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By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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August 22, 2024Venerating Mary as Our Queen and Queen of Heaven, The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, August 22, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
August 22, 2024
Is 9:1-6, Ps 113, Lk 1:26-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.22.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today we celebrate the Memorial of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was placed in the 1970 reform of the liturgical calendar at the end of the Octave from her Assumption, since it’s on the Coronation that we celebrate the enduring purpose of the Assumption. Mary was raised body and soul into heaven not so much as an honor but as a mission, a mission flowing from her vocation. As the Second Vatican Council taught, at the culmination of her earthly life, Mary “was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory… and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son” (LG 59). She was assumed and crowned in order to intensify further her conformity to her Son in glory. Mary is, as we remember, first and foremost a disciple of her Son. She sought to conform her existence to him in everything. God’s having crowned her Queen of heaven and earth — Queen of Angels, Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, Virgins, all Saints, Families, and Peace, as we proclaim in the Litany of Loreto — is so that she may first share in the glory and heavenly reign and work of the blessed Fruit of her womb.
There are two grounds for Mary’s queenship. The first is her maternity. Isaiah in today’s first reading prophesied that the child to be born to us would have from David’s throne a vast dominion, and as a result of his reign, the people in darkness would see a wonderful light. We see that fulfillment in the Gospel, when that “child to be born for us” would be “called holy, the Son of God” and “Son of the Most High.” The Archangel says he would simultaneously receive “the throne of David his father and rule over the house of Jacob forever and of whose kingdom there would be no end.” Our Lady would give to the light in Bethlehem the Light of the World so that all those in the darkness of despair and even death would see the greatest light of all. We know that in most realms the mother of the King is traditionally called Queen and in many of them has some real authority. Mary would share in her Son’s authority. And since his reign is eternal, so would be her queenship. She would exercise her maternal queenship, for example, in Cana of Galilee, interceding with confidence. And at the end of her life on earth, Jesus took her up to heaven so that she could continue that work. At St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome, in its beautiful 13th century apse mosaic, Jesus is depicted crowning Mary while the two of them were seated on Jesus’ throne. With his right hand, Jesus is placing a crown on Mary’s head; with his left, he has an open book with the words that describe what he was in fact doing: “Veni, electa, ponam te super thronum meum,” “Come, chosen one, so that I may place you on my throne.” Jesus once sat on Mary’s lap as the throne on which he reigned as an infant king of heaven and earth. At the end of her life, Jesus took her and sat her on his throne.
This humble Nazarene teenager, growing up in simple circumstances in a place where Nathaniel would later wonder whether any good could come, is now the queen of the universe. As we prayed in Psalm 113, the Lord indeed raises up the lowly to seat them with princes. As Mary prayed in her Magnificat, that’s because the Lord casts down the mighty, exalts the humble, and never ceases to do great things for her for which all generations would call her blessed. She is the response to question in today’s Psalm, “Who is like the Lord, our God, who is enthroned on high and looks upon the heavens and the earth below?” She is the foremost image of God, filled with God from the first moment of her conception. And as we prayed a week ago on the Assumption, the Queen stands at his right hand arrayed in gold. She is, as Revelation attests, the “woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.”
But her maternity is only the first way she has been conformed to her Son, Christ the King, assumed into have and crowned. The second is her share in Jesus’ ongoing mission and work. Christ came into the world not to be served but to serve. For him to reign is to serve. And so Mary, as ancilla Domini or handmaid of the Lord, now shares in that reign through service. Her maternal service to him and to us is the glory of her royal exaltation, as she cooperates in the birth and growth of divine life in all those whom, reigning on Calvary, her Son entrusted to her as her children. To be Queen is not just a title or honor, but an office, sharing in her Son’s love and responsibility for the world.
For us to venerate her aright on this feast, which we ponder in the fifth glorious mystery every Sunday and Wednesday, is to allow her to live out for us her queenship, seeking to serve us, to love us, to help us in our needs. We turn to her in prayer under the title of queen, which is a vocative of trust, joy and love. In the Salve Regina, we hail her as our Holy Queen, mother of mercy, life, sweetness and hope, asking her to hear our sighs, to turn her merciful eyes toward us, and to show us her Son. We praise her in the Ave, Regina Caelorum, as queen of angels, as the root and gate from whom Christ the light of the world entered the human race, and to pray for us to Christ. In the Easter chant of Regina Caeli, we rejoice with her at the resurrection of the Son she merited to bear and ask God the Father through her prayers to obtain the joy of everlasting life. We turn to her because we know she is simultaneously close to her Son, seated on his throne, but also close to us. Her coronation is, Pope Pius XII said when he established this feast, the “climax” to all our filial devotions to Mary. But Pius XII wanted us likewise on this feast to make a commitment to her, as she lives from heaven her regal commitment to us. In his encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam at the end of the Marian year of 1954, celebrating the centenary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he wanted the Church on her Coronation to renew its consecration to her, to respond to her maternal intercession with filial entrustment, so that she could help us, in turn, be fully conformed to her Son in this world and forever, to allow our whole life, like hers, to develop according to God’s word. We renew — or make for the first time — that entrustment today.
What Mary is praying for is ultimately for us to live a truly Eucharistic life in conformity to her Son. Just as she was umbilically connected to the Blessed Fruit of her womb, she wants to help us to unite everything we are and have to Jesus. She wants to help us become like her Son, the Lord, our God, who is enthroned on high and looks upon the heavens and the earth below. Her Annunciation is in a sense recapitulated at every Mass when the incarnation that happened in her womb is perpetuated on this altar and we receive within us the same King she bore in her womb and seated on her lap. At every Mass, she participates as Queen, praying that through our Holy Communion, we may become united with all our mind, heart, soul and strength to her Son, who humbly desires to take up his throne within us. Her child born for us, who is called holy, the Son of God, who brings light to all in darkness, desires — as does his mother — that we will allow him to help make us holy from the inside, so that, with Mary, we, too, may one day be exalted to share with Mary his eternal kingdom and reign of love. That’s what we celebrate on the feast of the Coronation. That’s what Mary, as our mother and the handmaid of the Lord, is praying be accomplished in us. That’s why we entrust ourselves to her with confidence anew today. This is what we hope to celebrate with all the saints forever in heaven. Hail Holy Queen, enthroned above, pray for us!

The readings for this Mass were:
Reading 1
Is 9:1-6
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
You have brought them abundant joy
and great rejoicing,
As they rejoice before you as at the harvest,
as men make merry when dividing spoils.
For the yoke that burdened them,
the pole on their shoulder,
And the rod of their taskmaster
you have smashed, as on the day of Midian.
For every boot that tramped in battle,
every cloak rolled in blood,
will be burned as fuel for flames.
For a child is born to us, a son is given us;
upon his shoulder dominion rests.
They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero,
Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.
His dominion is vast
and forever peaceful,
From David’s throne, and over his kingdom,
which he confirms and sustains
By judgment and justice,
both now and forever.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this!
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 113:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8
R.   (2) Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever.
or:
R.   Alleluia.
Praise, you servants of the LORD,
praise the name of the LORD.
Blessed be the name of the LORD
both now and forever.
R.   Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever.
or:
R.   Alleluia.
From the rising to the setting of the sun
is the name of the LORD to be praised.
High above all nations is the LORD;
above the heavens is his glory.
R.   Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever.
or:
R.   Alleluia.
Who is like the LORD, our God, who is enthroned on high
and looks upon the heavens and the earth below?
R.   Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever.
or:
R.   Alleluia.
He raises up the lowly from the dust;
from the dunghill he lifts up the poor
To seat them with princes,
with the princes of his own people.
R.   Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever.
or:
R.   Alleluia.
Alleluia
See Lk 1:28
R.   Alleluia, alleluia.
Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you;
blessed are you among women.
R.   Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Lk 1:26-38
The angel Gabriel was sent from God
to a town of Galilee called Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph,
of the house of David,
and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And coming to her, he said,
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”
But she was greatly troubled at what was said
and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
Then the angel said to her,
“Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favor with God.
Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”
But Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.
And behold, Elizabeth, your relative,
has also conceived a son in her old age,
and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren;
for nothing will be impossible for God.”
Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.
The post Venerating Mary as Our Queen and Queen of Heaven, The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, August 22, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
13 min
August 21, 2024Faithful Sheep, Shepherds and Laborers, 20th Wednesday (II), August 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Pius X, Pope
August 21, 2024
Ez 34:1-11, Ps 23, Mt 20:1-16

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.21.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following thoughts guided the homily:
The ultimate transformation that Jesus wants to work in us is to change us by his love so that we will learn how to love others as he has loved first. Today in the readings, we see two different ways by which he has sought to love us and how that love is supposed to spur us toward living by his standards. But the readings also reveal how sometimes we fail even to try to live to his standards. And the saint the Church celebrates today is someone who not only strived to live by Christ’s standards of love but help the whole Church to do so.
