Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

March 08, 2025 Being Reconciled to God and Making Better Confessions, NYC Leonine Forum Lenten Day of Recollection, March 8, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Agnes Church, Manhattan
Lenten Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum and Columbia Catholic Ministry
March 8, 2025

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The post Being Reconciled to God and Making Better Confessions, NYC Leonine Forum Lenten Day of Recollection, March 8, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
53 min
March 08, 2025Following Matthew and John of God on the Path of Lenten Conversion, Saturday after Ash Wednesday, March 8, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Agnes Church, Manhattan
Lenten Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum
Saturday after Ash Wednesday
March 8, 2025
Is 58:9-14, Ps 86, Lk 5:27-32

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
“Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth,” we prayed several times today in the Responsorial Psalm. And the Truth incarnate responds in the Gospel, first for Matthew and then for all of us, by coming into our lives and saying, “Follow me!”
“Follow me!” These words mean that we have to change course, we can no longer go our own way and do our own thing. Once Christ calls us, once he teaches us his way, we are summoned to walk in his truth. That’s the call to conversion. Conversion literally means turning with Jesus. When he turns to the Father, we turn with him. When he turns to his mother, so do we. When he turns to our neighbor, we follow him across the road. When he sets his face firmly on Calvary, we walk with him along that way of the Cross.
There are two types of people with different standard reactions to Jesus’ command. Some people are in Matthew’s circumstance, where it’s obvious to them and everyone else that they have been going in the opposite direction of the Lord. These words come as nothing short of a revolution. Many will stubbornly continue to go their own way. Others, like St. Matthew today, will seize the summons as a once in a lifetime opportunity. We’ll return to him in a moment.
The second main group of people hear Jesus’ words, “Follow me!” as nothing revolutionary at all. They think that, even if they might have some diversions here and there, from time to time, they “basically” follow the Lord. They believe, for example, that they’re devout Christians and yet are indifferent to the slaughter of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in the womb, or turn hardened hearts to Jesus’ brothers and sisters at the border, or respond with a shoulder shrug to the mass murders of innocents in Ukraine, northern Nigeria or the Middle East. They assert they follow Jesus but don’t really make time for him each day in prayer or come to be with him and receive him worthily in the Holy Eucharist. They say they follow him but they think he’s going the wrong way on various issue controversial to our enlightened or woke age. This latter group is somewhat like St. Peter after Jesus had revealed Peter’s vocation to be the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church. When Jesus announced for the first time that he would be betrayed, tortured and crucified, Peter said, “No such thing will ever happen to you, Lord!,” and Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do.” After having changed his name from Simon to Peter, Jesus changed it again to Satan, because, like Satan in the desert, Peter was trying to lead Jesus, not follow He was thinking according to worldly logic, not divine. He was not interested in the Lord’s teaching him how to walk in the truth, but in his own instructing the Lord the way things should go. And many are in this category: they believe they’re following the Lord — and, like Peter, they’ve made various big choices to follow him — but they don’t follow him yet fully. They still want to be in charge of the relationship, at least some or most of the time. Even after the Resurrection, when St. Peter was asking Jesus what would happen to St. John, Jesus simply said to Peter, basically, “Peter, mind your own business. Stay focused. Your job is to follow me!”
So whether we’re in the first category, that of Matthew, who needs to turn around almost 180 degrees to follow Jesus, or whether we’re in the second, that of Peter, who may be blind as to how much he needs to change to think as God thinks, to learn his ways and walk in them, Jesus meets us all today and renews his powerful, life-changing invitation, “Follow me!” He makes that appeal insistently during the Lenten season. To convert does not mean just making minor course corrections in our life like cleaning up our speech, being more patient with the family members or work colleagues who drive us crazy, giving up a bad habit like an addiction to the internet or social media. Conversion goes much deeper than that. Jesus’ call to us three days ago as ashes were being imposed, “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” is much more profound. The Greek word to convert — metanoete— means to turn our head around, to question the path we’re on, to make a choice to try to think as God thinks and live by his ways, consciously choosing not to live everyone else lives, to think as everyone else thinks, to prioritize what everyone else finds important. To convert means ultimately to seek to adopt Christ’s own life as our own, to enter into a deep friendship with him, to die to the old Adam in us so that we can share, full-time, the New Adam’s risen life.
We see the beauty of this process and gift of conversion in the life of St. Matthew. He was a despised tax collector who used to extort money from his own people to give it to the occupying Romans. The way the Roman tax system worked was that the Romans needed to get a set fee from a given territory; everything the tax collectors got beyond that was theirs to keep. Because of this system, many tax collectors, filled with greed, would begin greedily to rip off their own people with the help of the Roman army. They were like modern mafia dons who extort neighborhood small businesses and even families to pay “protection fees” lest an “accident” happen to their businesses or loved ones. For Jesus to go after Matthew at his customs post then would be as dramatic as his going into the Playboy Mansion and calling Hugh Hefner from his vixens, or entering into Al Capone’s speakeasy and calling him from his booze and hundred dollar bills. Jesus desires mercy and he came to call sinners to repentance — and he was going to show that by going after one of the most notorious sinners of his day. By this point, because of all the miracles Jesus had been working in Capernaum, Matthew must have heard about Jesus. Perhaps he had even stood at a distance to hear him speak or known someone who had been healed. But just like someone in prison would never expect a phone call from the Pope, so he never would have thought Jesus would want him to be among his associates, not to mention friends. Yet in today’s Gospel Jesus enters the place where he was working and says to him, “Follow me!”
Matthew’s response was two-fold. First, he immediately left everything to follow Jesus. He left all his money on the table, all his ledgers, everything. That’s how powerful the summons of Jesus really is. Matthew responded far more quickly than the great prophets up until then, like Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or certainly Jonah. A few days ago, on Ash Wednesday, St. Paul implored the Christians in Corinth not to receive the grace of God’s gift of conversion in vain, and Matthew certainly didn’t! St. Paul also reminded the Corinthians and us, “Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation!,” and Matthew responded with the urgency befitting the offer.
But his response didn’t end there. The second part of it was to celebrate his conversion. He called together his friends for a party with Jesus, presumably so that they not only could share in his unbelievable turnaround but experience a similar one. When the Scribes and the Pharisees saw Jesus in a notorious public sinner’s house eating with him, they took scandal. There’s an aphorism that we become like the company we keep and the Pharisees and Scribes totally avoided notorious sinners lest they become like them. They asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” They didn’t think that it was possible that Jesus could lift sinners up toward God’s level; rather they were convinced that company would drag him and his followers down. Overhearing them, Jesus said, “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have come not to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”
What Matthew intuitively grasped, and the Scribes and Pharisees obstinately didn’t, was that he was sick. He knew his sins were a terrible cancer of the soul and, even though he was surrounded by money, he was slowly dying unhappy and unfulfilled. When Jesus the divine Physician appeared and said he wanted to treat him, Matthew immediately responded and rejoiced. The problem for the Scribes and Pharisees is that, like St. Peter in Caesarea Philippi, they didn’t recognize that they, too, were sick, that they, too, were sinners. One of their most self-injurious characteristics is that they didn’t recognize they needed Jesus because they didn’t think they needed saving. Lent is a time in which Jesus the Doctor gives us the diagnosis of a death sentence — “Temember that … unto dust you shall return” — but then tells us that he will cure us. We must, however, recognize both that we’re sick and then follow his treatment regime. Will we do so? Or will we be like those patients who, for whatever reason, never go to the doctor or take the medicine the doctor prescribes? Jesus tells us at the end of today’s Gospel, “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” Therefore, if we’re called by Jesus to be his disciple, we’re called, like Matthew, precisely as sinners summoned to repentance. And our response to that call will involve receiving the gift of Jesus’ mercy in the Sacrament of Conversion (about which we’ll talk more this morning) that Jesus established on Easter Sunday night and sent Matthew and the other reconciled sinners among the apostles to bring to the world.
