameras, the internet and social media — we can see, unlike ever before, all the tragedies happening across the country and globe almost all at once. We see news report of natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, tornados, wildfires, as well as of manmade atrocities like massacres, bombings, assassinations, and the carnage of war; rather than being stimulated to compassionate action, many of us become desensitized, tempted to turn the page, flip the channel and wash our hands. We know that 733 million people in the world, one in eleven, are chronically malnourished and 148 million children go to bed each night starving, but many say there’s little they can do. As we walk the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx, we pass so many homeless begging for food and money that it’s tempting to pretend we don’t see them or to try to walk on the other side of the road. Even after the Dobbs decision, we recognize that each year more than 1.1 million babies, made in God’s image and likeness, have their lives ended through abortion in our country alone, but most turn a deaf ear to their silent screams. Pope Leo spoke about this blindness and deafness to the needs of others in his homily this morning at St. Peter’s Square on the Jubilee of Catechists. He said, “The story that Christ tells us is, unfortunately, very relevant today. At the doorstep of today’s opulence stands the misery of entire peoples, ravaged by war and exploitation. Through the centuries, nothing seems to have changed: how many Lazaruses die before the greed that forgets justice, before profits that trample on charity, and before riches that are blind to the pain of the poor!  …  The Church tirelessly proclaims this word of the Lord, so that it may convert our hearts.” We can multiply the examples of indifference and neglect, but the sheer magnitude of the needy and their needs can sometimes lead us just to turn away and turn inward, mind our own business, and divest ourselves of responsibility.
                  • Where does this indifference come from? How can so many in the world, including so many of us Christians, get to the point where we chronically fail to be Good Samaritans, where our hearts are no longer touched by the misfortune of others, where we no longer even weep over others’ misfortune when we notice it? Pope Francis used to blame “the culture of comfort,” flowing from consumerism, which can make us addicted to our own desires over others’ needs. Love of money and material things gradually makes our hearts stony, corrupted, anaesthetized and deadened. Like the rich man in the Gospel, we can stuff ourselves with so much food and pleasure that we longer empathize. We can be so blinded by ego that we fail even to notice the Lazaruses whom God places at our doorstep, not just so that we might help them but so that through them he might convert and change us.
                  • Many of us are in need of that conversion. The good news is that the Lord’s grace is powerful and can in fact change us. That gives us, in this Jubilee, great hope. One of the greatest examples showing the possibility of a profound personal moral revolution is St. Vincent de Paul, whose feast the Church celebrated yesterday. He is one of the greatest saints in the history of the Church, but he didn’t start that way. He began as a selfish egomaniac, ambitious to live the life of the rich man in today’s Gospel. Vincent was the third of six children of poor farmers in southwestern France. His parents struggled to make ends meet, but when Vincent’s father recognized how precociously intelligent his son was, he and the family sacrificed many of their animals to provide him an education. Vincent wasn’t particularly grateful, though. One day when his father, in his tattered peasant clothing, made a long journey on foot to visit him at university, Vincent didn’t even go out to greet him because he was so embarrassed by his father’s poverty. Vincent’s ambition at the time was to become a priest not really because he discerned it was his vocation, but because he thought vainly that it might bring him money and fame. He deemed that if he played his cards right, he might receive benefices for rich Churches and abbeys that would provide him enough income permanently to get his family out of the poverty, not primarily for their sake but because their penury embarrassed him. On account of his genius and motivation, he raced through university and was ordained a priest at the shockingly young age of 19, even though canon law required one to be 25. He wasted no time vainly trying to climb the ecclesiastical ladder. He became a chaplain to Queen Margaret of Valois and moved to Paris. As a brilliant “baby priest,” he quickly earned the reputation as a gifted preacher, which gained him further entrée into French high society.
                  • But the Lord gave him two experiences that helped him to convert from his vanity and rejection of Christ in service of his own ego. The first happened in 1605, six years into his priesthood. After having gone to Marseilles to acquire an inheritance from an elderly widow — another sign of where he was placing his treasure — he boarded a ship to Narbonne that was captured by African pirates who brought him to Tunisia, where he was a slave for two years. God eventually arranged for his escape when he was able to persuade the wife of an ex-priest who had converted to Islam to preserve his life, so that he might have a chance to convert her husband and allow her with him to head back to France. Her conversion was an occasion of his. After his release, Vincent never forgot the misery the slaves were experiencing. He resolved to help them somehow, someway, at some point in the future. There were about 25,000 poor slaves on the Barbary Coast, mostly Christian. He would eventually train and send many priests and brothers to attend to their spiritual needs and never ceased to raise money to ransom them; by the time of his death, he had purchased the freedom of over 1,200. (Oskar Schindler saved 1,100 Jews in the Holocaust, and he will be known for this until the end of time.) The second experience was a further crucifixion of his ego and pursuit of the esteem of others. After he had returned to Paris, his roommate was robbed of 400 crowns, about $12,000 in today’s money. Convinced Father Vincent was the thief, the roommate maliciously accused him to the police and everyone else. Whereas earlier Father Vincent may have trusted in his own abilities to defend his reputation, now he trusted only in divine Providence, who had just freed him from slavery. “God knows the truth,” he said calmly, as he bore the calumny for six months until the true thief confessed. It cured him of the vanity of placing his treasure in human respect.
                  • From that point forward, he was free to seek God’s interests in everything, and even though he would continue to walk in and out of French high society, his heart was set firmly on what the Lord wanted, on God’s glory, rather than the vanity of worldly success. He began from that period to welcome Christ in his poverty fully into his life and to help others to make the same exodus from rejection to welcoming. He was recruited by the powerful Count of Joigny, Philip de Gondi, to become chaplain to his family and tutor to his children. This was the assignment of the former Vincent’s dreams, but it was now an assignment that he twice laid down in order to become a pastor in rural areas in great need of conversion. Both times, however, Count de Gondi — who with his family loved Vincent — prevailed upon him to return. The latter time they enticed him by promising him that one of his tasks would be to teach the Gospel to the peasants throughout their expansive territory who were in ignorance and moral disarray. Count de Gondi, who was prefect of the French penal system, also arranged for Vincent to be named almoner and chaplain to the convicts in the galleys, which allowed Vincent to bring not just spiritual but material comfort to these prisoners across France. The more work he did among the poor and the outcasts, the more he became aware of how much work needed still to be done. He knew that organization was crucial. He began to recruit priests to help him in the task of preaching the Gospel to the poor; these clerics, drawn by Vincent’s example, became the first members of the Congregation of the Mission, which was popularly named, then and now, the “Lazarists,” because they cared for poor Lazarus however they found him. With the help of St. Louise de Marillac, he established the Daughters of Charity, to work in the many hospitals he was founding to care for the sick, incurable, orphaned, aged and abandoned. To help in the relief of the indigent, he instituted the Ladies of Charity, a group of wealthy women who would use their social connections to raise the funds needed not merely for the immediate care of the poor, but for their long-term education and training; in Paris these Ladies helped to run a soup kitchen that fed a staggering 16,000 hungry people a day. He also was appointed by the king and by the bishops to reform how priests were trained, so that everyone who was ordained would not only be able to preach the Gospel to the poor and celebrate the Sacraments, but be a man, minister and model of charity. He involved everyone he could in the work of charity: priests, religious men, religious women, lay people, because the needs were enormous. He had gone from vanity to sanctity, from worldly ambition to Christlike zeal, from seeking wealth to giving everything he had to those in need. To use St. Paul’s words from today’s second reading, he left spiritual worldliness behind to “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness,” to “compete well for the faith,” and to “lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called. Every Catholic is supposed to be a Lazarist, caring for poor men and women, boys and girls, materially and spiritually, however we can.
                  • The Missionaries of Charity were founded to transform the world to notice Lazarus in his distressing disguise and to give him or her wholehearted, free service. Jesus thirsts infinitely for each Lazarus and he wants to love and care for them through us, his Mystical Body. He raised up the Society of the Missionaries of Charity, as your Constitutions say, not only to “labor for the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor all over the world, … loving [Jesus] wholeheartedly and freely in the poorest of the poor with whom He identifies,” but also to make “reparation for the sins of hatred, coldness, lack of concern and love for him in the world today.” Saint Teresa of Calcutta once commented, “Jesus came on earth to give charity the rightful place in the hearts of men. ‘By this,’ He said, ‘men shall know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ … To love means to give. … Let this spirit come through in our relations with our poor people, for we are missionaries, the carriers of God’s own love.”
                  • She expressed concern that the cancer of indifference that can affect many hearts in the world can similarly attack the hearts of Missionaries of Charity. She examined her conscience and encouraged her daughters to examine theirs by asking, “Are you one of those who just ignore the poor? Do you go to them without preparing? Are you one of those who judge the poor? … Though we do not take money, we are not living in the open. We have a house, clothes to wear, four meals and all the comforts necessary. When I get up, I don’t even think, ‘What am I going to eat today?’” She said that “charity for the poor must be a burning flame in our Society” and warned that “just as when a fire ceases to burn, it gives us no more usefulness and heat, so the Society, the day it loses its grip on charity toward the poor, will lose its usefulness and there will be no life.” And so she encouraged everyone to focus on the words of the fourth vow, to give wholehearted, free, service to the poorest of the poor. To love Christ in each Lazarus with their whole heart, “not just half minds, or as much as you are able to do,” with “hearts burning with zeal and love for souls, single-minded devotion, wholly rooted in … deep union with God in prayer and fraternal love.” And she urged her daughters to do this freely, which means, she said, “joyfully and with eagerness; fearlessly and openly; freely giving what we have freely received; without accepting any return, without seeking any reward or gratitude.” This “wholehearted and free service to Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor,” she underlined, gives the Missionaries of Charity “a distinct vocation in the Church today.” And the whole Church needs that vocation to rediscover how to satiate Jesus’ infinite thirst and take responsibility to notice, love, and serve each Lazarus.
                  • This leads us to one last point from today’s Gospel. When the rich man due to his callous disregard for Lazarus in his midst asks Abraham, representing God, to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them that they need to be charitable, to overcome their indifference to the plight of those in need, lest they join him in the place of flames, Abraham replies that his brothers have Moses and the Prophets. They had Amos, like in today’s first reading. They had Isaiah, who said that the fasting God wishes is to “share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, clothe the naked when you see them, and not turn your back on your own.” They had Hosea and so many others. But the rich man says that the testimony of the prophets wouldn’t be enough, because his brothers, just like he used to, were ignoring God through Moses and the Prophets just like they were ignoring the poor. “But if someone from the dead goes to them,” the rich man protested, “then they would repent.” Abraham replies, however, that if they were deaf to the Law and the Prophets, if they were deaf to God, then they would be unmoved even by the appeals of someone risen from the dead.
                  • Well, today, we and the whole Church receive what the five brothers in the Parable did not. Not only do we have Moses and the Prophets to speak to us about charity, but Jesus, risen from the dead, comes to proclaim to us this Parable live. At Mass, we encounter him not under the appearance of a poor man but under the even humbler appearances of bread and wine. As he gives us his risen Body and Blood, he tells us, “Do this in memory of me,” which means not just to celebrate Mass but to go and do what he does, giving our body, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our food, our material resources, and most importantly our love to others in need. God, who calls us to be remember him and to love others as Good Samaritans, will give us all the help he knows we need to do so, but we, like Saints Vincent de Paul and Teresa of Calcutta, need to respond to that grace, as Lazarists and true missionaries of his responsible, tender, compassionate love. This is the path that, when it comes time for our judgment, will enable Jesus to wave each of us to his right for having cared for him in the person of others. This is the way that we may take our seat with all those eating not just scraps from the Master’s table but sharing in the sumptuous eternal wedding banquet for which the Mass is a foretaste. This is the way we respond to the gift of life and of redemption that Jesus has given us.