Let’s begin with the Psalm and first reading. In the famous Psalm 23, we focus on the Lord as our Shepherd. He leads us to verdant pastures and restful waters, guides us in right paths, accompanies us firmly through dark valleys, spreads tables before us even in the sight of opponents, anoints us as priests, prophets and kings, fills our cup to overflowing, inundates our life with goodness and kindness and invites us to dwell with him in his house permanently. With him as our shepherd, we shall not “want,” we shall not be lacking of anything we need. When Jesus finally came into our world as our Good Shepherd, he fulfilled all of these hopes, calling us as his sheep by name, leaving the 99 and going after us when we had wandered as if we were the only sheep in the world, guiding us along his paths, and feeding us ultimately with himself. But his ultimate goal was to transform us, while remaining sheep, to be shepherds after his own heart, to care for others with a similar care by which he first cared for us, to take responsibility for others and protect them, provide for them, go in search for them when their lost, and love them. We see in the first reading that the people of Ezekiel’s time, especially the leaders, were failing to do that. Rather than shepherding and pasturing God’s flock, they were serving themselves, feeding off their milk, shearing and wearing their wool, slaughtering their fattened ones, and giving them over to pillage. They were not strengthening the weak, healing the sick, binding the injured, seeking the lost and bringing back the strays. As a result, the sheep were scattered and became food for the beasts, being taken advantage of by others, wandering far from God and the care he wanted to provide them through his people. So God swore an oath that he would come against those shepherds, take his sheep from them, save his sheep, look after them himself and tend them. That’s precisely what happened when Jesus the Good Shepherd came. But he wants us in his Church to learn the lesson he taught the people of Israel through Ezekiel, and become truly shepherds of others, not using others for our own benefit, but loving and caring for them, calling them in Christ’s name, guiding them to him, protecting them from the wolves and marauders, and seeking to bring them to the Good Shepherd himself to feed them, pasture them, bind their wounds and heal them. It leads us to ask the question as to how much effort we put to shepherding others, to passing on the faith, to protecting people from the predators of every age, and to making sure they’re fed not just with material food but with the food of everlasting life. In an age of individualism, we can allow people to fend for themselves, as they wander far from Christ’s fold. Today Jesus, through the prophet Ezekiel, is calling us as his sheep to learn from him how to shepherd rightly.
The second great image comes to us from the Gospel. Jesus entered our world to work. He even took on a human trade, doing challenging manual labor as a builder for most of his life on earth, a sign of how he sought to build us up into a holy temple united with him. In the work of salvation, he worked indefatigably as a shepherd, as a fisher of men, to save as many as he could, walking up and down the ancient holy land to bring the Gospel, not having a place to lay his head, sometimes so tired he would fall asleep in rocky, soaked boats in storms, even willing to be tortured and murdered in order to accomplish his work. And he wants us to be hard workers for his kingdom alongside him, because he knows that part of our salvation is precisely through our doing that work together with him. He similarly wants us to experience the joy of work well done, a piece of the happiness of heaven when we’re able to bring in a harvest for and with him, when we’re able to see the return of one or more sheep and rejoice with all of heaven. That’s what the Gospel Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is all about.
Looked at with worldly lenses, when we compare the men who worked twelve hours and those who worked for one, we think that the latter group had it better, especially since they all ended up receiving the same pay. But this manifests the jaundiced view many of us have of human work, which certainly influences our reaction to Jesus’ story. Most of us have come to think about work in general — and the work of sharing the faith in particular — as a burden rather than a blessing, even though we know that God gave us the vocation to work — to “subdue the earth” and have “dominion” over all animals — before the Fall (Gen 1:28). Work is a part of our vocation, how God has us grow and develop; as we do honest work, we not only make something, but we make ourselves, we build our character, through the qualities we bring to our work.
If we understand the way work happened in the ancient world, we see clearly how great a gift work actually was. Men used to go to the market place in the morning hoping to be hired as day workers. They did all they could to be chosen, arriving with their tools, running up to meet those who were hiring, selling themselves as hard-workers, much as almost everyone in the United States did during the Great Depression. In the ancient world, many men and their families were living on the semi-starvation line. To be unemployed for a day was to court disaster. If they were not picked at dawn, they would be filled with anxiety. If they were not picked later, at 9, they would have been concerned about letting their wife and children down. If they were not selected by noon, they would have begun to wonder if any sandals and deprecations would be hurled in their direction upon their embarrassed return! If they were not hired by three, they would have begun seriously to worry that their family, and especially their children, might go to bed hungry and malnourished. It’s not like those who were not hired would have been in the market place playing poker, smoking, drinking and gawking at passersby. Most of them would have been eaten alive by apprehension. They easily would have traded in 11 hours of hard work in the fields for the eleven hours of anxiety waiting in the square.
These considerations bring us to the first application of the parable. Jesus was using this story to preach to the Jews about salvation. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had already been God’s chosen people for about 1800 years, since the time of Abraham. For thirteen hundred years, they had been committed to keeping a covenant with God based on the faithful fulfillment of the Mosaic law. All of a sudden a carpenter from Nazareth, who was accomplishing various types of miraculous signs to back up the authority of his potent preaching, was saying that others were going to get the same “life’s wage” that they were. Jesus stated that the prostitutes, if they repented and accepted his Gospel, were going to receive the full pay of salvation, adding that tax collectors, hated by observant Jews for their complicity with the Romans, would receive the same if they accepted the Gospel like Zacchaeus or Matthew did. Most shocking to the Pharisees’ phylactery-covered ears was Jesus’ assertion that even the Gentiles would be saved. It just didn’t seem fair to them. They resented — to use the words of the parable — that others were being made “equal” to them. Even though Jesus was underlining that his Jewish listeners, too, would be saved if they accepted the fulfillment of all God had been doing among them and embraced the Gospel he was proclaiming and enfleshing, many of his listeners were convinced the “system” was unfair. After all, weren’t those who had kept the Mosaic Law with such exactitude and rigor for thirteen hundred years entitled to something special? Didn’t those who had borne the greater “burdens” and “scorching heat” of the moral law from the dawn of their life have a right to something more than the Johnny-come-latelies — who up until that time had never kept the covenant or, in the case of the Gentiles, hadn’t even heard of it? The Lord’s generosity in freely offering salvation to others, like he would to the Good Thief Dismas on the Cross, was making them jealous and angry.
Through this parable, Jesus was exposing a serious flaw in the way his contemporaries looked at the Covenant with God and with the religious life in general. Just like sometimes we can view work as a burden rather than a blessing, so many Jews, especially the Scribes and Pharisees, looked at their keeping of the covenantal precepts more as a yoke than a grace. They failed to see that they had already received far more than the others were being offered because of the great gift of having been able to walk in the Lord’s ways up until then. We Christians can sometimes be guilty of the same flaw. We can be secretly jealous of those who have lived a wild and sinful life, but who, because of God’s mercy, converted before it was too late. We can behave like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son and resent that the Father treats our profligate brothers and sisters with the same love with which he has treated us who have never disobeyed his commands in such a flagrant way. We can be bitter, as those who had worked all day were, that the Master is making others “equal to us” who have shouldered the weight of fidelity to his law all along. But this envy happens because our vision has become distorted. The expression the Master in the Parable uses today, “Are you envious because I am generous?,” is a loose translation of the Greek St. Matthew employs, which says, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” The generosity of another, especially of God, can make us angry because we think that if we are to win, others must lose; that we can’t be happy and enjoy the fruits of our work unless others, especially the lazy bums who haven’t made the same choices we have, don’t get the same thing and are unhappy. Our eye becomes evil when we’re confronted by others’ sharing their goods or sharing in those goods. We have to add that one of the reasons why we, like Jesus’ Jewish listeners, are prone to anger by the Lord’s merciful generosity is because sometimes we value sins more than we value the love of God and of others. That’s why we’re jealous of those who “get in” at the last moment after having lived a sinful life. If we truly treasure God, however, we recognize that we’ve been blessed all along way more than those who were sinfully enslaved to various idols. Repentant sinners clearly recognize this: that’s one of the reasons why they convert!
So the first lesson that the Lord wants us to take from this parable is that he in his mercy and generosity continues to call others into his vineyard to join those whom he called earlier. Jesus’ heart is so moved with compassion for the crowds that he begs us to pray to the Harvest Master for laborers for his fields. He wants us to rejoice when others respond to that prayer, even if they respond at the last minute, and to let people know how many job openings there still are in the vineyard of the world! That’s how our thoughts will become like God’s thoughts and our ways like his ways.
But there’s a second, equally important lesson from the parable. When many “cradle Catholics” hear this parable, we initially seem to relate to those hired at 6 am in the story, because we think we’ve been in the vineyard from the day of our baptism. When many converts hear it, depending upon how long ago they received the grace, they see themselves in those hired perhaps at 9, noon, 3 or 5. But the Lord wants us — including us priests and religious — to recognize that in terms of work for the Kingdom, we may still be in the market place! Many of us may not yet have begun really to labor for his kingdom: we may be bodies in his vineyard, but not yet laborers. There’s the famous quip of St. John XXIII in response to the question, “Quante persone lavorono in Vaticano?” “How many people work in the Vatican?” Rather than give a number of employees, he replied, “Più o menu, la metà!” “More or less, about half.” Half of the priests, religious and laity in the Vatican were really working to build the kingdom in the heart of the Church; the other half just pretended to be laboring. With regard to the work of the Church in parishes, surveys show that only about 7 percent, one of 14, ever volunteer to help out as catechists, coaches, in the food pantry, or elsewhere. More broadly, the majority of Catholics aren’t even coming to Mass. They’re not learning the faith to pass it on. They’re not only not living the faith with discipline in the middle of the world, but sometimes actually living opposed to it, as some Catholic politicians sadly show us. Likewise there are some priests and religious who do the minimum of their duties, undistinguished by diligence or zeal, happy to allow others to get the callouses. The Lord is calling all of us to labor in his vineyards, to pray to the Harvest Master, to bring Jesus and his teaching to others, and to help to bring others — including notorious sinners, including those who might seem to be far from the Gospel — to Christ. God wants each of us to become a real laborer, a true hard worker, in and for his kingdom, with sleeves rolled up and sweat on the brow.