As we continue to pray for the Holy Father, now more than three weeks into his hospitalization, it’s important to ponder the role today’s Gospel had in his life and is meant to have in ours. Back on the feast of St. Matthew in 1953 — September 21, the first day of Spring in Argentina and a national holiday — the 16-year-old Jorge Bergoglio was planning to spend the day at a picnic with friends. Before meeting with them at the train station, he stopped by to pray at his parish Church dedicated to St. Joseph. A priest he had never seen before, Fr. Carlos Duarte Ibarra, was in the Church. Young Jorge decided to approach him and asked him to hear his confession. We don’t know what the boy said to the priest or how the priest replied. But we know that that confession totally changed not only the teenager’s plans for the day but for the whole course of his life. Pope Francis said a few years ago, “Before going to the celebration I passed through the parish I normally attended. I found a priest whom I did not know and I felt the need to go to confession. For me this was an experience of encounter: I found that Someone was waiting for me. I do not know what happened. … I do not know why that particular priest was there whom I did not know, or why I felt this desire to confess, but the truth is that Someone was waiting for me. He had been waiting for me for some time. After finishing confession I felt something had changed. I was not the same. I had heard something like a voice, or a call. I was convinced that I should become a priest.” His papal motto, taken from the Office of Readings every priest reads on September 21 for the Feast of St. Matthew, relives the encounter that took place in the Buenos Aires confessional. “Miserando atque Eligendo,” St. Bede’s words about the former tax collector he realized could also be said about his vocation and every Christian vocation: Jesus “saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him.” The Lord wants us to recognize that, just like he did with St. Matthew, just like he did with Jorge Bergoglio, so he has chosen us through his mercy and wants us to help others to recognize the same calling. Little did Jorge Bergoglio recognize then that he would one day become the successor of St. Peter. But he already intuited he was to be a successor of St. Matthew, someone called through mercy and sent out as a herald and minister of that mercy. We, too, each in our own way, are called and sent out by the Lord as successors of St. Matthew as well.
Today the Church celebrates someone who had a conversion as profound as Matthew’s and went on, like the evangelist, to become a great saint. João Duarte Cidade, whom we now call St. John of God, was born in Portugal in 1495 and at 27 became a soldier in Castile. Like many in the military throughout the centuries, he gave himself over to vice, became thoroughly licentious and left the practice of the faith. Eventually the army was disbanded and he worked as a shepherd. At the age of about 40, stung with remorse for his past sins, he resolved to be healed and to give himself over to God’s service. He tried first as a martyr among the Christian slaves in Morocco, but that plan didn’t work. Then he began to care for the poor and eventually for the sick. He heard a sermon by now doctor of the Church St. John of Avila and was so affected that he filled the sanctuary with his cries, beating his breast and loudly imploring God’s mercy. St. John of Avila gave him God’s mercy and set him straight. From that point forward, until he would die at 55, he immersed himself in the care for others out of love for God. He founded a hospital to care for those whom everyone was neglecting and allowed himself to be surrounded by a group of men who would eventually be called the “Brothers Hospitallers,” popularly called the Fatebenefratelli, the “Do Good Brothers.” In a letter he wrote that the Church presents to us in the Office of Readings this morning, he describes how to receive God’s mercy, we must be prepared to receive it and want to share it, something that the Church in her wisdom grasps as she insistently summons us to almsgiving in this Lenten season of conversion. “If we look forward to receiving God’s mercy,” St. John of God wrote, “we can never fail to do good so long as we have the strength. For if we share with the poor, out of love for God, whatever he has given to us, we shall receive according to his promise a hundredfold in eternal happiness. What a fine profit, what a blessed reward! Who would not entrust his possessions to this best of merchants, who handles our affairs so well? With outstretched arms he begs us to turn toward him, to weep for our sins, and to become the servants of love, first for ourselves, then for our neighbors. Just as water extinguishes a fire, so love wipes away sin.” He did it in such a Christ-like way that his contemporaries simply called him “John of God.” Today he is interceding for us to learn to love God and others like he did.
What’s the conversion the Lord concretely is asking of us? During Lent the Church focuses with resolve on three interrelated ways that Jesus is calling us to reorder our relationship to him, to ourselves and to others. Jesus said them to us in the Gospel on Ash Wednesday. The first is, “When you pray….” Jesus seeks to lead us apart, like he did Matthew and the apostles, from the crowds to pray with him, as we resolve to do on this Day of Recollection. The second is, “When you fast,” and leads us into the desert of Lent for 40 days, where, apart from distractions, we can learn how to hunger for what he hungers. The third is, “When you give alms,” as he desires us to go with him to care for those who are in need. In anticipation of Jesus’ own actions, Isaiah tells us in the first reading that we must, among other things, bestow bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted, remove from our midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech, all of which are rampant today. We must repair the breaches that have been made in society and restore the ruined homesteads and broken families. In all of these we follow Jesus, and seek to unite ourselves to him, in his praying, fasting and giving of himself down to the last drop of his Precious Blood.
Today at Mass the same Jesus, the Divine Physician, who called and chose Matthew through his mercy, comes here with his healing power to call and choose us anew again. He comes to have another meal with sinners, not in Matthew’s house, but in this Church dedicated to him through the intercession of St. Agnes. Matthew, we know, was present at the first Mass and was given the sacramental power by Christ to “do this in memory of” him. As we prepare to offer with faith and gratitude Christ’s body, blood, soul and divinity shed “for the forgiveness of sins,” we beg the Lord for the grace to grasp that we are sinners who desperately need him each day to heal us. And let us, through the intercession of St. Matthew, respond to that help to leave our old habits, our old “customs” on the table, and immediately get up to follow him wherever he leads so that, having learned from him his way, we may walk in his truth all the way to the eternal banquet with Matthew, John of God and all the saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Isaiah 58:9b-14
Thus says the LORD:
If you remove from your midst oppression,
false accusation and malicious speech;
If you bestow your bread on the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted;
Then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday;
Then the LORD will guide you always
and give you plenty even on the parched land.
He will renew your strength,
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring whose water never fails.
The ancient ruins shall be rebuilt for your sake,
and the foundations from ages past you shall raise up;
“”Repairer of the breach,”” they shall call you,
“”Restorer of ruined homesteads.””
If you hold back your foot on the sabbath
from following your own pursuits on my holy day;
If you call the sabbath a delight,
and the LORD’s holy day honorable;
If you honor it by not following your ways,
seeking your own interests, or speaking with malice–
Then you shall delight in the LORD,
and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;
I will nourish you with the heritage of Jacob, your father,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 86:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
R. (11ab) Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth.
Incline your ear, O LORD; answer me,
for I am afflicted and poor.
Keep my life, for I am devoted to you;
save your servant who trusts in you.
You are my God.
R. Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth.
Have mercy on me, O Lord,
for to you I call all the day.
Gladden the soul of your servant,
for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
R. Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth.
For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in kindness to all who call upon you.
Hearken, O LORD, to my prayer
and attend to the sound of my pleading.
R. Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth.
Verse Before the Gospel
Ezekiel 33:11
I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked man, says the Lord,
but rather in his conversion, that he may live.
Gospel
Luke 5:27-32
Jesus saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the customs post.
He said to him, “Follow me.”
And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him.
Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house,
and a large crowd of tax collectors
and others were at table with them.
The Pharisees and their scribes complained to his disciples, saying,
“Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus said to them in reply,
“Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do.
I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”
The post Following Matthew and John of God on the Path of Lenten Conversion, Saturday after Ash Wednesday, March 8, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
24 min
March 06, 2025Making the Choice of the Paradoxical Path to Life, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, March 6, 2025
Father Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum New York City Chapter
IESE Business School, New York
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
March 6, 2025
Dt 30:15-20, Ps 1, Lk 9:22-25

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
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The following points were attempted in the homily:
Throughout Lent, we focus first and foremost on God’s desire to save us and we recognize, as we heard yesterday with St. Paul, that “now is the day of salvation.” This Lent, today, is the time to respond. “God so loved the world,” St. John tells us in his most famous passage, “that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God does not want us to perish. He didn’t even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, so that we might not die but have life to the full. But God’s will is not enough, because he chose to make us free. We need to respond to his gift of salvation. Todays’ readings, on our second day in the pilgrimage of Lent, are about the choices we are called to make in response to God’s offer and to the grace he gives us that St. Paul appealed yesterday that we wouldn’t take in vain.