                    •  

                    The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                    Reading 1
                    Amos 6:1a, 4-7

                    Thus says the LORD the God of hosts:

                    Woe to the complacent in Zion!
                    Lying upon beds of ivory,
                    stretched comfortably on their couches,
                    they eat lambs taken from the flock,
                    and calves from the stall!
                    Improvising to the music of the harp,
                    like David, they devise their own accompaniment.
                    They drink wine from bowls
                    and anoint themselves with the best oils;
                    yet they are not made ill by the collapse of Joseph!
                    Therefore, now they shall be the first to go into exile,
                    and their wanton revelry shall be done away with.

                    Responsorial Psalm
                    Psalm 146:7, 8-9, 9-10

                    R. (1b) Praise the Lord, my soul!

                    or:
                    R. Alleluia.
                    Blessed is he who keeps faith forever,
                    secures justice for the oppressed,
                    gives food to the hungry.
                    The LORD sets captives free.
                    R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
                    or:
                    R. Alleluia.
                    The LORD gives sight to the blind;
                    the LORD raises up those who were bowed down.
                    The LORD loves the just;
                    the LORD protects strangers.
                    R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
                    or:
                    R. Alleluia.
                    The fatherless and the widow he sustains,
                    but the way of the wicked he thwarts.
                    The LORD shall reign forever;
                    your God, O Zion, through all generations. Alleluia.
                    R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
                    or:
                    R. Alleluia.