And in calling us to work hard for his kingdom, Jesus is once more simply telling us, “Follow me!.” In the parable, we see how the Master, representing Jesus, exhausts himself even in comparison to the workers who were hired first thing in the morning. Despite the fact that the Master had a foreman to whom he could have delegated all the hiring, the Master himself went out to hire at 6, 9, 12, 3 and 5. He was even willing to lose money to hire people at the end of the day, not only because he cared about taking in the harvest as urgently as possible, but because he didn’t want anyone excluded from the work of and in his kingdom. Notice that he doesn’t give things out of charity to the people sitting idle in the marketplace; respecting their dignity as workers, he gives them something to do. His question to those hired at 5 pm, “Why do you stand here idle all day?,” shows his passion that everyone come to his vineyard to work; after all, he had already come out four times that day to hire everyone who was present. Their response, “Because no one has hired us!,” shows in a sense how so much inactivity had led to a self-pity that had made unresponsive and irresponsible. Did they not realize that the Master of the Vineyard was hiring everyone? Even if they were in the ancient “out house” the first four times he was hiring, did they not grasp that everyone was being summoned to work in the fields? People often say that the reason why they have never gotten involved is, “No one asked me.” With regard to the harvest, however, God never wants us to say that. He wants us to grasp that he is hiring all of us, that there’s room in the vineyard for everyone willing to work, that he’s counting on all our help. And he’s passionately and continuously coming out in search of each of us to summon us to labor with him for the salvation of the human race.
The essential lesson of the parable is that to be in the Kingdom of God means to be working together with God and together with others, some who have entered the fields before us, and some who have come after us. There’s much work to do and God wants each of us working as hard as talented athletes strive to make the Olympics and win the gold. We see in the Parable that remaining idle on the sidelines when God’s hiring us all to do his work is not merely the worst of missed opportunities, but rather a lack of the life the God of the Kingdom wants us to share. He wants us not only objectively to share in the urgent work of the harvest, but he wants to form us as harvesters, because our life, like that of the day laborers in the marketplace, is purposeless unless we grasp that we’re hired and get down to hard work. Our failure to recognize and to respond to his call deprives us of this grace.
Today the Church rejoices to celebrate someone who was a good shepherd after Jesus’ image, someone who was a hard worker his whole life who brought that diligence to the papacy, St. Pius X. His whole life as a disciple and then his priorities as a priest, bishop and Pope were all to love God and neighbor with all he had and to help form Christ’s people to do so as sheep, shepherds and laborers. Born in 1835 in a small village called Riese near Venice, one of a family of 12 whose father was a mailman, Giuseppe Sarto discerned a priestly vocation as a boy but his family did not have the resources to pay for his priestly education. His pastor came to the rescue. He tutored him in Latin and arranged a scholarship for him to go away to seminary where, despite a ten mile journey on foot each day, Giuseppe excelled so much that he was ordained a priest by dispensation at the early age of 23. He was assigned as the assistant to an aging and crippled pastor in Tombolo for nine years. In between pastoral calls, he continued to study St. Thomas Aquinas and canon law, established a night school for adult catechesis, and became a much sought-after preacher. In 1867, he was named pastor in Salzano, where he rebuilt the Church, provided for a parish hospital, and heroically served the ill during a cholera epidemic. Recognizing his talents and zeal, his bishop then made him a canon of the Cathedral, spiritual director and rector of the diocesan seminary, and finally vicar general. Because he was faithful in so many “little things,” he was entrusted with greater. At the age of 49, he was named Bishop of Mantua, a diocese that was in rough shape due to various scandals among the clergy. He immediately set out to reform his priests, present and future, and with and through them to reform the people. He taught dogmatic and moral theology at the seminary. He gave weekly catechesis to adults. He heard confessions regularly. His charity knew no bounds. After eight years, there was a such a change in Mantua that Pope Leo XIII named this simple priest of humble origins Cardinal Patriarch of Venice. There, in contrast to the pageantry with which such a prelate was accustomed to be treated, his unpretentiousness and zeal in trying to teach the faith quickly won over the people, who regarded him as a saint. After Leo died in 1903, the cardinals in conclave were set to elect the Vatican Secretary of State Mariano Rampolla as the new pope, but his election, by an historical situation too complicated to describe now, was vetoed by the Austrian emperor Franz Jozef. Providentially, Cardinal Sarto was elected as a compromise. During his 11 years as pope, he brought to the papacy his vast priestly experience ministering to ordinary Catholics. He chose as his motto, “To renew all things in Christ” (Eph 1:10), and he began that renewal with the “source and summit of the Christian life,” Christ in the Eucharist. Most Catholics, influenced by Jansenist rigorism, received Holy Communion only once or twice a year. He encouraged them to receive Holy Communion frequently, even daily. He lowered the age of first communion from about 18 to the age of reason. He promoted communion to be brought to the sick. He encouraged all Catholics to read Sacred Scripture each day, preached publicly every Sunday on the Gospel, and founded the Pontifical Biblical Institute to help in the understanding of the Bible. He reformed Church music so that the people would be able to sing simple Gregorian plainchants during Mass and come to Mass to love God and receive his strength to love others, rather than to attend to hear a concert of famous Bach, Beethoven or Mozart orchestral Masses. He fostered Marian devotion. He clearly denounced the various forms of “modernist” ideas that were undermining people’s faith and made sure that all priests and teachers who had a responsibility to pass on the Catholic faith took an oath to promise they would pass it on rather than modernist notions. He also began a thorough reform of canon law and resolved various complicated Church-state issues so that people would have the proper context to grow in Christ-like love. We can summarize his life by saying that, from a very early hour in his life, he worked hard as a student, seminarian, priest, seminary teacher, bishop, cardinal and pope to restore all things in Christ, to refresh the faith of the people and to encourage them, by his example, to get involved as workers in the Vineyard.
Today Jesus is look at each of us straight in the eye and saying, “You, too, go to work in my vineyard!” He’s telling each of us, “You’re hired!” If we respond to the blessing of that calling, if we roll up our sleeves, and help him spread and strengthen the faith as laborers and shepherds, then he will give us each not just a denarius or full day’s wage, but the abundantly generous reward of eternal life, the same reward as Our Lady, St. Joseph, and all the great saints. We don’t have to wait that long to see that generosity, however. Before we engage in his work later today and throughout this week, he already gives us something far greater than a salary of a billion dollars. The reward he gives is the greatest expression of his generosity he could: he gives himself! He even involves in this gift the “work of [our] human hands.” But to whom more is given, more is to be expected. As we prepare to receive him today, we thank him for never stopping to come to meet us in the marketplace to remind us of the gift of the work to which he’s calling us. We thank him for shepherding us and sending us out to pasture others. We beg him to strengthen us from our communion with him on the inside to respond wholeheartedly to his holy summons. There’s much work to do and, out of love for others and for us, God is sending us to do it. Let’s get started!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Ez 34:1-11
The word of the Lord came to me:
Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel,
in these words prophesy to them to the shepherds:
Thus says the Lord GOD: Woe to the shepherds of Israel
who have been pasturing themselves!
Should not shepherds, rather, pasture sheep?
You have fed off their milk, worn their wool,
and slaughtered the fatlings,
but the sheep you have not pastured.
You did not strengthen the weak nor heal the sick
nor bind up the injured.
You did not bring back the strayed nor seek the lost,
but you lorded it over them harshly and brutally.
So they were scattered for the lack of a shepherd,
and became food for all the wild beasts.
My sheep were scattered
and wandered over all the mountains and high hills;
my sheep were scattered over the whole earth,
with no one to look after them or to search for them.
Therefore, shepherds, hear the word of the LORD:
As I live, says the Lord GOD,
because my sheep have been given over to pillage,
and because my sheep have become food for every wild beast,
for lack of a shepherd;
because my shepherds did not look after my sheep,
but pastured themselves and did not pasture my sheep;
because of this, shepherds, hear the word of the LORD:
Thus says the Lord GOD:
I swear I am coming against these shepherds.
I will claim my sheep from them
and put a stop to their shepherding my sheep
so that they may no longer pasture themselves.
I will save my sheep,
that they may no longer be food for their mouths.
For thus says the Lord GOD:
I myself will look after and tend my sheep.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 23:1-3A, 3B-4, 5, 6
R. (1) The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
Beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.
R. The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.
He guides me in right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
With your rod and your staff
that give me courage.
R. The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.
You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
R. The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.
Only goodness and kindness will follow me
all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
for years to come.