The choice is framed by Moses in today’s first reading. The Israelites were drawing toward the end of their 40-year pilgrimage in the desert. Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, accompanied them through the desert for four decades and now they were on the opposite side of the Jordan from the long-awaited Holy Land. God had told Moses that he would die before crossing, so Moses, in today’s first reading, was finishing a sort of last will and testament, a summary of what God had done for them and taught them. As the long experience of their time in the desert had taught them, God’s wondrous actions were not enough. The ten plagues weren’t enough. Their passing through the Red Sea on dry land wasn’t enough. The manna from heaven, the daily quails, the water from the rock and the theophanies associated with giving the Ten Commandments were not enough. None was sufficient to keep many of the Jews faithful. Many of them complained that they should have remained with their fleshpots in Egypt, others made a golden calf, even Aaron the high priest’s faith began to waver. So Moses wanted to urge them to choose wisely. He framed the decision facing them as it truly was, a decision of life and death: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” Moses reminded them that the choice for God is a life-giving choice, a choice full of blessing; and that the choice against God — even if it might seem at first a choice that leads to life and happiness — is actually fatal. This is not something, of course, that they recognized. Throughout the desert they complained that they had left their favorite foods in Egypt behind just to perish in the desert by following the Lord. Along the way, many times they thought that the choice for God was a choice for death. But it is a choice for life. And those who sought the counterfeit path of turning their hearts away from God, of refusing to listen, of adoring and serving other gods, never made it out of the desert.
That’s the choice that faces all of us in Lent as we enter into a 40-day journey like the Israelite’s 40-year trek. Lent historically and actually is a catechumenate, an ecclesial preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil or, for those of us who have already been baptized, a 40-day renewal of the meaning of our baptism. Like the Jews, we have been set free from the slavery of sin and death, passing through the waters of baptism like the Jews passed through the Red Sea. We are presently in the desert with Jesus for these 40 days looking with him toward the eternal promised land that is anticipated in the celebration of Easter. It’s a time for us to focus on the graces of our liberation and the choice God has given to our freedom between life-giving fidelity through “loving him, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments,” through “heeding his voice and holding fast to him,” or the path that leads to death under the seduction of bringing life.
The contrast between these two paths is highlighted in today’s Psalm, which is the first of all the Psalms and the one that in a sense orients the praying of any and every psalm. It describes the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night” as like a “tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” He receives life and is able to give life from his contact with the “living water” of God. On the other hand, the “wicked” man, the one follows “the counsel of the wicked, … walks in the company of way of sinners, [and] sits in the company of the insolent” is compared to “the chaff that the wind drives away.” There are no roots, no substance, no life. The Psalm says, “The way of the wicked vanishes.” That’s the choice facing us as we begin Lent.
The question arises: Isn’t this choice a no-brainer? Who, after all, would consciously choose death over life? It’s like the choice between eating filet mignon or tire rubber. In the Gospel, however, we see why the choice, though conceptually simple, is morally challenging.
Jesus tells us today that the path of life is paradoxically a path of self-denial. Just as he was going to “suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes and be killed” before being raised to unending life on the third day, so “if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself  and take up his cross daily and follow me. ” He gets even more explicit about that paradox: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,  but whoever loses his life for my sake will save.” In order to obtain life, we need to die to ourselves. We need to lose our life for the sake of God and his Gospel in order to retain it. In the choice between self-denial and self-affirmation, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it really is the former. In the path between the Cross and the comfy recliner, we think the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. In the path between following Christ to Calvary and going to a beach resort, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. The path of life doesn’t seem to be life-giving, and the path of death, on the contrary, does. But that’s what Jesus wants us to grasp. There’s a choice we must make between forfeiting ourselves to gain the whole world or forfeiting the whole world to gain ourselves.
This is why living a good and holy Lent is so important. Lent is meant to help us to make the choice for real life, to help us to walk in the footsteps of Christ, to plant ourselves in his living water in the midst of the desert so that we may grow to eternity. But we need to make the full and conscious choice for life, which requires the full and conscious choice to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Christ. The three Lenten practices, when we choose to live them generously, are all geared to do this. All three teach us self-denial: fasting denies the dominion of our lower appetites, almsgiving denies our selfishness, prayer denies our egocentrism. Each, in a sense, is a Cross that leads to our self-death, because to many it may seem that giving into our cravings, spending what we have on ourselves, and using our time for our own pursuits actually constitute the path of life, but they’re not. And these three practices help us to follow Christ in his own fasting, his giving of himself to the point of death, and his prayer. For this process of communion with Christ and the life he comes to give us to occur, however, we really must choose bold resolutions that can help facilitate these spiritual fruits, rather than soft ones that, even if we keep them, won’t really lead to the crucifixion to the worldliness that is necessary in order to experience the life that Jesus wants to give.
The Leonine Forum with its focus on learning and living Catholic social teaching helps us to choose the path of life the readings today indicate. They remind us of who we are, how we’re interconnected, and how to love in accordance with the others’ dignity, the common good and a subsidiary trust. The path of life is one we choose with others, the full flourishing of our being made in God’s image to give of ourselves fully in love, following Christ along the life-giving path of the grain of wheat. Tonight as we focus on how we do that particularly in our work, we remember that through the sacrifices we make for others through our work, we are participating in Christ’s saving and sanctifying work.
Today, with Moses, Jesus and the Church place before us this choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse, between the fruitful tree and the chaff. Each Mass we have the privilege to make anew this choice. Mass is the time in which we choose to lose our life for him who lost his for us. God so loves the world that he gives us his only Son continuously in our participation in his life-giving death and resurrection in the Eucharist. Here we choose to lose our life with him so as to be saved by him forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
DT 30:15-20
Moses said to the people:
“Today I have set before you
life and prosperity, death and doom.
If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God,
which I enjoin on you today,
loving him, and walking in his ways,
and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees,
you will live and grow numerous,
and the LORD, your God,
will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy.
If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen,
but are led astray and adore and serve other gods,
I tell you now that you will certainly perish;
you will not have a long life
on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.
I call heaven and earth today to witness against you:
I have set before you life and death,
the blessing and the curse.
Choose life, then,
that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God,
heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.
For that will mean life for you,
a long life for you to live on the land that the LORD swore
he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
Responsorial Psalm
PS 1:1-2, 3, 4 AND 6
R. (40:5a) Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Blessed the man who follows not
the counsel of the wicked
Nor walks in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the company of the insolent,
But delights in the law of the LORD
and meditates on his law day and night.
R. Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
R. Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Not so the wicked, not so;
they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.
R. Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Gospel
LK 9:22-25
Jesus said to his disciples:
“The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected
by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.”
Then he said to all,
“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?”
The post Making the Choice of the Paradoxical Path to Life, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, March 6, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
March 05, 2025 Wise Practices for Eucharistic Adoration, Zoom Presentation for Operation Divine Mercy, New York City, March 5, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Zoom Presentation for Operation Divine Mercy
New York City
March 5, 2025

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3.5.25 Wise Practices for Eucharistic Adoration
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1 hr 23 min
March 03, 2025Fully Trained to Be Like Jesus Our Teacher, Eighth Sunday (C), March 2, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
March 2, 2025
Sir 24:4-7, Ps 92, 1 Cor 15:54–58, Lk 6:39-47
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The following text guided the homily:
For the third straight week, we have a chance to listen to Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain and the readings that support it, something we only have a chance to do when Lent basically begins very late in Year C. This has happened only three times in my 26 years as a priest. So let’s make the most of this opportunity.
Two weeks ago Jesus gave us St. Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, showing us that the path of happiness in this world and the next is not through wealth, food and drink, parties, popularity and praise, but, as he shows us, through treasuring the kingdom, having our hearts burst with compassion, through hungering and thirsting for holiness and through courageously and faithfully remaining true to him even if we have to suffer for it. Last week we heard him summon us more deeply toward his own way of living, which involves loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, doing good to those who persecute us, turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile out of love even for someone who doesn’t love us. Today Jesus continues describing for us the distinctiveness of the Christian life, speaking to us today just as much as he spoke to his listeners on the plain. And his words are as relevant now as they ever were, because they touch on what plagues so many people today.