                    Reading 2
                    1 Timothy 6:11-16

                    But you, man of God, pursue righteousness,

                    devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.
                    Compete well for the faith.
                    Lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called
                    when you made the noble confession in the presence of many witnesses.
                    I charge you before God, who gives life to all things,
                    and before Christ Jesus,
                    who gave testimony under Pontius Pilate for the noble confession,
                    to keep the commandment without stain or reproach
                    until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ
                    that the blessed and only ruler
                    will make manifest at the proper time,
                    the King of kings and Lord of lords,
                    who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light,
                    and whom no human being has seen or can see.
                    To him be honor and eternal power.  Amen.

                    Alleluia
                    Cf. 2 Corinthians 8:9

                    R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                    Though our Lord Jesus Christ was rich, he became poor,
                    so that by his poverty you might become rich.
                    R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                    Gospel
                    Luke 16:19-31

                    Jesus said to the Pharisees:

                    “There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen
                    and dined sumptuously each day.
                    And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores,
                    who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps
                    that fell from the rich man’s table.
                    Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.
                    When the poor man died,
                    he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham.
                    The rich man also died and was buried,
                    and from the netherworld, where he was in torment,
                    he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off
                    and Lazarus at his side.
                    And he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me.
                    Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,
                    for I am suffering torment in these flames.’
                    Abraham replied,
                    ‘My child, remember that you received
                    what was good during your lifetime
                    while Lazarus likewise received what was bad;
                    but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.
                    Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established
                    to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go
                    from our side to yours or from your side to ours.’
                    He said, ‘Then I beg you, father,
                    send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers,
                    so that he may warn them,
                    lest they too come to this place of torment.’
                    But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets.
                    Let them listen to them.’
                    He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham,
                    but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
                    Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets,
                    neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.'”

                    The post Becoming Lazarists and Missionaries of Charity, 26th Sunday (C), September 28, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                    29 min
                  • Living by Faith in the Love God Has for Us, Retreat Conference for Alumni of Manhattan College, September 26, 2025

                    Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                    Mount Alvernia Retreat Center, Wappinger Falls, New York
                    “Living by Faith in the Love God has for us”
                    Retreat Conference for Manhattan College Alumni
                    September 26, 2025

                    To listen to the conference, please click below: 

                    https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.26.25_Living_by_Faith_in_the_Love_God_has_for_us_1.mp3

                     

                    The following was the outline of the talk: 