R. The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.
Alleluia
Heb 4:12
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The word of God is living and effective,
able to discern the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mt 20:1-16
Jesus told his disciples this parable:
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a landowner
who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard.
After agreeing with them for the usual daily wage,
he sent them into his vineyard.
Going out about nine o’clock,
he saw others standing idle in the marketplace,
and he said to them, ‘You too go into my vineyard,
and I will give you what is just.’
So they went off.
And he went out again around noon,
and around three o’clock, and did likewise.
Going out about five o’clock,
he found others standing around, and said to them,
‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’
They answered, ‘Because no one has hired us.’
He said to them, ‘You too go into my vineyard.’
When it was evening the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman,
‘Summon the laborers and give them their pay,
beginning with the last and ending with the first.’
When those who had started about five o’clock came,
each received the usual daily wage.
So when the first came, they thought that they would receive more,
but each of them also got the usual wage.
And on receiving it they grumbled against the landowner, saying,
‘These last ones worked only one hour,
and you have made them equal to us,
who bore the day’s burden and the heat.’
He said to one of them in reply,
‘My friend, I am not cheating you.
Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?
Take what is yours and go.
What if I wish to give this last one the same as you?
Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?
Are you envious because I am generous?’
Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
The post Faithful Sheep, Shepherds and Laborers, 20th Wednesday (II), August 21, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
August 20, 2024The Generosity and the Possibilities of God, 20th Tuesday (II), August 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church
August 20, 2024
Ezek 28:1-10, Deut 32:26-28.30.35-36, Mt 19:23-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.20.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Yesterday, we had in the Gospel the scene of Jesus’ encounter with the Rich Young Man, a good guy seeking the way to eternal life, who had kept the commandments from his youth but knew that keeping the commandments, just not sinning, wasn’t enough. He knew he was lacking something and asked Jesus what he needed. Jesus looked at him with love and summoned him to perfection by giving him the path: to go, sell all that he had, give the money to the poor, become rich in heaven and what truly matters, and then to come, follow Jesus up close. When presented with the choice between Jesus and his stuff, between having it all by seizing the pearl of great price, or retaining his stuff without that far more intimate relationship with Jesus, the young man went away sad, continuing to hold on to, and be owned by, his possessions. That’s what led Jesus in today’s Gospel to swear an oath and declare, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven. Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” The disciples, astonished by the degree of difficulty Jesus had just declared for entering the Kingdom, cried out, “Then who can be saved?,” and Jesus answered by saying that it’s impossible for men on their own to be so detached from the things of the world, but “for God all things are possible.” He was communicating that, no matter whether we’re rich or poor, salvation is impossible for us as a result of our efforts alone, because salvation is always a grace. But God does will all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4) and therefore makes possible by his own divine grace what would be impossible for us according to our nature and effort.
We see that impossibility in today’s first reading. Ezekiel proclaims a message to the pagan prince of Tyre. He was so rich through his trading on the Mediterranean and as part of one of the big trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean, his treasuries were so full of gold and silver, that his heart grew haughty, he became full of pride and arrogance, and began to look at himself as a god. He forgot who he was as a creature dependent on God. And so God, medicinally for him and for others, would allow him to recognize that he was in fact a creature when other nations would invade Tyre, destroy it and even take his life. It would be a humbling experience that would remind him that he was a man and not a god and given him a chance to cry out for mercy to the one true God.
What happened to the Rich Young Man and to the Prince of Tyre can happen to anyone. We can begin to place our faith, hope and love in material things, in money and what money can be, that we can in practical terms forget God. That’s why Jesus will stress elsewhere in the Gospel that we cannot serve both God and mammon. We have to make the choice to serve God, to place our faith, hope and love in him. We have to reject the worship of the golden calf under various disguises. Sometimes we can persuade ourselves that, because we’re not as rich as Elon Musk, because we’re not millionaires and billionaires, that we’re not at risk of our hearts becoming arrogant, of choosing our stuff over Jesus, of even deeming ourselves gods, but what we see in the Rich Young Man and in the Prince of Tyre can in fact happen to anyone, regardless of the size of one’s bank accounts, who begins to become like a lava waste and place our trust in mammon. That’s why we need to turn to God and ask him for the moral miracle of trusting in him so much that we will live with genuine poverty of spirit. We need to ask him for the grace to be willing to divest ourselves of earthly riches for heavenly treasure. We need to beg him to help us truly place our trust in his providence more than in earthly securities.
This is a choice that ultimately the apostles made, that countless generations of religious and priests and faithful lay men and women have made over the course of the centuries. And it’s worth it. In the Gospel today, after being stunned by the clarity of Jesus’ words about passing through a needle’s eye and not being able to take salvation for granted, St. Peter asked about whether his and the apostles’ sacrifices were prudent investments. “We have given up everything and followed you. What will there be for us?,” he queried. And Jesus promised that those who have left everything to follow him — houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands — would receive 100 times more in this life and eternal life. This is the Lord’s promise and his guarantee was sealed not just in his blood but in his own triumph over death on the third day. He promises us not just eternity but 100 times more in this life. He doesn’t promise us that we will be 100 times richer than Bill Gates, but he does promise us far greater love, a far greater family, far more lasting possessions, much deeper happiness, even here and now. This is what we see, for example, in the lives of the saints — the saints the Church remembers at the altar and the many “saints next door” who have quietly but truly placed God first — who have given up everything to follow the Lord.
One such holy one is the great Saint Bernard of Clairvaux whom the Church celebrates today. He came from a very wealthy noble family. At 19, after his mother died, he began to think about the things that would last, about heaven, and about the blessed life that leads there. Then he started to talk to his brothers and friends. Eventually he convinced 30 of his family members and friends to join him in becoming Cistercians and all 31 of them showed up one day offering themselves to the original Cistericians, Saints Robert, Hugh and Alberic. Four of his brothers and an uncle were joining with him, but not yet his brother Nivard. As he was preparing to leave the world to follow the Lord, he told Nivard that he was becoming heir to the entire familial estate. Nivard, however, complained that that was unfair, that Bernard and the others would inherit eternity and he would just inherit stuff on earth. Nivard grasped the value of the things of God compared to the things of earth and he, too, would soon enter through the eye of the needle into religious life with his brothers. After becoming a Cistercian monk, St. Bernard traveled preaching people back to the faith, inviting them to think about heaven and the path to heaven. He was incredibly successful because he truly believed in the treasure he was passing on. He was so persuasive that many parents hid their children from him lest all of their kids would want to become priests and religious. He called people to conversion, to true holiness of life, to entrusting themselves to God who can give them the grace to do the impossible and pass through the eye of the needle even in this life. He preached on the infinite love of God for us and how we’re called to remain in that love, to love him back with all we’ve got and to love others enough to help them, with us, seize the hundred-fold gift of divine love in this life, not just in heaven. Today St. Bernard is trying to appeal to us just like he did his contemporaries. He’s praying for us that, just as he helped so many of the people of his day to treasure God above all, we might have a similar impact on our family, on our friends and our contemporaries. In the opening prayer of the Mass we turned to God and asked, “O God, who made the Abbot Saint Bernard a man consumed with zeal for your house and a light shining and burning in your Church, grant, through his intercession, that we may be on fire with the same spirit and walk always as children of the light.” Today God wants to make us truly zealous, a real light and a burning fire.
Once when St. Bernard was preaching in Languedoc, at Sarlat in Perigord, trying to bring those who had gone over to heresies back into the faith, he blessed some loaves of bread, saying, “By this you shall know the truth of our doctrine and the falsehood of that which is taught by the heretics, if such as are sick among you recover their health by eating of these loaves.” The bishop of Chartres thought that he was speaking imprudently and said, “If they eat with a right faith, they shall be cured,” but Bernard replied, “No. Assuredly they that taste shall be cured that you may now by this that we are sent by authority derived from God and preach his truth.” And many ate the bread and all those who were sick were cured. I think that that miracle is an image of what happens in the Holy Eucharist. St. Ignatius of Antioch called it the “medicine of immortality.” When we consume the Eucharist, we come into contact with the same Jesus who called the Rich Young Man to perfection and promised 100 fold to those who would leave behind their pearls to seize him as the precious Pearl. The Eucharist was the open secret of the source of St. Bernard’s strength, the way he was able to preach indefatigably against so much opposition. This was the root of his own happy chaste celibacy. This was the foretaste here on earth of the eternal treasure to which he invited so many hundreds of thousands. Jesus Christ is the incarnate 100-fold in this life promised to those who prioritize him. And united to him, he makes the impossible possible, as together with him, risen from the dead, we pass through the eye of the needle into the kingdom, here on earth, as we prepare, with Bernard, for the eternal life that the Rich Young Man and all of us have been made to yearn for and, by God’s grace, one day receive.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Ez 28:1-10
The word of the LORD came to me: Son of man,
say to the prince of Tyre:
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Because you are haughty of heart,
you say, “A god am I!
I occupy a godly throne
in the heart of the sea!”—
And yet you are a man, and not a god,
however you may think yourself like a god.
Oh yes, you are wiser than Daniel,
there is no secret that is beyond you.
By your wisdom and your intelligence
you have made riches for yourself;
You have put gold and silver
into your treasuries.