Jesus gives us three central teachings in today’s Gospel, each of which he makes by means of a simple unforgettable image: the first is about blind guides; the second about the speck of dust versus a plank of wood; the third is about trees bearing fruit. All three go together. We’ll discuss each one in turn in the hope that we might see both their relevance and their connections.
Jesus first asks, “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.” We need a guide when we don’t know how to get to where we’d like to end up, and when we don’t understand the meaning of things we encounter along the way. A good guide knows how to get to the destination and knows how to explain what we see along the journey. Even young people today in the age of driving with GPS have been in circumstances where they’ve asked someone for directions, received them and then followed them only to end up lost. It’s one of the most frustrating experiences in life, when someone who doesn’t know how to guide us to a particular location isn’t humble enough to admit it and therefore gets us even more lost. There are others who sort of know how to get to the destination, but who don’t know how to give clear indications about the right places to turn or even the time-saving shortcuts to take.
It’s similar in the spiritual life. To be a guide, we have to know the destination and we have to know how to get there. Ultimately, there is only one guide: Jesus, who is the Way to Eternal Life with the Father. He pointed the way, he opened the gates of heaven, he created the Church as the only barque, the only boat, that he’s steering toward that distant shore. Jesus is the clear-sighted expert guide. The Church is his pilgrimage company, to help him guide us on our pilgrim way. Jesus says, “A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.” The Pope, the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, catechists, Catholic school teachers, theologians, parents, grandparents and godparents, when they remain faithful to what they have heard and received from the Master, Jesus, are all called to be true guides to heaven, keeping us on the right track during the pilgrimage each of us is making to the next life.
The funny thing is, so few people today, even many Catholics, look to Jesus as their rea;u day-to-day Guide. Instead, they find their direction from worldly gurus like Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Phil, politicians, rappers and celebrities whom they make false prophets, listening to them and most often hearing that the meaning of life is something other than what Jesus told us it was. If they’re not leading us to Jesus, they are blind guides, proclaiming the woes Jesus described two weeks ago as the goals of life, teaching us how to know and defeat our enemies rather than love them, often serving the gods of sex, money, power, their own egos, but not serving God and guiding us on the path to Him and to the eternal life he died to give us. Today we first have to ask ourselves: who are the guides we really follow? To whom do we look for direction day by day? Do we follow Christ, even and especially when it is hard, even when he’s leading us through the dark to some distant place, even when we don’t understand why he is permitting something to happen to us or teaching us something we don’t yet understand? He’s the only guide who has gotten to the destination we want to end up; he has established his Church and sent out his disciples and apostles to be like him, echoing his words and pointing to him. Do we follow them faithfully as he calls us to?
The second part of today’s Gospel concerns not the guide’s vision illumined by a divine perspective, but our vision. Jesus says to us, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” We live in a very critical age. Everybody criticizes everybody else and notices everybody else’s flaws, but we seldom recognize our own. As an overreaction to this, some people, presuming to try to speak for Jesus, say: “Don’t criticize anyone else. Don’t be judgmental of anybody else or their actions. We’re no better else. Just live and let live.” Jesus, however, does not say “Don’t criticize anyone else for doing wrong.” That would be inconsistent with loving someone else. If someone were a terrible alcoholic and could no longer control his drinking, we wouldn’t love that person or be his friend if we didn’t try to tell him to do something about his drinking. Jesus, however, says that before we do that, we need to take out the plank out of our own eye before we help our sibling or friend take out the speck in his. He who created us knows us so very well. He sees that the reason why we start criticizing others, the reason why we start noticing all of their flaws, is normally because we don’t have the guts to look in the mirror to see our own. The reason we criticize others is often so that we can make ourselves look good in comparison with their flaws. In the seminary, when we were tempted to go to others to complain about something they were doing or a decision they had made, we were encouraged first to examine whether there was something wrong inside of us such that we were deflecting our attention onto others’ foibles. More often than not, our critical attitude derives from the fact that we are not at peace within ourselves. This is the behavior Jesus calls us to. He says first examine yourself, straighten out your problems with me, with yourself and with others, and then go constructively criticize others, because then you’ll see clearly. He wants us to help them take the speck out of their eye, but only after we can see clearly, see with his eyes, his charity, his mercy, even pure vision. If we’re ever going to presume to guide anyone toward better behavior, we first have to make sure our eyes are free of any planks that might keep us from seeing and following Christ.
In the third and last part of today’s Sermon on the Plain, Jesus uses the image of bearing fruit. “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; or each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” Jesus speaks very commonsensically here. To see who a person is, we observe how he acts. A person can say that she has great faith, but we see if she does by observing her deeds of love. Jesus said in the Gospel of John, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” We have to be with Jesus to bear good fruit and apart from him we can bear any good fruit. We often see the fruit when the tree is shaken, as Sirach teaches us in the first reading. “When a sieve is shaken, the refuse appears; so do a person’s faults when he speaks.” The tree is shaken when a person speaks, when the person puts the thoughts of his heart and mind into action in either word or deed. The lesson for us today, Jesus’ lesson, is to focus on the tree not on the fruit! We’re called, like we prayed in the Psalm, to “flourish like the palm tree, … planted in the house of the Lord, [who] bear fruit even in old age, vigorous and sturdy.” Sometimes when our tree is fine, we seem to produce little fruit, or make mistakes, or can’t seem to do anything well. But one day our tree will start to produce in a similar way to a mother I know who tried to have children for years. She waited five long years and never thought she’d conceive. But then, after much prayer, she conceived her first child and now she has five children. Other times, in contrast, we seem to be bearing good fruit — and everybody thinks good of us — despite the fact that we know we really need to correct our relationship with God by means of the sacrament of Confession and living our Christian life more fully. When our tree is shaken by some stressful circumstance, that’s when our lack of integration, even our hidden vices, our lack of Christian faith, hope and love, can come to the surface. That’s why God sometimes permits our tree to be shaken.
All three of today’s Biblical images go together. Jesus calls all of us first to look at Him, and the Church he founded, as our guide so that we can know that we’re on the way to Him, then to look within and remove any planks in our sight that can prevent us from seeing him. He calls us always to be attached to him, who is the Vine, and then attached to him, having removed sin from our eyes, he calls us to be guides for others, pointing to Him, and bearing fruit in acts of love, helping them by our patient and loving example to remove the specks from their eyes so that they can see Jesus.
Today’s readings, therefore, are an excellent preparation for Lent, which begins in three days. Lent is a spiritual boot camp in which we strive, with God’s help, to become more and more like Christ. “No disciple is superior to the teacher,” Jesus tells us today, “but when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.” Lent provides the training for us to become like Christ. Just as he went to the desert for 40 days to pray, so we make the commitment to improve the quality and — for most of us — quantity of our prayer time. Just as Jesus fasted so much that the devil’s first temptation to him was to try to have him transform stones into bread, so we take on the self-discipline of fasting, which helps us to say “yes” to God and “no” to sin by training us to say “no” to our appetite for food and drink. Just as Jesus generously gave everything down to the last drop of his blood, so in Lent we seek to imitate his merciful love, giving of ourselves, our time, our gifts and our material resources, to those who are in need. The main purpose of Lent is to become like the praying, fasting, almsgiving Jesus and Jesus seeks to give us that training so that we can become like him, our teacher, and seeing God, others and ourselves clearly, become true guides for others to him. Lent is about recognizing our blind spots, the sins that cloud our vision, and striving by God’s mercy to eliminate those planks and even specks. If our eyes occluded, we can’t effectively be his instruments, his guides, to help others remove the sins from their life. We’d be like eye surgeons with macular degeneration trying to do delicate corneal surgery. Lent is the time in which we go to Jesus the Divine Physician to be cured of our sins so that with charity and humility we can help others rid sin from their lives, too. And, like the third image in today’s Gospel, Lent is not just about bearing fruit but about becoming a good tree. It’s not about random acts of kindness but about becoming truly charitable. In Lent, Jesus wants to graft us onto him as branches to the vine, not just partially but fully. He wants us to remain in him in prayer. He wants us to remain in him in the way we eat and drink and work and recreate. He wants us to remain in him in how we relate to others, loving them in the truth of his divine love. This is the way to bear abundant fruit that will last.