                    • Introduction
                      • Theme of the Retreat: “So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn 4:16).
                      • John’s whole approach to evangelization was to focus on the love of God.
                      • Story of St. Jerome. “Little children love one another”
                      • Not enough to know “of” the love God has for us. Have to know it personally. To experience it.
                      • But we realize that it can seem too good to be true. That’s why we have to believe in it. We have to stake our life on it. Even if we don’t “feel” it, we have to live it.
                      • We have a communion with God from the day of our Baptism, but we are able to experience communion with God ultimately through love, because God is love.
                      • What Jesus said during the Last Supper:
                        • Just as the Father loves me, so I love you. We have to recognize we’re loved and in fact lovable. If we don’t love ourselves it’s going to be hard for us to believe in the love God has for us.
                        • Live on in my love. We can’t run away from it. We have to know and believe it.
                        • You will live in my love if you keep my commandments, just like I have kept the Father’s commandments and live in his love. The commandments train us to love. This is the path for us to experience it.
                        • Love one another as I have loved you.
                          • Jesus doesn’t ask us to love him as he has loved us, but love one another as he has loved us.
                          • Peter after the Resurrection. His love for Jesus would be shown in the way he fed and tended Jesus’ sheep and lambs.
                          • John: if we say we love God but don’t love our neighbor, we are a liar and the love of God is not in us.
                          • Therese’s vocation, to be love in the heart of the Church. We all have a similar vocation. In order for us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and our neighbor as ourselves, we have to begin with the love of God. “In this is love,” St. John will say elsewhere, “not that we have loved God but that he has loved us and given himself as an expiation for our sins.”
                          • Various ways God reveals his love for us. Know and believe in him loving us in these ways.
                            • Baptism
                              • See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God.
                              • Divine Filiation.
                              • God the Father: “This is my son/daughter, in whom I am well pleased.”
                              • Most important day of our life
                              • Sin wiped away. Temple of God. Incorporated into the Church
                              • The joy of a Chinese convert at Columbia. Weiling Kong. Art. Baptism. She knew what it meant. She knew it could mean suffering. But she came and you couldn’t wipe the smile off her face for years.
                              • Another convert, a law school student. Claire Addinquy. Secular France. Faith of her grandmother. Finally she could act on it. Extraordinary joy worth selling everything to obtain.
                              • A third, Marin Minamaya. Several Guinness world records. Knew the consequences and how to change and made immediate changes. Asked if she might sing at her baptism. O Lord, I am not worthy.
                              • Each felt the love of the call of God to be his daughter. They believed in it. They chose.
                              • In the early Church, the first Christians needed to wait until that value became so strong that they would be willing to suffer. Willing to be faithful under trial. Until they were committed to abide in God always even should they have to trust in his love enough to be a martyr.
                              • Do we know and believe in this love? Do we abide in it?
                              • To believe in this love is to live our baptism. To reject Satan. To believe in God, the communion of saints and becoming a saint, to believe in the forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
                              • Eucharist
                                • We call the Eucharist the “Sacrament of Love.” Jesus did in the apparition of the Sacred Heart.
                                • If God the Father didn’t spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, would he not give us everything else besides? He gives us his Son every day.
                                • Teresa of Calcutta. On the Cross, Jesus showed us how much he loved us. In the Eucharist, he shows us how much he loves us now.
                                • Hence Jesus spoke about love during the first Mass.
                                • This is the means by which we’re able to remain in him (John 6) and thereby remain in his love. Just as he lives because of the Father, so he wants us to live because of him.
                                • Same Jesus. Looks different. Risen from the dead. Double-miracle.
                                • Summit of salvation history.
                                • Do we know and believe in this love? Do we live a Eucharistic life?
                                • Story of Cam from the NEP.
                                • My own story when the truth of the Real Presence hit.
                                  • 37 years ago, earlier this week. on Sept 23, 1988. Freshman
                                  • 13,516 days ago.
                                  • Sacrament of Confession
                                    • Forgiveness is an extraordinary gift of love. Requires a lot to forgive and reconcile.
                                    • Yet God forgives 70 x 7 times. While we were still sinners he sent his Son to die for our sins.
                                    • Even though our sins are like scarlet, he wants to make them as white as snow.
                                    • Divine Mercy devotion reveals the extraordinary depths of God’s mercy.
                                    • Lost sheep, lost coin, lost sons.
                                    • Heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner.
                                    • One of the most extraordinary aspects of the priest is to participate as a minister of the Sacrament of God’s mercy. So many who believe in the love of God come to receive this gift.
                                    • Common experience of people who haven’t been to confession in decades. First question: “Welcome back.” How God wants to bring good even out of sins. How his mercy is greater than our misery. How there can be a fresh start, a reset button.
                                    • Likewise experiences in prisons, experiences on retreats for post abortive women, experience with people who struggle to forgive themselves because of some of the horrible betrayals of God and their loved ones. To be able to experience in that moment of intense self-hatred the love of God can be life changing for them.
                                    • Missionary of Mercy. Preach mercy. Corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Hearing confessions and making God’s mercy available. Experiencing the joy of the Lord.
                                    • Do we know and believe in the love of God that he shows us in this way?
                                    • Do we take advantage of this gift and make heaven rejoice?
                                    • Do we pay it forward? Do we forgive those who owe us 10,000 talents. Erika Kirk and Donald Trump. Forgive or refuse to forgive. Love or hate our enemies? Which is the path of Christ? Which is the path the evil one wants us to take?
                                    • My own experiences. General confessions. Retreat confessions. Gratitude for the priests who hear, like those at St. Anthony’s in Boston. Peter’s Basilica. Jetez ces pêchés dans la poubelle! Father Joseph Henchey. This will make you a better confessor.
                                    • Do we know and believe in the love of God shown in this way?
                                    • Word of God
                                      • Deuteronomy 4 — God’s love shown in his ordinances.
                                        • Therefore, I teach you the statutes and decrees as the LORD, my God, has commanded me, that you may observe them in the land you are entering to occupy. Observe them carefully, for thus will you give evidence of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations, who will hear of all these statutes and say, ‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’ For what great nation is there that … has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?”
                                        • He is loving us on every page. Entering into dialogue with us.
                                        • How do we respond to it? Do we hunger for every Word? Or do we take it for granted?
                                        • Jerome. Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. It’s a certain ignorance of the depth of God’s love for us over time.
                                        • If we were to receive letters from a loved one, wouldn’t we look forward to reading them? Do we do the same with God’s love letters?
                                        • Story of Fr. Bob from Cleveland.
                                        • Story from Bishop Anton Justs from Latvia about Father Viktors.
                                        • Bible in a Year Podcast. So helpful for us to get to know him.
                                        • Do we know of the love of God in God’s word? Do we believe in it?
                                        • What about those parts of the Sacred Scripture that challenge us to change? Do we believe that all parts of Scripture are part of the Gospel?
                                        • Sacrament of Marriage and Family
                                          • We’re all born in a family.
                                          • Most here have the vocation to be married.
                                          • In the first, most of us have had the love of God revealed to us by the love of our parents, siblings and many others. We’ve learned that we were lovable. It became possible to identify and believe in a little of the love of God by the ways our dads represented God’s hesed and our moms enfleshed God’s rahamim. I certainly did. My dad showed me the love like St. Joseph, sacrificing everything for us, his vacation for ours, working hard every day in a job he didn’t like. My mom showed great love, taught about God, taught to pray, taught with joy, pride and affection. Taught about commitment. I always sought to love God as totally as my mother and to love others as a priest, particularly those entrusted to me, with the love of my dad.