By your great wisdom applied to your trading
you have heaped up your riches;
your heart has grown haughty from your riches–
therefore thus says the Lord GOD:
Because you have thought yourself
to have the mind of a god,
Therefore I will bring against you
foreigners, the most barbarous of nations.
They shall draw their swords
against your beauteous wisdom,
they shall run them through your splendid apparel.
They shall thrust you down to the pit, there to die
a bloodied corpse, in the heart of the sea.
Will you then say, “I am a god!”
when you face your murderers?
No, you are man, not a god,
handed over to those who will slay you.
You shall die the death of the uncircumcised
at the hands of foreigners,
for I have spoken, says the Lord GOD.
Responsorial Psalm
Deuteronomy 32:26-27AB, 27CD-28, 30, 35CD-36AB
R. (39c) It is I who deal death and give life.
“I would have said, ‘I will make an end of them
and blot out their name from men’s memories,’
Had I not feared the insolence of their enemies,
feared that these foes would mistakenly boast.”
R. It is I who deal death and give life.
“‘Our own hand won the victory;
the LORD had nothing to do with it.’”
For they are a people devoid of reason,
having no understanding.
R. It is I who deal death and give life.
“How could one man rout a thousand,
or two men put ten thousand to flight,
Unless it was because their Rock sold them
and the LORD delivered them up?”
R. It is I who deal death and give life.
Close at hand is the day of their disaster,
and their doom is rushing upon them!
Surely, the LORD shall do justice for his people;
on his servants he shall have pity.
R. It is I who deal death and give life.
Alleluia
2 Cor 8:9
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Jesus Christ became poor although he was rich
so that by his poverty you might become rich.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mt 19:23-30
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich
to enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Again I say to you,
it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.”
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and said,
“Who then can be saved?”
Jesus looked at them and said,
“For men this is impossible,
but for God all things are possible.”
Then Peter said to him in reply,
“We have given up everything and followed you.
What will there be for us?”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you
that you who have followed me, in the new age,
when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory,
will yourselves sit on twelve thrones,
judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters
or father or mother or children or lands
for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more,
and will inherit eternal life.
But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”
The post The Generosity and the Possibilities of God, 20th Tuesday (II), August 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
13 min
August 19, 2024The Delight of Our Eyes and True Treasure, 20th Monday (II), August 19, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Monday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Eudes
August 19, 2024
Ezek 24:15-23, Dt 32:18-21, Mt 19:16-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.19.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted on the homily:
We all know what the first and the greatest commandment is. We’ve heard Jesus’ answer to the question so many times that it’s easy to recall from memory: we are to love the Lord our God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. But even though we know this, it’s hard to live in practice, because, many times, other loves can get in the way. Today’s readings help us to examine what a few of those loves might be.
In the first reading, we have the disconcerting scene of the death of the Prophet Ezekiel’s wife, whom God calls “the delight of [his] eyes.” We don’t know if she had been sick or whether her death would be sudden, but God told Ezekiel that she would die and then that night came for her. God had instructed his prophet that when she died, he should “not mourn or weep or shed any tears,” but “groan in silence, make no lament for the dead, bind on your turban, put sandals on your feet, do not cover your beard, and do not eat the customary bread” of grief. He was to go with life as normal. And all of this was to be a sign for the Jews in exile as to how they should mourn the imminent destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which was the delight of their eyes, the stronghold of their pride and the delight of their eyes. What was going on? Why would God ask this of Ezekiel? Why would he communicate the message to his people in exile in this fashion?
Ezekiel was all-in as a prophet. His whole life was geared toward being God’s messenger. He doubtless loved his wife very much, she was indeed the delight of his eyes, but he loved God even more. When God asked of him this sacrifice, not only the death of his wife but the sacrifice of not mourning for her, he was willing to do it because he loved God even more, and he knew that even though he no longer had his wife, he still had God who was the true delight of his heart. Mourning the death of loved ones is perhaps the most difficult of human experiences, but as St. Paul would later write to the Thessalonians, we grieve but not like those without hope. We grieve with God, knowing he is with us, and knowing that he can raise the dead. What was going on with this prophetic sign was that the Jewish exiles were still not getting the message of conversion. They were still not turning to the Lord with all their mind, heart, soul and strength. They were still thinking because the temple was standing, they would eventually be able to return there to life as normal. But when the Temple was destroyed, God through Ezekiel wanted them to go on with life as normal in exile, conscious that they still had the one who ought to be the treasure of their heart. It’s a tough lesson, but a very important one. Sometimes we, too, can put too much of our heart in the things of this world, instead of God, even of the holy things of the world, like they did the temple, in which they took so much pride as a sign of God’s presence and blessing. Today people can put so much of their heart in a parish Church such that if it closes, or somehow experiences a major change, people can lose all of their bearings. But God wants to be our true treasure, not the things and the gifts of God. And he wants us to learn that lesson and make that choice for him now, not after, out of love for us, he might take away something good so that we will be able to choose him as the better part.
This lesson is similarly emphasized in the dramatic encounter in the Gospel between Jesus and the Rich Young Man. We see in this dialogue that he was a good man, keeping the commandments of the “second tablet” of the decalogue — about love of neighbor — well since his youth, but he knew he was still missing something. He was missing two things. First, he was missing a focus on the “first tablet” of the decalogue, the commandments of which all concern the primary love we should give to God, to his name, to his day. Second, he was lacking spiritual poverty: what he lacked was that he paradoxically had too much. Jesus would address both when he said, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” To have it all he had to give away everything. He went away sad because when given the choice between God and his stuff, he chose his stuff. His possessions, his clothes, his money, his lifestyle, were the delight of his eyes and heart. It’s where his true treasure was. And that’s why he went away sad. He was enslaved to it. He knew it didn’t bring him happiness, but he was too attached to let it go. Regardless of how much we have, whether we’re rich or poor, we can similarly be too attached to the goods of the world, more attached to them than we are to God himself. Sometimes God can take them away through a stock market crash, or a fire, or a thief. But he’d much rather have us love with what he’s given us, and give our stuff, especially our excess stuff, away generously to those who need it. In order truly to follow him, in order to experience in this world a little of the happiness he wants us to have forever, we cannot put anything or anyone in our life higher than God. Otherwise we, too, in the midst of those we love, in the midst of things, will experience that we lack something and often wander away from God himself sad rather than joyful.
Someone who grasped these lessons, lived them and taught others to live them, is the saint we celebrate today, St. John Eudes, one of the great saints of the 17th century, who spread devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. During the time of the plague, he recognized that so many souls were dying, and rather than mourning, he worked indefatigably to try to bring the sacraments to them at the risk of his own life. He began to realize that the state of their souls was worse than their bacteriologically infested bodies and so he founded a Congregation of Jesus and Mary to preach missions to bring them back to the Lord, so that they might convert and learn how truly to love God first and above all and find in him their true wealth and the path of perfection. Over the course of his priesthood, he preached 110 missions — which would have lasted several weeks to months — powerfully describing the love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the way we’re called to respond by imitating and entering into Mary’s Immaculate Heart. He wanted their hearts to become truly rich by placing their treasure in God and in the way God loves. Every morning he sought to recalibrate his own heart and values at Mass, which he would preach upon with passion. He once wrote that we would need three eternities properly to respond to the Mass: the first eternity to prepare for it, the second to celebrate it, and the third to thank God for it. And that’s the awe he would take each day to the sacred encounter. It’s in the Mass that we meet the one who stopped at nothing to raise us and our loved ones from the dead. It’s here that we find and choose each day the Pearl of Great Price, worth selling everything else we have to obtain. It’s here that we meet the one who wants to lead us on the path to perfection. Let us ask him for the grace to yearn to be perfect, by divesting ourselves of whatever good things or bad stand in the way of him in our life, by giving generously what we have to those who are in need because we are seeking eternal treasure, and then to come follow him today, and tomorrow, into eternity where St. John Eudes and all the saints wait to embrace us.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
EZ 24:15-23
The word of the LORD came to me:
Son of man, by a sudden blow
I am taking away from you the delight of your eyes,
but do not mourn or weep or shed any tears.
Groan in silence, make no lament for the dead,
bind on your turban, put your sandals on your feet,
do not cover your beard, and do not eat the customary bread.
That evening my wife died,
and the next morning I did as I had been commanded.
Then the people asked me, “Will you not tell us what all these things
that you are doing mean for us?”
I therefore spoke to the people that morning, saying to them:
Thus the word of the LORD came to me:
Say to the house of Israel:
Thus says the Lord GOD:
I will now desecrate my sanctuary, the stronghold of your pride,
the delight of your eyes, the desire of your soul.
The sons and daughters you left behind shall fall by the sword.
Ezekiel shall be a sign for you:
all that he did you shall do when it happens.
Thus you shall know that I am the LORD.
You shall do as I have done,
not covering your beards nor eating the customary bread.
Your turbans shall remain on your heads, your sandals on your feet.
You shall not mourn or weep,
but you shall rot away because of your sins and groan one to another.
Responsorial Psalm
DEUTERONOMY 32:18-19, 20, 21
R. (see 18a) You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you.
You forgot the God who gave you birth.
When the LORD saw this, he was filled with loathing
and anger toward his sons and daughters.
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
“I will hide my face from them,” he said,
“and see what will then become of them.