This transformation — from blind guide full of planks to good guide, from barren or stingy tree to abundantly fruitful — is meant to take place not just in Lent but in every Mass, when we listen to the Divine Master as he teaches us in the Liturgy of the Word, when we confess the planks in our eyes and ask him to remove them, when we recalibrate our vision and behold the Lamb of God and receive His flesh and blood from that Vine so that we, attached to him, might jointly love God and others with all we’ve got and be formed to lead them, as fully trained disciples, to the Christ we behold. Mass is the time, as we prepare to meet and receive the Risen Lord Jesus in Holy Communion, when we are able, with St. Paul in today’s second reading, to rejoice in Christ’s victory and what it means for us, exaliming, “O death, where is your victory? O death where is your sting?” It’s what helps us to enter anew into Jesus’ triumph and be strengthened by him on the inside to, as the apostle says, “be first, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord [our] labor is not in vain.” It’s where we become capable, united with him, of guiding others to Him who is the way to happiness, holiness and heaven.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Sirach 27:4-7
When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear;
so do one’s faults when one speaks.
As the test of what the potter molds is in the furnace,
so in tribulation is the test of the just.
The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had;
so too does one’s speech disclose the bent of one’s mind.
Praise no one before he speaks,
for it is then that people are tested.
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 92:2-3, 13-14, 15-16
R (cf. 2a) Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.
It is good to give thanks to the LORD,
to sing praise to your name, Most High,
To proclaim your kindness at dawn
and your faithfulness throughout the night.
R Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.
The just one shall flourish like the palm tree,
like a cedar of Lebanon shall he grow.
They that are planted in the house of the LORD
shall flourish in the courts of our God.
R Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.
They shall bear fruit even in old age;
vigorous and sturdy shall they be,
Declaring how just is the LORD,
my rock, in whom there is no wrong.
R Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.
Reading II
1 Corinthians 15:54-58
Brothers and sisters:
When this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility
and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality,
then the word that is written shall come about:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
The sting of death is sin,
and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters,
be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord,
knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
Alleluia
Philippians 2:15d, 16a
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Shine like lights in the world
as you hold on to the word of life.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Luke 6:39-45
Jesus told his disciples a parable,
“Can a blind person guide a blind person?
Will not both fall into a pit?
No disciple is superior to the teacher;
but when fully trained,
every disciple will be like his teacher.
Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?
How can you say to your brother,
‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’
when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?
You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first;
then you will see clearly
to remove the splinter in your brother’s eye.
“A good tree does not bear rotten fruit,
nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit.
For every tree is known by its own fruit.
For people do not pick figs from thornbushes,
nor do they gather grapes from brambles.
A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good,
but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil;
for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”
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24 min
February 25, 2025 The Importance of the Church’s Mission Work Today, TPMS Northeast Regional Meeting, February 25, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Northeast Regions Diocesan Impact Team Regional Meeting
Archdiocese of Philadelphia Pastoral Center
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
February 25, 2025

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1 hr 5 min
February 25, 2025 Being Ready For When We Come to Serve the Lord, Seventh Tuesday in Ordinary Time (I), February 25, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Cathedral of SS. Peter and Paul, Philadelphia
The Pontifical Mission Societies
Northeast Regional Meeting of Diocesan Directors
Tuesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
February 25, 2025
Sir 2:1-11, Ps 37, Mk 9:30-37

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The following text guided the homily:
As we come together today for Mass in this beautiful Cathedral, diocesan directors of the various offices of The Pontifical Mission Societies, not to mention those who prioritize the Lord here for daily Mass each lunch time, Sirach confronts us in the first reading with some sobering, but at the same time life-giving words. We ponder them within the context of the prayers for our Holy Father, Pope Francis, as he becomes a living icon of these words.
Joshua Ben Sirach begins today’s passage by saying, “When you come to serve the Lord, … prepare yourself” not for a stream of consolation, but “for trials.” He then describes them: we should get ready for a “time of adversity,” “crushing misfortune,” even “a crucible of humiliation.” These trials are all tests, meant to help purify us, he says, just as “in fire gold and silver are tested.” For that reason, while we’re experiencing them, we should not think that God has abandoned us, but we should faithfully remember that God is helping us to learn how to be great, to learn how to love him and trust in him so that we might truly serve him and become the servant of all. So he tell us “Be sincere of heart and steadfast, incline your ear and receive the word of understanding undisturbed in time of adversity, wait on God with patience, cling to him, forsake him not, … accept whatever befalls you, be steadfast when sorrowful, be patient in crushing misfortune, trust God and God will help you … and direct your way. Wait for his mercy, trust him and your reward will not be lost, hope for good things, love him and your hearts will be enlightened.” Sirach urges us to urge us to turn to those means by which God gives us consolation in trial. “Study the generations long past,” including those who have given their lives out of fidelity, “and understand: has anyone hoped in the Lord and been disappointed? … Persevered and been forsaken? … Called upon God and been rebuffed?” God, he insists, “saves in time of trouble and is a protector to all who seek him in truth.”
These thoughts from Sirach about how to prepare ourselves for trials, misfortunes and even humiliating crucibles when we come to serve the Lord, are a powerful preparation for the Gospel. Jesus stresses today for the apostles the same lesson that they rejected in Caesarea Philippi and that Jesus reemphasized as Peter, James and John were descending with him the mountain. Jesus reiterates, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.” He has already made plain that if they wish to be his disciples, they must deny themselves, pick up their own cross and follow him. The Cross, in other words, is not an optional part of Christianity. It’s at the core of our communion with the Lord. Just like on the previous occasions, and just like during the Last Supper when all of them again jockeyed for preeminence after Jesus told them that one of them would be betray him, so again here they cared more about their own ambitious position in what they presumed would be the pecking order of Jesus’ messianic administration than they did about Jesus and his telling him he was about to be betrayed and executed. In response to the third articulation of these shocking words, Jesus’ friends and followers and would-be servants do not console him or even ask him questions to try to understand. Instead, they begin to debate who’s better than whom. It’s pathetic. It would be like if a mom said she had two weeks to live and the kids, rather than focusing on her, began immediately in her presence to talk about who is her favorite or who gets her car or jewelry. But Jesus never tried to eliminate his followers’ ambition, but to purify it and direct it toward true greatness. He told them the path to greatness, which would be his path, is the way of cruciform love: “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” To be great we must become great in sacrifice, in loving service. And to illustrate exactly what he was describing, lest we interpret it according to our comforts, he took a child and said, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” An infant is someone who cannot will to reward us, with whom we cannot engage in a quid pro quo. An infant is not even able to thank us. While it’s true that whenever we love, we receive more than we give and that those who love children receive so many blessings in return, Jesus’ point is that we need to love those who cannot explicitly reward us. That’s the type of service we’re called to give, to which we’re supposed to aspire.
Those are super important words for us who want to do what the Lord is asking of us. Sometimes with the distance and safety of 2,000 words, we can look at the apostles and judge them for their selfish lack of love and human ambition. But the situation for us is even starker. Unlike the apostles who were called in faith to believe that Jesus would be betrayed, arrested, tortured, crucified and on the third day rise, we know that Jesus endured all of these things for our salvation. And he didn’t do it so that we could set our hearts on the corner office, the retirement home in Florida, a huge bank account or other things on which human beings can set their aspirations. If it were wrong for them to hear about Jesus’ death and then turn to their own worldly pursuits, it’s even worse for us. We have seen the fulfillment of all Jesus’ promises and now it’s our turn to follow him on the way, to seek to be his true and faithful servant, continuing his mission, not according to mundane criteria of greatness but according to divine.
Pope Francis is teaching us these lessons now through his suffering. He is proclaiming the Gospel even from a hospital bed. In this Jubilee of Hope he is pointing to Christ Jesus as our hope and showing us now a witness of the great hope of the Christian life: that because of all Jesus did through his passion, death and resurrection, eternal life with him is possible for us. He’s summoning us on the path of true Christian greatness, which is holiness, which can only happen through self-denial, picking up our Cross and following Jesus.