                                          • For those who have received the sacrament, we experience something of the love God has for us in the love of another to whom we want to commit the rest of our life. We experience the desire to love them and the way that that grows.
                                          • In the family, we always have some sufferings. Some come from God. Some are permitted because of the choices of others. But marriage and the family are meant to be, albeit imperfectly, schools of love.
                                          • I’ve seen this in so many of the marriages I’ve celebrated, the anniversary Masses I’ve celebrated and more. I’ll never forget what some of the Jubilarians have said to me. “Honey, you got your way the last time. I want you to get your way again!” “We make love all day long.”
                                          • The connection to the Eucharist. Baldachins. “This is my Body given for you.” Always a connection.
                                          • The Church
                                            • God is love and that love is interpersonal. Triune.
                                            • God has made us in his image, reflecting this interpersonal communion.
                                            • At a natural level, we have marriage and family, as well as the social nature of the human person.
                                            • At a supernatural level, the personal love of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit, and he seeks to unite us in love.
                                            • The Church is meant to be a family.
                                            • Christ prayed for us to be one as God is one.
                                            • Christ loves the Church and laid down his life to make her holy by water and the word.
                                            • The Church is, therefore, a tremendous gift of the love of Christ. He doesn’t require us, or want us, to worship God alone. But to have the joy of worshipping him together with others. Together with Our Lady, St. Joseph, the great saints. Together with each other.
                                            • The first Christians got this and we see how they understood it. They prayed together, made pilgrimages together, ate together and had all things in common, selling their property and sharing the proceeds with whoever among them needed it. Because of that mutual love (and love for God in martyrdom) people were becoming Christians fast, despite the persecution.
                                            • Do we know and believe in this love that God has for us? Do we experience the love of Jesus’ bride — of the Church triumphant, suffering and on earth? Do we respond to the gift of friendship with the saints and God’s good ones here on earth?
                                            • Espirito Santo Parish. Church was there for them. They arrived with nothing but their faith. They cared for each other. They were there for each other in suffering and in joy. The parish really was their family.
                                            • People just out of jail in New Bedford. That people really cared for them. Many couldn’t believe it.
                                            • As a priest, we not only give and form, but receive and are formed. The love of the people formed me from the time I was a child. All those who passed on the faith and inspired me. Now form me still by their faith. As a missionary the welcome that I’ve received. The religious communities I’ve served and what they’ve done for birthdays, anniversaries or when I’ve really needed prayers. Those who pray for me every day.
                                            • Opportunities for Charity
                                              • God wants to help us learn how to grow in knowing and believing in his love through the experience of human love. We learn the love of God often through the love of parents, grandparents, Godparents, perhaps older siblings, aunts and uncles, priests, religious, parishioners and more. That’s important at the beginning.
                                              • But he wants that to grow. He gives us the opportunity to grow by paying it forward. He forms us to be Good Samaritans by putting people in need in our path. We meet people who need help.
                                              • John Vianney gave God thanks because he didn’t have to look for the poor, because they would often be at his Church doorstep.
                                              • In NYC, I don’t have to look forward, because the poor are on every block.
                                              • God loves us by giving us the opportunity to love. He incentivizes it by identifying with the poor, the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need.
                                              • Do we know and believe in the love of God by taking advantage of these privileges? By being stretched and generous? By making the time for someone. By helping them out when they were desperate?
                                              • Story of Jan Valjean.
                                                • Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
                                                • Jean Valjean’s interaction with the Bishop of Digne, Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel, called Bienvenue — “Monsignor Welcome” — in the novel.
                                                • Bienvenu is based on the real life Bishop of Digne, Bishop Bienvenue de Miollis (1753-1843). While a little-known priest, he had a chance encounter with Napoleon and praised him, as a result of which he was made a bishop. He continued to act like a common, compassionate, country priest, welcoming everyone. He moved into the smalltown hospital, so that the episcopal could be used as a hospital. He kept only a tenth of his salary for himself, spending the rest on alms. He once accompanied a condemned man to the scaffold, after the village priest refused to do so. Hugo’s narrator summarizes the bishop’s philosophy: “There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction of pity. Universal misery was his mine. The sadness that reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. Love each other; he declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was the whole of his doctrine.”
                                                • One evening, as we see in the novel, Jean Valjean shows up at his door, asking a place to stay the night. Bienvenu graciously accepts him, feeds him, and gives him a bed. Valjean takes most of Bienvenu’s silver and runs off in the night. The police capture Valjean and take him back to face Bienvenu. When the police inform Bienvenu they have found the silver in Valjean’s knapsack, Bienvenu tells the police that he had given them to Valjean as a gift. He chastises Valjean for not taking the silver candlesticks as well. After the police leave, Bienvenu tells Valjean to use the silver to become an honest man:
                                                • “Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man…. Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!”
                                                • In the Musical, the point is made just as powerfully. “But remember this, my brother / See in this some higher plan / You must use this precious silver / To become an honest man / By the witness of the martyrs / By the Passion and the Blood / God has raised you out of darkness / I have bought your soul for God!”
                                                • It’s important for us to know that Victor Hugo was rabidly anticlerical. He had a great anger against the Church. He could have easily based the bishop on a heartless ecclesiacrat, or one who lived a double life, or in some other way negative or even ordinary. He chose a bishop from his own lifetime, one whom he himself regarded with a reputation for sanctity and charity, and he did so intentionally. His son, who likewise resented the Church, tried to get him to make the figure who brought Valjean to conversion a doctor or a teacher. But Hugo kept the bishop, because he wanted through showing his charity the standard to which his readers ought to hold their own bishops. He thought most would fall short and the lack of charity in the episcopate would be sufficient justification for people to recognize that the Gospel didn’t have the power to change us for the better if it wouldn’t change even the leaders of the Church.
                                                • I think it’s a challenge in every age for us to become, for the sake of the Lord’s name, Mr. Bienvenu, Mr. Caritas, Mr. Misericordia.
                                                • John Vianney: all we have is a divine depository placed in our hands. We have a chance to exercise God’s charity.
                                                  • My present position distributes American charity. I’m able to see it. It’s incredible to help people in this way. To some degree we all have this.
                                                  • Do we know and believe in God’s love in this way, entrusting us with the care for others, his own sons and daughters?
                                                  • Conclusion
                                                    • Tonight’s talk was “Living by Fatih in the Love God has for us”
                                                    • It’s not enough to know it. It’s not enough to believe in the love that God has.
                                                    • That’s faith, that knowledge, must lead to action. It must translate into life.
                                                    • The seven ways I’ve highlighted are not the only ways that we could examine. I would hope over these days, through your private prayer, through the other talks, through your small group sharings, you will explore many other ways that God shows you his love, inciting you to come to know him and relate to him with love on the basis of the fiery love he shows you. But it’s always a thing of action. Faith leads to life. And the Church needs those who manifest that they realize they are loved, a love from which we cannot be separated, a love that conquers even death.