What a fickle race they are,
sons with no loyalty in them!”
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
“Since they have provoked me with their ‘no-god’
and angered me with their vain idols,
I will provoke them with a ‘no-people’;
with a foolish nation I will anger them.”
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
Alleluia
MT 5:3
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are the poor in spirit;
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
MT 19:16-22
A young man approached Jesus and said,
“Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”
He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good?
There is only One who is good.
If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
He asked him, “Which ones?”
And Jesus replied, “You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
honor your father and your mother;
and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The young man said to him,
“All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go,
sell what you have and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven.
Then come, follow me.”
When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad,
for he had many possessions.
The post The Delight of Our Eyes and True Treasure, 20th Monday (II), August 19, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
August 17, 2024Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 17, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 17, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.17.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which Jesus will continue to speak to us, for the fourth of five weeks, on the mystery of his body and blood in the Eucharist. How much we need to hear this as the Church in the United States tries to respond to the graces to live the ongoing Eucharistic Revival well. We need the Revival because, for the most part, most Catholics in the United States have not lived by what Jesus teaches us so clearly during these weeks. So let’s listen to what we will hear with fresh ears.
In the second reading of Sunday’s Mass, St. Paul will tell the Ephesians and us, “Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people, but as wise!” He will encourage us to “make the most of the opportunity” of life, not to “continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.” He stresses that we have a choice about how we are to live. While there are many who live unwisely and in ignorance, who waste the opportunity of life God has given them., St. Paul reminds us of God’s call to live differently, to seize the chance and live according to God’s will.
But what does it mean to live wisely, to make the most of our opportunity, to live according to the will of God? The first reading from Sunday’s Mass tells us. The Book of Proverbs shows wisdom building her house, preparing a banquet, and inviting others to come in. Wisdom is a term, a title, for God: God says, “You who are simple, turn in here! To the one who lacks understanding, Wisdom says, ‘Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed! Forsake foolishness that you may live; advance in the way of understanding.’” Notice what Wisdom, what God, doesn’t do to pass on his wisdom: He doesn’t build a classroom and prepare a lecture. Significantly he builds a house — we could even say a Church! — and prepares a banquet. He doesn’t bring in the ignorant principally to teach them, but to feed them on the “bread” and “wine” he’s prepared, which Wisdom calls “my food.” We will grow in the path of wisdom, in other words, through consuming wisdom, through becoming what we eat. The foolish think that we can learn it all intellectually, that faith is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, in which we can comprehend everything we need to. It’s not that instruction is unimportant — learning from Jesus the Master is essential! — but it’s also true that our finite minds can only learn and retain so much. The wise path, the one in which we advance in the way of understanding, is one where we enter into communion with that nourishment that we cannot make or achieve of our own, the nourishment God provides at the banquet he’s throwing in the house he’s built.
This sets the tone, obviously, for this Sunday’s Gospel, when Wisdom incarnate, Jesus Christ, will speak about the fulfillment of the prophecy about the banquet of Wisdom announced in Proverbs. Jesus tells us that to live wisely, to advance in the way of understanding, we literally need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. We know that the Scribes and the Pharisees and many of the disciples were much more comfortable with an intellectual or conceptual religion, memorizing and repeating the Scriptures and rabbinical commentaries. When Jesus, however, told them something that surpassed their human abilities to understand, when he indicated that the path to true wisdom was to become simple and to eat of the food and imbibe the drink he had prepared, they responded with doubts and derision. We see in them foolishness masquerading as intelligence, worldly prudence substituting for true Wisdom. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” they murmured. Such a reaction, on the surface, was reasonable. If some ordinary rabbi had said that others needed to consume his flesh, we could understand why there would be opposition. If our mom were to tell us that for dinner we were going to consume dad’s flesh and drink grandma’s blood, we would be disturbed and wonder if she had taken hallucinogens. But the crowds present were saying that about the same man who the previous day had fed about 25,000 people on five loaves and two fish, who had been astonishing and amazing them with his teaching over the past two years, whom they had witnessed heal people by the hundreds, making paralyzed men walk, people with withered hands whole, curing lepers and liberating those possessed by demons. None of that seemed to matter. Their worldly wisdom, which tried to frame everything according to human categories rather than reframing their human categories according to God’s, led them to rejecting the enfleshment of God’s wisdom when at last he came.
Next week we will hear that it wasn’t just the ignorant pagans, or the hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees or the feeble-hearted, worldly Sadducees who rejected Jesus. Many of Jesus’ discipleswould say, “This is a hard teaching. Who can endure it?,” and walk away from the Lord Jesus, as if Jesus would never challenge them beyond their theological and gastronomic comfort zones. Even many of Jesus’ followers were not simple, humble and faithful enough to eat Wisdom and become truly wise.
Now it comes to us. Throughout this triennial five-week course on the Eucharist, Jesus has been getting us ready to make a choice. He repeatedly challenges us this Sunday: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” “Whoever eats me will live because of me.” “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” He who is the Truth incarnate is telling us that unless we eat him, we will have no life. We will just be walking spiritual corpses. We may still have bios, the Greek word that indicates the biological life we share with plants and animals, but we won’t really have zoe, the type of divine life that he came into the world to give us so that we might have life more abundantly (Jn 10:10). Jesus gives us the greatest wisdom of all, that to live is to live off of him, but there are many who reject this wisdom, including Catholics who tragically forsake Jesus each Sunday as he eagerly desires to feed us with himself at Mass or who neglect him on Holy Days like last Thursday’s Solemnity of Our Lady’s Assumption. Moreover, many who would never miss on Sundays or Holy Days still do not live by Jesus’ teaching, because they do not find in the Eucharist their life principle. To eat Jesus’ body and drink his blood is more than a mechanical act of digesting Him the same way we consume a donut or drink coffee. To eat his body and drink his blood means to draw our life from him, to treat him as God and to recognize that without him in our life, we’re devoid of the one thing necessary. Coming to Mass, some can say to themselves, is a good thing, a holy thing, an important religious duty they faithfully accomplish. But they don’t really look at Mass, at adoration, at a truly Eucharistic life, as a thing of life and death. And that’s what Jesus is saying it is: a thing of life and death. Few Catholics look at the Eucharist this way: that if they weren’t able to receive Jesus on a given week — because of weather, a sickness, or travel — they would feel forlorn of the most essential reality in life, as a thing of life and death. Many can miss Mass with a certain nonchalance. They don’t feel spiritually dead when they don’t receive the greatest gift in the history of the world, perhaps because they’ve never really yet allowed Jesus in the Eucharist to bring them fully alive.
Jesus means what he says, and we shouldn’t succumb to the temptation of the evil one to try to water his words down. Unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood — unless we enter into communion with him and keep that holy communion with him — we have no life in us. To the extent that we’re spiritually alive, it’s because we’re living off of him. The Second Vatican Council phrased this teaching in a very powerful way. The Council fathers said that Jesus in the Eucharist is the “source and summit of the Christian life.” He is the source, the point from which everything flows; and he is the summit, the goal toward which everything goes. If we’re living a life that’s truly Christian, we will be uniting everything we do to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. And if we’re not actively and consciously uniting all that we’re doing to our Eucharistic Lord, we’re not yet living the truly Christian life. The Christian life, in other words, doesn’t involve merely knowing the Catechism, or living by the Ten Commandments, attending Mass each week and going to Confession at least once a year. It involves making Jesus in the Eucharist the Source and Summit, the alpha and omega, the beginning and end of our life, drawing our strength from the Jesus in the Eucharist and seeking to do everything in Communion with Him.
The choice facing each of us this Sunday involves true growth in wisdom or remaining where we are. Jesus say to us, with the words of Proverbs, “You who are simple, turn in here!” Divine wisdom calls to us again, saying, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity and walk in the way of insight!” The choice before us is to draw our life from holy Communion with Jesus and live off Him in the Mass, or to seek our life principle somewhere else, serving some other god of our own making and structuring our life on some other foundation that Him who is the rock. This is the most important choice we’ll ever make in life. If during this Revival, we truly choose Jesus, it will change not only the way we look at Sunday Mass, but also daily Mass, at Eucharistic adoration, and at the unity of the Christian moral life. Our entire existence is meant to be Eucharistic, a commentary on the words of consecration, as we, having received Jesus’ body and blood, go out to others to say, “This is my body, this is my blood, this is my sweat, my heart, my calloused hands, all my efforts, given and poured out for you.” This Sunday Jesus puts before us that way of holiness, the path of wisdom, the route of love and life. Let’s ask the Eucharistic Jesus’ help to choose him who is the Way with all our heart and commit ourselves to help others to take the same wise path!

The readings on which the homily was based were:
Reading 1
Prv 9:1-6
Wisdom has built her house,
she has set up her seven columns;
she has dressed her meat, mixed her wine,
yes, she has spread her table.
She has sent out her maidens; she calls
from the heights out over the city:
“Let whoever is simple turn in here;
To the one who lacks understanding, she says,
Come, eat of my food,
and drink of the wine I have mixed!
Forsake foolishness that you may live;
advance in the way of understanding.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7
R. (9a) Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Let my soul glory in the LORD;
the lowly will hear me and be glad.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Glorify the LORD with me,
let us together extol his name.