So today we’re called to grasp that when we come to serve the Lord, as we have today, we cannot really do so unless we’re willing and able, in fact ambitious, for self-denial, for crucifying ourselves to the world, for following Jesus along the path of the grain of wheat. For those of us asked to carry out the Great Commission, these words teach us about the type of missionaries Jesus wants us to be, as well as the type of Gospel he is asking us to help resonate throughout the world. We are called to study not just the generations long past, including the generation of Jesus and the apostles, but St. Katherine Drexel present in this Cathedral, St. John Neumann, the fourth Bishop of Philadelphia, and so many other. They hoped in the Lord and were not disappointed. In this Jubilee of Hope, Pope Francis, in his Bull of Indiction, reminds us: Spes Non Confundit, St, Paul’s words to the Romans: Hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Rom 5:5).
So today as we prepare to come to this altar and receive the foremost outpouring of God’s love and service in giving us himself in the Eucharist, we prepare ourselves with faith and hope for the trials that will come today and we pray for the Holy Father in his present crucible.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 SIR 2:1-11
My son, when you come to serve the LORD,
stand in justice and fear,
prepare yourself for trials.
Be sincere of heart and steadfast,
incline your ear and receive the word of understanding,
undisturbed in time of adversity.
Wait on God, with patience, cling to him, forsake him not;
thus will you be wise in all your ways.
Accept whatever befalls you,
when sorrowful, be steadfast,
and in crushing misfortune be patient;
For in fire gold and silver are tested,
and worthy people in the crucible of humiliation.
Trust God and God will help you;
trust in him, and he will direct your way;
keep his fear and grow old therein.
You who fear the LORD, wait for his mercy,
turn not away lest you fall.
You who fear the LORD, trust him,
and your reward will not be lost.
You who fear the LORD, hope for good things,
for lasting joy and mercy.
You who fear the LORD, love him,
and your hearts will be enlightened.
Study the generations long past and understand;
has anyone hoped in the LORD and been disappointed?
Has anyone persevered in his commandments and been forsaken?
has anyone called upon him and been rebuffed?
Compassionate and merciful is the LORD;
he forgives sins, he saves in time of trouble
and he is a protector to all who seek him in truth.
Responsorial Psalm PS 37:3-4, 18-19, 27-28, 39-40
R. (see 5) Commit your life to the Lord, and he will help you.
Trust in the LORD and do good,
that you may dwell in the land and be fed in security.
Take delight in the LORD,
and he will grant you your heart’s requests.
R. Commit your life to the Lord, and he will help you.
The LORD watches over the lives of the wholehearted;
their inheritance lasts forever.
They are not put to shame in an evil time;
in days of famine they have plenty.
R. Commit your life to the Lord, and he will help you.
Turn from evil and do good,
that you may abide forever;
For the LORD loves what is right,
and forsakes not his faithful ones.
R. Commit your life to the Lord, and he will help you.
The salvation of the just is from the LORD;
he is their refuge in time of distress.
And the LORD helps them and delivers them;
he delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
because they take refuge in him.
R. Commit your life to the Lord, and he will help you.
Alleluia GAL 6:14
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
May I never boast except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MK 9:30-37
Jesus and his disciples left from there and began a journey through Galilee,
but he did not wish anyone to know about it.
He was teaching his disciples and telling them,
“The Son of Man is to be handed over to men
and they will kill him,
and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.”
But they did not understand the saying,
and they were afraid to question him.
They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house,
he began to ask them,
“What were you arguing about on the way?”
But they remained silent.
For they had been discussing among themselves on the way
who was the greatest.
Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them,
“If anyone wishes to be first,
he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”
Taking a child, he placed it in their midst,
and putting his arms around it, he said to them,
“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;
and whoever receives me,
receives not me but the One who sent me.”
The post Being Ready For When We Come to Serve the Lord, Seventh Tuesday in Ordinary Time (I), February 25, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
February 23, 2025Living By Jesus’ Standards, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), February 23, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the MIssionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
February 23, 2025
1 Sam 26:2.7-9.12-13.22-23, Ps 103, 1 Cor 15:45-59, Lk 6:27-38

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The following text guided the homily:
Today Jesus continues the very clear and challenging homily he began seven days ago. Last week, he stressed how different is the path that leads to true happiness, to holiness, to heaven from what men and women normally believe. Whereas the world says you have to be rich to be happy, to be the life of the party, to fulfill every earthly desire and appetite and to be spoken well of by everyone, Jesus says, rather, blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger for things beyond their earthly appetites, who weep out of concern for others and for one’s sins, and who are persecuted and reviled on account of their faith. The Lord presented us a choice, a fork in the road between the “wide path” the world says will lead to beatitude and the narrow, uphill way that he himself indicated and he himself trod. The one who himself was so poor that he didn’t have a pillow on which to lay his head, who wept over Jerusalem and her repeated rejection of God’s offer of love, who fasted for 40 days living off of “every word that fell from the mouth of God” and who was persecuted and maltreated until death, heads up the narrow path to eternal happiness and turns to us and says “follow me!” (Lk 9:58; 19:41; Mt 4:4).
Today Jesus continues to point us to the way that leads to life with him and away from the populated path presented by the world. Jesus’ path is challenging. In the Gospel antiphon today, Jesus gives us again his “new commandment,” to “love one another as I have loved you” and in the Gospel itself, he tells us clearly the standard of love by which he lived and by which each of us is called to live.
He who loved his enemies enough to give his life for them and prayed that the Father would forgive those who were mocking and crucifying him told us that to be truly his disciples we, too, need to love our enemies, to do good those who hate us, bless those who curse us and to pray for those who abuse us.
He who turned the other cheek when the Roman soldiers were beating and scourging him and who did not withhold his tunic from those who were stripping him, commanded us, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from the one who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt.”
He who gave his body and blood down the very last drop challenged us to give to everyone who begs of us and if anyone takes our goods, not to ask for them again.
In all of these imperatives, Jesus was not telling us, merely, “Do what I say,” but rather, “follow me.” He calls us to love as he did, to love those who don’t love us, to give to those who don’t give to us, to bless those who curse us. He calls us to make the first move, to do to others what we would want them to do to us, regardless of any consideration of what they in fact have done or failed to do to us. He calls us to a higher standard. He calls us, in fact, to his standard. The standard of most in the world is reciprocity. We generally try to treat well those who treat us well; if others treat us poorly, we feel justified in doing the same to them. But living by the principle of an “eye for an eye” just leaves the whole world blind. Christ calls us to look on others with the eyes of God the Father, who is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” Jesus tells us that if we love only those who love us, if we do good only to those who are good to us, if we give only to those who give to us, then we are no different from everyone else, whom Jesus very clearly calls “sinners.” The human notion of “justice,” of “quid pro quo” is not enough. Jesus calls us to a higher standard, the standard of God the Father, to be merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful, even and especially when others do not deserve it. This is what love really is, doing what is best for the other at all times, even when the other does not reciprocate it, or appreciate it, or even acknowledge it.
We see an illustration of this type of living by a higher standard in today’s first reading when David, after having been hunted down by King Saul and his assassins, was presented with an opportunity to kill the one who was seeking to kill him. David’s soldiers advised him to take advantage of the opportunity to kill Saul while he was sleeping, saying “God has given your enemy into your hand.” But David was not looking at the situation with their eyes, but with God’s. Even though his life would have been made so much easier if Saul were dead, even though he might have been able to justify killing him in self-defense, David replied, “Who can raise his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?” Although Saul was committing evil against David, David wouldn’t descend to that level of evil. Instead, he treated Saul with mercy. Saul, experiencing that mercy, changed. As we see later in the First Book of Samuel, Saul repented of the evil he was planning to do and David and Saul were reconciled.
All of us are called to act in a similar way. Even when people are treating us badly, speaking ill of us, trying to harm us, even if some are — God forbid! — trying to hunt us down and to kill us, Jesus calls us to remember like David that each of those malefactors is made in his image and likeness. If they’re Christians, they, too, have been anointed by God through the sacraments, no matter how far they have fallen from the graces they received. Like David, none of us can raise our hand against one of God’s children and be guiltless. If we, like David, refuse to descend to their level but rather treat them with mercy and try to raise them up to our level, to Christ’s level, then they, like Saul, may convert. Said in another way, others may consider us THEIR enemies — just like some made Christ their enemy — but Christ calls us not to consider them OUR enemies, but rather to love them, to do good to them, to bless them, to pray for them, and to forgive them. This is the way we make the transition from the “old Adam” that St. Paul talks about in the second reading to the “new Adam,” from one who lives by worldly standards to one who lives by Christ’s standards.