                                                      • The post Living by Faith in the Love God Has for Us, Retreat Conference for Alumni of Manhattan College, September 26, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                                      1 hr 5 min
                                                    • Christian Anthropology: The Human Person in the Modern World, NYC Chapter of the Leonine Forum, September 25, 2025

                                                      Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                                                      New York City Leonine Forum Chapter
                                                      IESE Business School
                                                      September 25, 2025

                                                       

                                                      To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s presentation, please click below: 

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                                                      To download a copy of the PDF of the slides of the presentation, please click below: 

                                                      LF 2025 Christian Anthropology Man in the Modern World

                                                      The post Christian Anthropology: The Human Person in the Modern World, NYC Chapter of the Leonine Forum, September 25, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                                      1 hr 21 min
                                                    • Building God’s Dwelling Place with Urgency, 25th Thursday (I), September 25, 2025

                                                      Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                                                      Leonine Forum NYC Chapter, IESE Business School
                                                      Thursday of the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
                                                      Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit
                                                      September 25, 2025
                                                      Hg 1:1-8, Ps 149, Lk 9:7-9

                                                       

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

                                                      https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.25.25_Homily_1.mp3

                                                       

                                                      The following points were attempted in the homily:

                                                      • As we begin the Leonine Forum together with this Mass of the Holy Spirit, we focus straight out on the way the Lord wants to build us up this year by helping us to build our life on him.
                                                      • We are now in the midst of three weeks of focus in the first reading on the post-exilic writings during which the Church has us ponder, if there are no proper feasts, on three days of Ezra, two days of Haggai, three days of Zechariah, two days of Nehemiah, two days of Baruch, three days of Jonah, one day of Malachi and two days of Joel.  These post-exilic writings focus essentially on two things: first, the rebuilding of the temple and, second, the way of holiness so that there is never again an exile from God. Since today is one of only two days in two years we will listen liturgically to Haggai, let’s ask the Holy Spirit who inspired him to help us to listen well to the message God wants us to get through him. The way we’re supposed to hear with ears to hear is to link what is said about rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem to Jesus’ resurrection (the True Temple), to the temple that is the Church, and to the temple that is meant to be each of us together with Jesus.
                                                      • In today’s passage from Haggai, we see how the Lord sent the prophet to wake up the people of God whom the Lord had freed from exile. It was happening during the time of King Darius, the son of Cyrus. As we’ve seen over the last three days from the Book of Ezra, Cyrus had allowed the Jews to return and helped them to start rebuilding the Temple and Darius refunded all of their sacrifices. But the Jews did not finish the job. They built something quickly and temporarily on the Temple Mount, but then started to prioritize their own affairs. They were saying, “The time has not yet come to rebuild the House of the Lord.” They were delaying the things of God for their own affairs, while constructing their own luxurious paneled houses. Haggai, speaking for the Lord said, “Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses, while this house [of God] lies in ruins?” He then went on to say that they would never find fulfillment in sowing, eating, drinking, clothing, or money making. The forceful appeal of the Lord was “Consider your ways!” He told them to go get timber and begin to build the house of the Lord “that I may take pleasure in it and receive my glory.” That might seem like an egocentric statement, but it’s not. The Lord takes pleasure in loving us — we prayed in the Psalm, “The Lord takes delight in his people” — and his glory is, as St. Ireneus would say at the end of the second century, “man fully alive” through the vision of God. God wanted a house of God built so that we would fittingly worship him, because it is through such worship that he builds us into a holy temple. It starts, however, with proper zeal. Before the first temple was built, we saw in King David an opposite attitude to that of the post-exilic Jews. King David was eaten alive by the fact that he was living in a palace while the ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was in a tent. He wanted to build a fitting temple, but God, through the prophet Nathan, replied that He instead would build a temple for David. That temple was obviously David’s own descendant according to the flesh and God’s own Son, Jesus. We’re all called, however, to have the same zeal to build a house of the Lord because that’s the way the Lord in fact makes us his temple. In the Gospel, Herod was curious to meet Jesus, but Jesus will never be able to build a temple for him to dwell within us by curiosity. There needs to be a true relationship, a union, with the Lord, a hunger for mutual indwelling, something that Herod never had.
                                                      • The Holy Spirit has been sent among us to help us build our whole life on Jesus the Cornerstone, so that we, in fact, can become a true temple of God’s presence. In Catholic Social Teaching, in the whole Christian life, we begin with two truths: the truth of God and our having been created in God’s image and likeness. The summit of human life is when we can not only become like God but have God dwell within us. That’s what happens in the sacramental life. It begins in baptism and intensifies every Holy Communion, when we receive within ourselves what the Blessed Fruit of Mary’s womb who dwelled within her for nine months. Starting from this awesome reality of human dignity, we strive as Catholics to build the Kingdom of God, a civilization of love, a culture of life, peace, justice, solidarity, virtue and more. Everything begins here. But we have to take responsibility. We have to consider our ways. We have to begin with our own conversion and build ourselves on Christ and then, together, to go out as salt, light and leaven and transform culture.
                                                      • The Lord Jesus, the Cornerstone, comes from heaven to the altar to make us his holy temple. He invites us each day to build our life wisely on the rock of his Word and even more on him who is the Word-made-flesh. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit’s help for our joint labors this year so that the Holy Spirit may enkindle in us the fire of his love and through us renew the face of the earth.

                                                        •  

                                                        The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                                                        Reading 1
                                                        HG 1:1-8
                                                        On the first day of the sixth month in the second year of King Darius,
                                                        The word of the LORD came through the prophet Haggai
                                                        to the governor of Judah, Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel,
                                                        and to the high priest Joshua, son of Jehozadak:
                                                        Thus says the LORD of hosts:
                                                        This people says:
                                                        “The time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the LORD.”
                                                        (Then this word of the LORD came through Haggai, the prophet:)
                                                        Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses,
                                                        while this house lies in ruins?
                                                        Now thus says the LORD of hosts:
                                                        Consider your ways!
                                                        You have sown much, but have brought in little;
                                                        you have eaten, but have not been satisfied;
                                                        You have drunk, but have not been exhilarated;
                                                        have clothed yourselves, but not been warmed;
                                                        And whoever earned wages
                                                        earned them for a bag with holes in it.
                                                        Thus says the LORD of hosts:
                                                        Consider your ways!
                                                        Go up into the hill country;
                                                        bring timber, and build the house
                                                        That I may take pleasure in it
                                                        and receive my glory, says the LORD.
                                                        Responsorial Psalm
                                                        PS 149:1B-2, 3-4, 5-6A AND 9B
                                                        R. (see 4a) The Lord takes delight in his people.
                                                        Sing to the LORD a new song
                                                        of praise in the assembly of the faithful.
                                                        Let Israel be glad in their maker,
                                                        let the children of Zion rejoice in their king.
                                                        R. The Lord takes delight in his people.
                                                        Let them praise his name in the festive dance,
                                                        let them sing praise to him with timbrel and harp.
                                                        For the LORD loves his people,
                                                        and he adorns the lowly with victory.
                                                        R. The Lord takes delight in his people.
                                                        Let the faithful exult in glory;
                                                        let them sing for joy upon their couches;
                                                        Let the high praises of God be in their throats.
                                                        This is the glory of all his faithful. Alleluia.
                                                        R. The Lord takes delight in his people.
                                                        Gospel
                                                        LK 9:7-9
                                                        Herod the tetrarch heard about all that was happening,
                                                        and he was greatly perplexed because some were saying,
                                                        “John has been raised from the dead”;
                                                        others were saying, “Elijah has appeared”;
                                                        still others, “One of the ancient prophets has arisen.”
                                                        But Herod said, “John I beheaded.
                                                        Who then is this about whom I hear such things?”
                                                        And he kept trying to see him.

                                                        The post Building God’s Dwelling Place with Urgency, 25th Thursday (I), September 25, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                                        16 min
                                                      • Missionaries of Hope Among the Peoples (Part II), Day of Reflection for the Diocese of Fort Worth Mission Council, September 20, 2025

                                                        Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                                                        St. Bartholomew Church, Fort Worth, Texas
                                                        Day of Reflection for the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth Mission Council
                                                        September 20, 2025

                                                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.20.25_Fort_Worth_Mission_Council_Part_II_1.mp3

                                                        The post Missionaries of Hope Among the Peoples (Part II), Day of Reflection for the Diocese of Fort Worth Mission Council, September 20, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                                        46 min
                                                      • Missionaries of Hope Among the Peoples (Part I), Day of Reflection for the Diocese of Fort Worth Mission Council, September 20, 2025

                                                        Msgr. Roger J. Landry

                                                        St. Bartholomew Church, Fort Worth, Texas
                                                        Day of Reflection for the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth Mission Council
                                                        September 20, 2025

                                                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.20.25_Fort_Worth_Mission_Council_Part_I_1.mp3

                                                        The post Missionaries of Hope Among the Peoples (Part I), Day of Reflection for the Diocese of Fort Worth Mission Council, September 20, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                                        33 min
                                                      • Preaching and Proclaiming with Christ the Good News of the Kingdom of God, 24th Friday (I), September 19, 2025