I sought the LORD, and he answered me
and delivered me from all my fears.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Look to him that you may be radiant with joy,
and your faces may not blush with shame.
When the poor one called out, the LORD heard,
and from all his distress he saved him.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Reading 2
Eph 5:15-20
Brothers and sisters:
Watch carefully how you live,
not as foolish persons but as wise,
making the most of the opportunity,
because the days are evil.
Therefore, do not continue in ignorance,
but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.
And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery,
but be filled with the Spirit,
addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing and playing to the Lord in your hearts,
giving thanks always and for everything
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.
Alleluia
Jn 6:56
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him, says the Lord.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 6:51-58
Jesus said to the crowds:
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world.”The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
“How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
The post Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 17, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
August 11, 2024Getting Up to Eat the Bread Christ Gives For Our Life and the Life of the World, 19th Sunday (B), August 11, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 11, 2024
1 Kings 19:4-8, Ps 34, Eph 4:30-5:2, Jn 6:41-51

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.11.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
In today’s first reading, we have a dramatic scene of Elijah’s praying for death. The evil queen Jezebel had made a vow, sending a messenger to Elijah to announce, “May the gods do thus to me and more if by this time tomorrow I have not done with your life what was done to” the prophets of Ba’al, whom Elijah had just humiliated and had put to death. So Elijah fled for his life to Beersheba, 113 miles from Mt. Carmel where he had defeated the 300 priests of Ba’al. Once there, he left his servant and went a further day’s journey alone into the desert, where, like the ancient Israelites who had wandered in the desert pursued by an evil ruler, he experienced profound desolation and much like Moses (Num 11:15), prayed for death. “Enough, O Lord!,” he cried out. “Take my life for I am not better than my fathers.” Out of exhaustion and depression, he fell asleep under a broom tree but was awakened twice by an angel. The angel instructed him, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” Elijah did as the angel had commanded. He was given there in the desert bread the shape of a cake like a host and a jar with water, evocative of the jars of water in Cana that Jesus would convert into wine as a prophecy of how he would later convert wine into his blood. Strengthened by the food and drink in a way that no ordinary food could do, he was able to journey through the desert for 263 miles more over the following 40 days and nights. He trekked to Mount Horeb on the Sinai Peninsula, where the Lord would speak to him in a gentle whisper like a breeze, console and strengthen him, and then send him 450 miles north to Damascus where he would have the privilege to anoint Elisha as his successor. I cite the big numbers of his journeys — 113, 263 and 450 miles — to give some indication of the type of hunger we’re supposed to have for divine nourishment and the type of potency what God gives contains.
“Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” Those words that the angel of the Lord said to Elijah Jesus himself effectively says to all of us. We are now in the third week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mysterious reality of his body and blood in the Eucharist, which Jesus taught for the first time in the Synagogue of Capernaum and renews for us live every third summer. Two weeks ago, we had the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which was a foreshadowing of the multiplication of the meal of the Last Supper throughout every land and time in order to feed the spiritually famished human race. Last Sunday Jesus urged us not to work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life that he would give us, lest the journey of life prove too much for us!
As we saw last week, in response to the crowds’ asking him to one-up Moses in the desert who gave them manna from heaven every day for 40 years, Jesus told them that it wasn’t Moses who rained down from heaven each morning like dew on the ground fine flakes like hoarfrost, with the appearance of bedellium, tasting like wafers from coriander seed mixed with money. It was God Himself, Jesus said, who not only gave them that bread but was planning to give them the true Manna. In today’s continuation of Jesus’ words, Jesus emphasizes that he is that true manna, the nourishment God the Father provides for us in the desert of life until we reach the eternal Promised Land. He tells us, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and, later, “I am the bread of life.” Just as God through the angel gave Elijah hearth cakes and water, just like God through Moses gave the Israelites manna, quails and water from the rock, so as the culmination of both of these prophetic miracles, God the Father wants to give us Jesus as the true Manna, the bread that is alive that comes to bring us fully alive. It’s a basic truth of nutrition that we become what we eat, by assimilating the nutrients we consume. In the Eucharist, something even greater happens: Jesus incorporates us into himself. He tells us that when we consume him, we become one with his life, and, since he is eternal, to consume him is to enter somehow, even now, everlasting life. Jesus astonishingly tells us, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert but they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. … I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
This is an awesome mystery that exceeds human comprehension. Jesus tries to help us to understand a little what he wishes to do later in the dialogue. By analogy, he states, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. … Just as the Father who has life sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” Just as Jesus draws his life eternally from God the Father, so he wants us to draw our whole life from him. We’re able to do that by remaining in him and he is us through eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Through that holy communion, his life becomes the principle of our life, his living Bread brings us alive, and since his life is eternal, death for us will be just a passage into a new and permanent form of life in communion with him who has triumphed even over death.
When Jesus first said these words, they were met mainly by incomprehension and doubt. In today’s Gospel, the crowds murmured, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’” To them, Jesus was basically a peripatetic preaching construction worker from Nazareth, and they felt justified to question his credentials. As we’ll see next week, after Jesus doubles down — rather than waters down — his words on the centrality, indeed the necessity, of holy communion to have his life in us, the crowds renew their objection, exclaiming, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Eventually, as we will see in two weeks, most of his disciples, his followers, his friends, were persuaded more by the doubts of the crowds than by trust in him and his words, as they complained aloud, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
We shouldn’t dismiss these objections and these questions. Jesus’ teaching on the Eucharist is hard and the questions they asked flow logically from the brains he has given us. To gnaw on someone’s flesh and drink someone’s blood sounds, at first glance, the fare of cannibals. To Jews who couldn’t touch blood without becoming ritually impure, to drink blood sounded not just downright Draculan but sacrilegious. None of this would make sense until exactly a year later, during the next Passover, when Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands during the Last Supper in the Upper Room, totally change them into his Body and Blood and say, “take and eat” and “take and drink.” We need to confront these questions the crowd had, even the disciples had, because they echo and foretell many of the questions our hyper-empirical, scientistic age still very much has.
Jesus responds to them in today’s Gospel, not by arguing according to their categories, trying to explain a mystery in rationalistic terms and reduce the infinite to the finite. He, rather, tries to open them — and us — up to the working of grace without which we’ll never be able to understand or enter into the mystery. He told the crowds, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,” and then adds, “It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father, and learns from him, comes to me.”
Today we give thanks that God the Father has indeed drawn us to Jesus, that he has spoken to us and taught us that Jesus is his beloved Son with whom he is well-pleased and called us to listen to him. We give him thanks for helping us to recognize that Jesus is far more than a carpenter, the son of Mary and the putative son of Joseph, and to trust in him, even and especially when he speaks to us in challenging ways, like he does about his Real Presence in the Eucharist and how we need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have life. We thank him for this gift of docility, this capacity to be stretched beyond our human categories, to stake our whole life on what Jesus says and gives. Jesus’ listeners at the time did not realize that God the Father was right then and there, in the Capernaum synagogue, drawing them to his Son and that he was attempting to teach them at that moment through Jesus, if only they would listen and learn. But the hearts of most — not just or principally their ears and minds — were not open to this dramatic upgrade of faith. We give God thanks, however, for giving us that gift, so that rather than murmuring about the difficulty of Jesus’ words, we can respond with praise, gratitude, amazement, trust, hope and love for the grace that allows us to take the leap of faith. We thank him for drawing us to his Son in the Eucharist so that through him we might continue to listen and learn from God as we listen and learn from his definitive Word-made-flesh. We thank him specifically for how Jesus seeks to help us live a Eucharistic life, drawing our life from him in the Eucharist, as he seeks to nourish us each day as our true Manna, lest the journey be too much for us.
In the Reponsorial Psalm we prayed, “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord,” and in the holy Eucharist, God the Father wants us not just to only to taste and see the Lord’s goodness but consume the good Lord himself! As we do so, not only will we bless the Lord at all times and never let his praise escape our lips, but we be helped to take our refuge in him as we consume him. This is the means by which, to draw on what St. Paul wrote the Christians in Ephesus in today’s epistle, we will not grieve Holy Spirit but please Him who has been sent by the Father to draw us to Jesus in the Eucharist. The means by which God helps us to become true imitators of Him as beloved children is by becoming one sons and daughters of God in God the Son. This is how, too, we will fulfill the prayer the Holy Spirit inspired St. Paul to make, that we will live in love as Christ loved us, because in the Eucharist, we receive that love outpoured for us in Jesus’ sacrificial offering. That’s how we interiorly listen and learn from God how to offer our own bodies as a holy and acceptable sacrifice, united to his, the only worship that makes sense (Rom 12:1-2).