But Jesus doesn’t stop merely by calling us to live up the standard he himself lived and told us to follow. He then says something absolutely breathtaking: that we, for our part, SET THE STANDARD by which we want GOD to treat us. “The measure with which you measure,” Jesus declares, “will be measured back to you.” If we’re merciful to others, God will be merciful to us. If we forgive, we’ll be forgiven. If we’re generous with others, God will be generous with us and bless us abundantly with “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over… put into [our] lap.” Jesus says that there will be a correspondence between our actions and God’s, for good or for bad. “For if you forgive others their trespasses,” he says in St. Matthew’s Gospel, “your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt 6:14). The Father will treat us by the standard we adopt. If we wish to be forgiven by him, we must forgive others. If we wish not to be condemned by him, then we must not condemn others. If we wish to be loved by him even when we sin against Him, then we must love others even when they sin against us.
So there are two standards. The first is the standard Christ sets for us. The second is the standard we set for God. God loves us with unconditional love and calls us to love others with unconditional love. If we choose, however, to love others conditionally — to do good only to those who are good to us, to forgive only some, to condemn those who we think deserve it, to retaliate when someone harms us — then Jesus tells us that that is the measure we will receive. This truth is not an exception to God’s unconditional love for us; he still loves us even when we are “ungrateful and wicked” and never wishes to condemn us. It is, in fact, one of the supreme illustrations of the Father’s unconditional love or us, that he gave us the freedom to choose to reject that love. When we do, it’s not that he no longer loves us unconditionally, but rather we refuse to let his unconditional love live in us and grow. We refuse to receive what he wants to give us. That is why the measure we measure out to others will be measured back to us: the only way for us to receive the full measure of God’s unconditional love, to have our laps filled to overflowing with his graces, is by our opening ourselves up to receive them loving others unconditionally. If we don’t live according to Christ’s standard of love, if we don’t sacrifice for those who hate us, bless those who curse us, do good to those who mistreat us and forgive those who wrong us, then we close ourselves off to God’s greatest blessing. The only way we can experience those blessings is by following Christ along the narrow, uphill, challenging path of real self-giving love. Christ calls us to live by his standard of love precisely so that in doing so we will be able to receive from the Father in return the full measure of the his love!
As we continue to pray for our Holy Father, Pope Francis, during this very precarious time, we can profit from some of his thoughts on these readings given in Angelus messages three years ago.
He told us, “In the Gospel of today’s Liturgy, Jesus gives some basic life guidance to the disciples. The Lord refers to the most difficult situations, those that constitute the bench test for us, those that confront us with those who are enemies and hostile to us, those who are always trying to do us harm. In such cases, the disciple of Jesus is called not to give in to instinct and hatred, but to go further, much further. To go beyond instinct, to go beyond hatred. … It seems that the Lord is asking for the impossible. … If one does not react to bullies, then every abuse of power is given free rein, and this is not fair. But is it really so? Does the Lord really ask for the impossible and indeed even unjust things of us?”
“Let us consider first and foremost that sense of injustice that we feel in “turning the other cheek”. … During the passion, in his unjust trial before the high priest, at one point [Jesus] receives a slap from one of the guards. And how does He react? He does not insult him, no: he says to the guard, “If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” (Jn 18:23). He asks for an account of the wrong done to him. Turning the other cheek does not mean suffering in silence, giving in to injustice. With his question, Jesus denounces what is unjust. But he does so without anger, without violence, indeed with kindness. He does not wish to spark off an argument, but rather to defuse resentment, this is important: to extinguish hatred and injustice together, seeking to restore the guilty brother. This is not easy, but Jesus did it and he tells us to do likewise. This is turning the other cheek: Jesus’ meekness is a stronger response than the slap he received. Turning the other cheek is not the withdrawal of the loser, but the action of one who has a greater inner strength. Turning the other cheek means defeating evil with goodness which opens up a breach in the heart of the enemy, unmasking the absurdity of his hatred. And this attitude, this turning the other cheek, is dictated not by calculation or by hatred, but by love. It is the freely given, undeserved love we receive from Jesus that generates in the heart a way of doing things that is similar to his, that rejects all vengeance.“
“Let’s get to another objection: is it possible for a person to come to love his or her enemies? If it depended only on us, it would be impossible. But let us recall that … the Lord never asks for something he has not already given us first. When he tells me to love my enemies, he wants to give me the capacity to do so. … Saint Augustine prayed in this way: … Lord, “give what You command, and command what You will” (Confessions , X, 29.40), because you have already given it to me. What should we ask of him? What is God happy to give us? The strength to love, which is not a thing, but rather the Holy Spirit. The strength to love is the Holy Spirit, and with the Spirit of Jesus, we can respond to evil with good, we can love those who do us harm. This is what Christians do.”
In 2019, he elaborated on how Jesus sought to give us what we need to live this way.
Jesus, he said, “is well aware that loving enemies exceeds our possibilities, but this is why he became man: not to leave us as we are, but to transform us into men and women capable of a greater love, that of his Father and ours. … With him, thanks to his love, to his Spirit, we are able to love even those who do not love us, even those who do us harm. In this way, Jesus wants God’s love to triumph over hatred and rancour in every heart. The logic of love, which culminates in Christ’s Cross, is a Christian’s badge and induces us to meet everyone with the heart of brothers and sisters. … Those who hear Jesus, who make an effort to follow him even at a cost, become children of God, and begin to truly resemble the Father who is in heaven. We become capable of things we never thought we could say or do, and of which we would have been rather ashamed, but which now give us joy and peace instead. We no longer need to be violent, with words and gestures: we discover that we are capable of tenderness and goodness; and we sense that all of this comes not from ourselves but from him!”
As we pray for the health of the Holy Father, let us pray, too, for him and us to be able to live by these standards of Jesus.
To help us live up to them, Jesus gives us himself. He not only does not want us to compare ourselves to others but to himself and live according to his model, but at the same time gives us himself so that together with him we may live up to that very high standard. To help us love others as he has loved us, he gives himself to us as the Sacrament of Love in the Holy Eucharist, so that we might “do this in memory of” him. This is the means by which we enter into his Passion and are trained to respond as he did to those who slapped, stripped, beat, mocked and crucified him. This is the way he makes us true children of our Heavenly Father.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Gospel
Luke 6:27-38
Jesus said to his disciples:
“To you who hear I say,
love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
To the person who strikes you on one cheek,
offer the other one as well,
and from the person who takes your cloak,
do not withhold even your tunic.
Give to everyone who asks of you,
and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.
For if you love those who love you,
what credit is that to you?
Even sinners love those who love them.
And if you do good to those who do good to you,
what credit is that to you?
Even sinners do the same.
If you lend money to those from whom you expect repayment,
what credit is that to you?
Even sinners lend to sinners,
and get back the same amount.
But rather, love your enemies and do good to them,
and lend expecting nothing back;
then your reward will be great
and you will be children of the Most High,
for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give, and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.
For the measure with which you measure
will in return be measured out to you.”
The post Living By Jesus’ Standards, Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), February 23, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
February 21, 2025Becoming Heroes of Hope like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Giving Reason for the Hope Within Us, Shrine of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, New York, February 20, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, New York
February 20, 2025

To listen to an audio recording of this talk, please click below:
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The outline for tonight’s talk was:
The Jubilee of Hope
A response to a time of growing despair
The Witness of Heroic Hope in St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
What hope is
How we grow in hope
How we lose hope
How we share hope
Becoming Pilgrims and Heroic Messengers of Hope

The post Becoming Heroes of Hope like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Giving Reason for the Hope Within Us, Shrine of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, New York, February 20, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
1 hr 4 min
February 16, 2025Trust in God and the Blessed Life, Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), February 16, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
February 16, 2025
Jer 17:5-8, Ps 1, 1Cor 15:12.16-20, Lk 6:17.20-26

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.16.25_MCs_Homily_I_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
There is a huge contrast in today’s readings. In the first reading, the prophet Jeremiah describes the contrast as essentially one of trust. On the one hand, there are “those who trust in human beings and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.” On the other there are those who “trust in the Lord.” Those who place their trust in things of this world live, he says, like a “shrub in the desert… parched… a lava waste, a salt and empty earth.” Those who trust in the Lord, in contrast, are “like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when the heat comes: its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”
This insight is crucial for us to understand why Jesus says what he says in the Gospel in his famous Sermon on the Plain. All the beatitudes and woes he describes have to do with whether a condition fosters trust in God or trust in men and material possessions, whether the condition makes us turn toward the Lord or away from him.