                                                        Fr. Roger J. Landry

                                                        National Assembly of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious
                                                        Basilica of the Old Cathedral of St. Louis, Saint Louis, Missouri
                                                        Friday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
                                                        September 19, 2025
                                                        1 Tim 6:2-12, Ps 49, Lk 8:1-3

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

                                                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.19.25_CMSWR_Homily_1.mp3

                                                         

                                                        The following text guided the homily: 

                                                        • As we enter together more deeply in this National Assembly into the reality of our being pilgrims of hope and witnesses even now of the life of the world to come, and celebrate this special votive Mass for the Holy Year of Hope, we are providentially given today’s readings, which teach us three crucial lessons of this journey of hope together with Christ Jesus our hope (1 Tim 1:1).
                                                        • The first lesson is about the initial proclamation of hope that Christ came into the world to give. In today’s short Gospel, we see Jesus’ peripatetic preaching, journeying from one town to another preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. This was a snapshot of his ordinary life, what occupied most of his days. He was announcing the kingdom and inviting people to enter. In the midst of all of their sufferings, hardships and up-until-then centuries of unfilled hopes awaiting the Messiah, awaiting God’s saving interaction in history, he was proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God. He was helping them to see that Sacred Scripture was being fulfilled in their hearing, inviting them to strive to enter through the narrow gate, encouraging them to buy the treasure buried in a field and selling everything they have for the precious pearl of the kingdom. The Kingdom of God, as Pope Benedict loved to say, is God. It means that God is present and the ultimate criterion of life. And that God had taken our humanity and was journeying in their streets inviting them to come, follow him.
                                                        • The second lesson is that he wasn’t preaching and proclaiming the Gospel alone. He was accompanied first by those whom he had chosen to be with him so that he might then send them out (Mk 3:14). These twelve disciples whom he named and formed as apostles, he had already bestowed his power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases and had sent them to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick and they went out on their first missionary journey, journeying from village to village, proclaiming the good news and curing diseases everywhere. Today we see Jesus taking out these apostolic year novices on his own missionary journey.
                                                        • But they were not the only ones with Jesus. St. Luke adds a very important detail. He said that some women were accompanying Jesus and the apostles, women who had received Jesus’ healing power — they had “been cured of evil spirits and infirmities” — and wanted to spend their life, with faith and constancy, assisting him to heal others and raise them up. Three get named — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ epitropos or money man Chuza, and Susanna — but Luke also says “and many others,” who “provided for them out of their resources.” They couldn’t preach; that was unheard of in Judaism and Jewish culture, but rather that lament what they couldn’t do, they were doing all they can to make possible, and share in, the preaching and proclamation of the Kingdom of God. These women were the ones who, to some degree, were making possible Jesus’ and the apostles’ preaching, so that Jesus everyday wouldn’t have to multiply loaves and fish, so that they wouldn’t have to appall the hypersensitive Scribes and the Pharisees by plucking heads of grain while walking through the fields. Like the widow with her two lepta placed in the Temple treasury, these three-plus-many women were giving all they had to help Jesus and the apostles proclaim, manifest and bring the Kingdom of God that was at hand. They were the ones who were providing drink to lubricate Jesus’ and the apostles’ vocal cords. They were the ones who were making sure that they would have the necessary bread within their bodies to be able to preach that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. This was not a group of bored do-gooders who figured that these wandering 13 men would be lost without their feminine genius and maternal practicality. Having received much from the mercy of Jesus, like the woman we met yesterday in Simon the Pharisee’s house, they loved much, and they wanted to give Jesus and his mission all the love, time and the material goods they could. They’re a model for all of us in making the choice to serve God rather than mammon and to use whatever resources we have for the building up of the kingdom. They are witnesses of the first beatitude, showing us true poverty in spirit, for theirs, their treasure, was the kingdom of God.
                                                        • We are here in this historical Basilica of St. Louis, the first Cathedral west of the Mississippi, the seat of what was once known as the Rome of the West. In the 1700s, the French-Canadian Catholic settlers who had arrived with and after the great Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette were part of the Diocese of Havana Cuba. After the American Revolution, Pope Pius VI established the Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, based in New Orleans, a vast jurisdiction that went from the Florida Keys all the way through the territory of what would become in 1803 the Louisiana Purchase to the Canadian border. For reasons of personal safety, the Bishop of the Diocese at the time, Bishop Louis Dubourg moved here for nine years from 1815-24. When he was given Bishop Joseph Rosati as an auxiliary, Dubourg moved back to Louisiana and kept Rosati here. Two years later, Pope Leo XII split the vast Diocese into two and made Rosati the first bishop of St. Louis. He then set out to build a Cathedral, the very Church that we’re in. And how did he do it? With the help of women, who, like those named in the Gospel, provided for the Church out of their resources. Most of the resources came from the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, which had just been founded by Blessed Pauline Jaricot in Lyons, France a few years before. Wanting to help the missions in Florida and China, she got together circles of ten women at a time, first in her father’s factory and then all over France, who would pray every day for the missions and contribute one sou or penny a week. As the circles expanded so did the support. The first contributions of the Society came to care for the Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas and the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky. When Bishop Rosati wanted to build this Cathedral, he appealed to her and that solicitation did not go in vain. The women of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith generously donated from their weekly collection of sous the equivalent of a vast sum that made this building possible.
                                                        • In every age the Church is built not just on the work of missionaries, and preachers, and bishops and priests, but on the sacrifices, contributions, the prayers and financial sacrifices of women like those in the Gospel. And so important for the growth of the Church in the United States and across the globe has been the inestimable contribution of religious women. During Bishop Dubourg’s brief stay here, he made the extremely consequential move of inviting the Society of the Sacred Heart in France to open schools here and soon thereafter St. Rose Philippine Duchesne arrived with other sisters and helped build the Church and make it strong. Later he invited the Sisters of Loreto. Rosati in his first day invited the Daughters of Charity. The Rome of the West wasn’t built in a day, but it grew strong and fast thanks to the total dedication to Christ and his kingdom of these heroic religious women. And that’s an image of the way of how the Church was built in the United States, through the dedicated labors of so many congregations of women religious, preaching and proclaiming the reality of the Kingdom of God in the school, college and university classrooms, at bedsides, in orphanages, in food pantries and more. The Church Christ established is not just grammatically feminine in every language that gives nouns a gender. It’s Marian before it’s Petrine. Before Jesus was able to say, “This is my Body given for you,” Mary said, “This is my body, given for you.” This Basilica is a living reminder of the sturdy feminine infrastructure of the Church, stretching back beyond the apostolic age to the scene we see in today’s Gospel. This Basilica has been since 1834 a station on the pilgrim Church’s journey, where generations of Catholics have been spiritually nourished and filled with hope as they’ve made their journey not just westward but simultaneously upward toward the heavenly Jerusalem.
                                                        • The third lesson of hope from today’s readings is about teaching. St. Paul writes the young St. Timothy urging him at the beginning of today’s first reading, “Teach and urge these things.” He reminded him that there were many teaching “something different” that did “not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ,” whose so-called “religious teaching” was “conceited, understanding nothing,” and led to “arguments, verbal disputes, envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds … deprived of truth.” Among those were the religious mercenaries who “suppose[ed] religion to be a means of gain” who out of “love of money… strayed from the faith.” St. Paul was instructing his beloved spiritual son to “teach and urge” what Paul as of the first importance had passed on to him about all that Christ had taught, proclaimed and done. He encouraged him to fight the good fight of faith, to compete with “righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness, … lay[ing] hold of eternal,” to which, Paul reminds him, “he was called when [he] made the noble confession of faith in the presence of many witnesses.” St. Timothy, as we know, continued to make that noble profession. He continued to teach and urge the things of the truth and to form others to know, live and share that truth.
                                                        • In this Jubilee of Hope, we are marking with great joy the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Pope Leo this November will go to Turkey so that, together with Patriarch Bartholomew and Christian leaders from throughout the globe, they can renew the Symbol of Nicaea and Constantinople that was put together 17 centuries ago this summer. It was composed in response to the Alexandrian priest Arius who was teaching “something different” than the “sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He was precisely denying the great source of Christian hope because he was denying the divinity of Jesus. If St. Paul would write the Ephesians that they before Gospel was brought to them were living “without hope” because they were “living without God in the world,” then hope means, as Pope Benedict suggested in Spe Salvi, “living with God in the world.” Arianism was extinguishing Christian hope by trying to water down the Gospel, by trying to change the deposit of faith and make it less challenging. The Council of Nicaea addressed it head on, condemned Arianism and proclaimed the faith especially by giving us this Symbol or Creed Christians have prayed ever since. This Creed, therefore, is not just a symbol of faith but of hope, proclaiming that God is with us: God the Father who loves us; God the Son, Light from Light, True God from true God, who for us and our salvation came down from heaven and by the power of the Holy Spirit was born of the Virgin Mary and became man, who died for us, rose, ascended and will return; God the Holy Spirit, the personal mutual love of the Father and the Son, the giver of life who continues to speak with tongues of fire, reminding us of everything Jesus has taught and leading us into all truth. The Creed similarly fills us hope because of the reality of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church founded by Christ and led by the Holy Spirit. It fills us with hope because of the trust we place in the promises Jesus has made about meaning of our baptism, of the possibility of the forgiveness of our sins, of the resurrection of our aging bodies, and of life everlasting, our great hope. Today St. Paul does not just say to St. Timothy, “Teach and urge these things” but he urges us to teach and urge others to embrace the life changing truth of the Gospel, the reality of the Kingdom, and of the King, who is the Way, Truth, Resurrection and Life.
                                                        • Today at Mass the same Jesus who journeyed from one town and village to another, preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God will come from heaven to Saint Louis to us. Accompanying him spiritually are 11 of the 12 apostles interceding for us, of we pray the women named in the Gospel and “many others” who are providing for the Church on earth out of the enormous resources of their prayers. Jesus comes to strengthen us in this historic parish or “hostel” along the journey of the Church’s pilgrimage on earth, as we commit ourselves to continue his mission of going from one town and village to another, preaching and proclaiming the good news of his Kingdom any and every way we can.

                                                          •  

                                                          The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                                                          Reading 1
                                                          1 Timothy 6:2c-12

                                                          Beloved:

                                                          Teach and urge these things.
                                                          Whoever teaches something different
                                                          and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ
                                                          and the religious teaching
                                                          is conceited, understanding nothing,
                                                          and has a morbid disposition for arguments and verbal disputes.
                                                          From these come envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,
                                                          and mutual friction among people with corrupted minds,
                                                          who are deprived of the truth,
                                                          supposing religion to be a means of gain.
                                                          Indeed, religion with contentment is a great gain.
                                                          For we brought nothing into the world,
                                                          just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it.
                                                          If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.
                                                          Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap
                                                          and into many foolish and harmful desires,
                                                          which plunge them into ruin and destruction.
                                                          For the love of money is the root of all evils,
                                                          and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith
                                                          and have pierced themselves with many pains.

                                                          But you, man of God, avoid all this.

                                                          Instead, pursue righteousness, devotion,
                                                          faith, love, patience, and gentleness.
                                                          Compete well for the faith.
                                                          Lay hold of eternal life,
                                                          to which you were called when you made the noble confession
                                                          in the presence of many witnesses.

                                                          Responsorial Psalm
                                                          Psalm 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20

                                                          R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!

                                                          Why should I fear in evil days
                                                          when my wicked ensnarers ring me round?
                                                          They trust in their wealth;
                                                          the abundance of their riches is their boast.
                                                          R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
                                                          Yet in no way can a man redeem himself,
                                                          or pay his own ransom to God;
                                                          Too high is the price to redeem one’s life; he would never have enough
                                                          to remain alive always and not see destruction.
                                                          R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
                                                          Fear not when a man grows rich,
                                                          when the wealth of his house becomes great,
                                                          For when he dies, he shall take none of it;
                                                          his wealth shall not follow him down.
                                                          R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
                                                          Though in his lifetime he counted himself blessed,
                                                          “They will praise you for doing well for yourself,”
                                                          He shall join the circle of his forebears
                                                          who shall never more see light.
                                                          R. Blessed the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!

                                                          Alleluia
                                                          See Matthew 11:25

                                                          R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                                                          Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth;
                                                          you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom.
                                                          R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                                                          Gospel
                                                          Luke 8:1-3

                                                          Jesus journeyed from one town and village to another,

                                                          preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God.
                                                          Accompanying him were the Twelve
                                                          and some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities,
                                                          Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out,
                                                          Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza,
                                                          Susanna, and many others
                                                          who provided for them out of their resources.

                                                          The post Preaching and Proclaiming with Christ the Good News of the Kingdom of God, 24th Friday (I), September 19, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                                                          21 min

                                                        About Catholic Preaching

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                                                        Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, who works for the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations in New York.

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