On the subject of money, Jesus says “blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours” and “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” The point he’s making is those who are rich often place their faith, hope and security in money and the things money can buy. Those who are poor often have to God because they have few or no worldly options. In terms of what really matters, their poverty turns out to be a blessing because it helps them to place their treasure in God and stretch out their roots to his eternal stream.
On the subject of food, Jesus says “Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied” and “woe to you who are now full, for you will be hungry.” Those who are really hungry generally take the words, “Give us today our daily bread” far more seriously, and learn to hunger and trust in God’s fatherly care. Those who are full, who have no food worries, can often begin to take its presence for granted, and can stop saying thanks to God for food because they think it grows in supermarkets. One state helps to bring one closer to God; the other can often help to turn one’s “heart away from the Lord.” In the final analysis, Jesus says one is clearly better for our soul.
With respect to human emotions, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh” and “woe to you who laugh now for you will grieve and weep.” Those who are laughing now can begin to put their trust and happiness in their own wit or in a group of interesting and entertaining friends and experiences. They may experience human contentment and have their desire for eternal happiness lessened. Those who are weeping on the other hand, who entrust their pains, sorrows and intercessions to God, are those who will have the eternal time of their life.
The greatest contrast is in terms of how others treat us and think about us. Jesus says “Woe to you when all speak well of you” and “blessed are you when people hate you, exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.” He says that the false prophets, the spiritual terrorists and great villains of history, were similarly praised in their lifetime but ended up facing judgment; the real heroes of eternity, the true prophets — and we can add Jesus himself, his apostles and so many martyrs and saints — were hated, denounced and even killed. They all lived a life, however, of total dependence on God, trusting in him even and especially when it was hard. They are now rejoicing and leaping for joy forever.
Jesus’ logic and focus are crystal clear. In terms of what’s most important, worldly blessings like riches, food, laughter and praise can be spiritual woes and curses, and worldly woes like poverty, famine, tears and derision can become spiritual blessings. It’s a sad truth that the more one is filled with human blessings, the easier it is to push God to the side, to think that one doesn’t need Him. The real question each of us needs to face is whether our values, our logic, our focus are like Jesus’ or like the world’s. Many if given the chance to be humanly rich like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos or spiritually wealthy like a poor holy widow would say, “Show me the money!” If given the choice between being the life of the party or someone who is mocked, misunderstood, or mistreated because of fidelity to Christ, most of us would say “Party on!” If given the choice between feasting or fasting, most of us would respond saying, “I’ll have the filet mignon medium rare and a glass of Cabernet Savignon.” But like the temptations Christ will undergo the desert on which we’ll focus in three weeks, the devil often uses food, riches, and the promise of power or popularity to draw us from God. This Sunday Jesus describes for us a choice between two types of trust: genuine trust in God or a trust in the things of God that the devil can often easily manipulate to turn our hearts away from God.
This contrast between two types of trust is starkest in today’s second reading. St. Paul describes two types of people, living contrasting ways of life: those who trust in the reality of faith in the resurrection of Christ, or those who trust in their own philosophy. Many in Corinth were teaching that Jesus had not risen. The Greeks — like, unfortunately many people again today — didn’t believe in a resurrection of the body. They thought that after death the soul continued to live, but that the body was just a temporary prison from which death permanently liberated the soul. They clung to this Greek philosophical belief and said that bodily resurrection couldn’t and wouldn’t happen. St. Paul came and preached clearly that Christ rose from the dead and that all of Christian faith was based on this belief. He wrote, “If Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” To bring St. Paul’s language up to 21st century terminology: if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then the last person to leave this chapel today is the biggest fool, because our faith would crumble like a falling house of cards. Jesus Christ, simply put, promised that he would rise on the third day. If he didn’t rise from the dead, then he was not God, then he was not even a good man, but a grand deceiver or demented. All of us who put our faith in him would then be pitiable fools.
Today’s readings about trust focus ultimately on what faith in God really is and does. Faith is a trust in a person that leads to our trusting what the person says or does. To believe in Jesus Christ means to trust in what he taught and did and base our life on it. The issue for us or others may not be the resurrection. It may be one of the controversial issues today on which so many in the world effectively tell Jesus and the Church he founded that they’re wrong or out-of-touch: trust in God working through the hierarchy of the Church, the need to forgive our neighbor seventy-times-seven-times or to turn the other cheek rather than retaliate, the teaching about a given sin or about the importance of Sunday Mass, the Sacrament of Confession, the counter-cultural teaching about marriage, the fact that we will be judged by how we treat the immigrant through whom we hear Jesus saying, “I was a stranger” and either “you welcomed me” or “gave me no welcome.” The question is, when confronted with the teaching of Christ or the Church he founded, do we in trust in Jesus enough to accept and live what he announces, or do we trust in what worldly opinion makers declare? Do we trust in God and the Church he founded to proclaim his Gospel, or do we trust more in our own opinions and ideas?
The Missionaries of Charity have been founded on this type of trust and are called to be prophets of it in the Church and in the world. Many times I’ve had the privilege in August to preach for you the Triduum in anticipation of your communal feast on August 22 and to focus with you on the Spirit of your Society: “Loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness, as lived by Jesus and Mary in the Gospels.” Everything begins with a trust full of all the love your mind, heart, soul and strength can muster and the joyful self-gift you make to God and in him to others as a result.
Today at this Mass, we’re presented with the choice between two paths. It’s the choice between putting our trust fully in Christ or placing it someplace else. We might think it’s a choice between poverty and wealth, between hunger and sumptuous foods, between laughter and tears, between friends and enemies. But that’s not what it’s really about. It’s really a choice between streams of living water or deserts, between fruitfulness or sterility, between beatitude and woe, between life and death. It’s here that we come poor to receive from him in the Holy Eucharist the greatest riches of all, hungry to be fed, sorrowful and desiring to do efficacious reparation for our sins and those of the world, and seeking Christ’s strength to remain faithful and united to him when suffering. Today as Jesus lifts up his eyes to us, let’s lift up our eyes and hearts with loving trust to him, as he sets us before us the path to eternal happiness and bids us to follow him as prophets leading others onto his narrow way.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Jer 17:5-8
Thus says the LORD:
Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings,
who seeks his strength in flesh,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
He is like a barren bush in the desert
that enjoys no change of season,
but stands in a lava waste,
a salt and empty earth.
Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose hope is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted beside the waters
that stretches out its roots to the stream:
it fears not the heat when it comes;
its leaves stay green;
in the year of drought it shows no distress,
but still bears fruit.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 1:1-2, 3, 4 and 6
R (40:5a) Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Blessed the man who follows not
the counsel of the wicked,
nor walks in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the company of the insolent,
but delights in the law of the LORD
and meditates on his law day and night.
R Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
that yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
R Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Not so the wicked, not so;
they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.
R Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.
Reading II
1 Cor 15:12, 16-20
Brothers and sisters:
If Christ is preached as raised from the dead,
how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?
If the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised,
and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain;
you are still in your sins.
Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all.
But now Christ has been raised from the dead,
the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
Alleluia
Lk 6:23ab
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Rejoice and be glad;
your reward will be great in heaven.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Lk 6:17, 20-26
Jesus came down with the Twelve
and stood on a stretch of level ground
with a great crowd of his disciples
and a large number of the people
from all Judea and Jerusalem
and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon.
And raising his eyes toward his disciples he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for the kingdom of God is yours.
Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!
Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.
For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.
But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are filled now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will grieve and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you,
for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.”

The post Trust in God and the Blessed Life, Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), February 16, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
18 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.