Over the course of the 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage I was able to make during the last few months with my intrepid fellow pilgrims on the Seton Route, we had a chance to ponder a great deal today’s readings, especially the journey of Elijah and Jesus’ words in the Bread of Life discourse. They would come up regularly in the votive Masses of the Holy Eucharist we would often celebrate. The pilgrimage as a whole was meant to show how the whole of our Christian life is dynamic because the Church is a pilgrim Church on earth. We, the Bride and the Body of Christ, move together with the Bridegroom and Head, who never tells us “Stay where you are!” or “Don’t move,” but always bids us, “Come!,” “Follow me!,” and “Go!” This pilgrimage of Christian is ultimately a Eucharistic procession on which Jesus wants to us each day not just on the outside but on the inside as our daily Manna. The Lord sends his angels, in fact his ministers, to us each day to startle us from somnambulating through life and feeds us not with hearth cakes and water but what they point to: Jesus’ own body and blood. Jesus the true Manna rained down from heaven above each day helps us on each day’s journey through the desert until we finally come to God’s mountain and the promised land. Each day, Jesus comes to us as our “viaticum,” from the Latin expression, “with you on the way.” This word has traditionally been used to refer to the last time we receive Holy Communion on earth, as we’re preparing to die, so that the Eucharistic Jesus might be with us on the passage to eternity where we await his everlasting embrace. But just as St. Teresa of Calcutta wanted placed in all the sacristies of the chapels of Missionaries of Charity throughout the world the instruction for priests to celebrate Mass like it were their first Mass, their last Mass, and their only Mass, so each of us every day should approach receiving Jesus in Holy Communion like viaticum, like our first Holy Communion, like we would want to on our death bed, and like we would if, similar to Blessed Imelda Lambertini, we would only receive him once on earth. Jesus’ love for us is so great that, to strengthen us on the journey of life lest it be too much for us, he doesn’t just feed us once or twice and send us on our way for 40 days, he doesn’t just want to nourish us once a week, but desires to strengthen us from within each day, so that, regardless of who is hunting us down, or how hot the sun is, or how long the journey may be, we will know that we never confront those problems alone, but that we do so in loving communion with the Creator of the world, the Savior of the Human Race, and the living Bread who has conquered even death itself.
It’s key for us never to lose this sense of the Eucharistic pilgrimage. Sometimes it can be tempting, with a chapel in one’s convent, to think that the journey to Jesus and with Jesus after having received him might be short and relatively easy. The National Eucharistic Pilgrimage was meant to communicate that it was worth a journey of many miles a day, even thousands of miles and more. This point was underlined for me this morning as I was exchanging text messages with one of the Seton pilgrims who is in Scotland for a wedding. She got up early to walk over an hour each way to Mass. She sent me a photo of a path through a field she needed to traverse, the grass was well over a basketball player’s head and the path almost not discernible. Yet with faith and love for the Eucharistic Lord she walked through it. When she texted me the image, she wrote, quoting Robert Frost, “The road less traveled!” And I texted back, “Which will make all the difference!” Sometimes to experience the difference the Eucharistic Jesus makes, we need to be willing to take that road less traveled, as Marina, this pilgrim, did. Sometimes we need to be willing to journey 3.5 miles through fields for an hour in a foreign country. Sometimes we need to sacrifice sleep and convenience to grasp a little bit more easily the incredible gift offered to us each day on the journey of life and come to seize that treasure, each day, as the pearl of great price.
Someone who lived the way today’s readings summon us to live is the great saint we celebrate today, Saint Clare of Assisi, the celestial patroness of our beloved Sister Clare Roy, MC. Saint Clare desired to live in the manner of the holy Gospels and left the world to unite herself to the Eucharistic Lord in his poverty, chastity, obedience, in his suffering and love to the extreme. She lived at a time in which religious were permitted to receive Jesus in Holy Communion only seven times a year, but she got her life from that pure living Bread and always sought to make the most of each reception. Over the last 28 years of her life, from her sick bed, she embroidered corporals for the celebration of Mass and sent them to the Churches all over the Spoleto valley. She’s the patron saint of television because, 700 years before the invention of TV, she was granted the grace to be able to see what was happening in the chapel in a vision on the wall of her cell. As St. John Paul II wrote about her in a letter 31 years ago today marking the 800th anniversary of her birth, “In reality Clare’s whole life was a eucharist because, like Francis, from her cloister she raised up a continual ‘thanksgiving’ to God in her prayer, praise, supplication, intercession, weeping, offering and sacrifice. She accepted everything and offered it to the Father in union with the infinite ‘thanks’ of the only-begotten Son, the Child, the Crucified, the risen One, who lives at the right hand of the Father.” He described in that letter her confidence in the power of Christ in the Eucharist and how she entrusted not only her life and the life of her fellow Poor Clares but also the fate of Assisi to the Eucharistic Jesus when in 1240 the Saracen troops employed by Emperor Frederick II were trying to invade San Damiano Convent. Jesus spoke to her from the Eucharist saying that they “will be defended by my protection.” John Paul II underlined, “Although she was very sick, [she] prostrated herself with the help of two sisters before the silver ciborium containing the Eucharist, which she had placed in front of the refectory door that the Emperor’s troops were about to storm.” Christ kept his promise. The troops were thoroughly intimidated by him and the courage the sisters drew from him, and repelled. We ask her on her feast day to intercede for us so that we might have a similar faith in Christ’s Real Presence, in his power, his love and his protection.
Today, as we prepare to receive the True Manna, we don’t murmur like the ancient Israelites in the desert when for the first time they found the heavenly bread rained down like the dew, “Man-na?” or “What is this?” We don’t have to say “What is this?” because we know what, or better Whom, the True Manna is. And we come her today to see him, to taste him and to be changed by him. Inspired by what the Lord did for Elijah, by the faith of St. Clare, and by the reality of our Christian pilgrimage, we can cry out with the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, when it seems that earthly leaders are against us like Jezebel and Ahab were against Elijah, “Bella premunt hostilia; Da robur, fer auxilium.” Even though “hostile wars press on,” we turn to God to “give strength, offer aid,” confident that this is what he always does. When we look at the journey of our life and how much of it, and how many obstacles, seem still in front of us, we turn to Jesus in the Eucharist and exclaim, “Ecce panis Angelórum, Factus cibus viatórum, vere panis filiórum.” “Behold the Bread of Angels, having been made the food of pilgrims, the true bread of God’s beloved sons and daughters.” He is the one who has become our food for the journey as much-loved children of God. And in response to the questions of every age that wonder about the Son of God’s incarnation and the way he seeks to continue that miracle in the sacrifice of the altar, we proclaim, “Panis angelicus fit panis hominum; dat panis caelicus figuris terminum; O res mirabilis: manducat Dominum pauper, servus et humilis.” “The bread of angels has become the bread of men and women. … O what a mind blowing reality! A poor and humble servants eats the Lord!” This is what — more precisely He is the One Who — makes our journey not just too much for us, but doable and delightful! And today the Lord himself comes to nourish these humble and servants with himself!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 Kgs 19:4-8
Elijah went a day’s journey into the desert,
until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it.
He prayed for death saying:
“This is enough, O LORD!
Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.”
He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree,
but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat.
Elijah looked and there at his head was a hearth cake
and a jug of water.
After he ate and drank, he lay down again,
but the angel of the LORD came back a second time,
touched him, and ordered,
“Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!”
He got up, ate, and drank;
then strengthened by that food,
he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9
R. (9a) Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Let my soul glory in the LORD;
the lowly will hear me and be glad.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Glorify the LORD with me,
Let us together extol his name.
I sought the LORD, and he answered me
And delivered me from all my fears.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Look to him that you may be radiant with joy.
And your faces may not blush with shame.
When the afflicted man called out, the LORD heard,
And from all his distress he saved him.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
The angel of the LORD encamps
around those who fear him and delivers them.
Taste and see how good the LORD is;
blessed the man who takes refuge in him.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Reading 2
Eph 4:30—5:2
Brothers and sisters:
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,
with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.
All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling
must be removed from you, along with all malice.
And be kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.
So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.
Alleluia
Jn 6:51
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven, says the Lord;
whoever eats this bread will live forever.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 6:41-51
The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said,
“I am the bread that came down from heaven, ”
and they said,
“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?
Do we not know his father and mother?
Then how can he say,
‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“Stop murmuring among yourselves.
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,
and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets:
They shall all be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the Father
except the one who is from God;
he has seen the Father.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
The post Getting Up to Eat the Bread Christ Gives For Our Life and the Life of the World, 19th Sunday (B), August 11, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
25 min
August 10, 2024Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 10, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 10, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.10.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which we enter into the third week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mystery of his body and blood in the Eucharist, which Jesus taught for the first time in the Synagogue of Capernaum and renews for us every third Summer. The timing this year is particularly appropriate, as we seek to profit more deeply from, and share in, the ongoing Eucharistic Revival renewing the Church in the United States.
Two weeks ago, we had the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which was a foreshadowing of the multiplication of the meal of the Last Supper, throughout every land and time, to feed the spiritually famished human race. Last Sunday Jesus told us not to work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life that he will give us and, in response to the crowds’ asking him to one-up Moses in the desert who gave them manna from heaven every day for 40 years, he told them that it wasn’t Moses who gave them manna but God the Father who gives them the true Manna.
This Sunday Jesus continues the consequential conversation, which gets into the heart of his teaching on his self-gift to us in the Holy Eucharist, on the faith we need to believe in his Eucharistic presence, and on the opposition his teaching on the Eucharist has received from the beginning. Let’s take each part in turn.
First, Jesus emphasizes more deeply how he is the true manna, the nourishment God the Father provides for us in the desert of life until we reach the eternal Promised Land. “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” he tells us, and then adds, “I am the bread of life.” It’s a basic truth that we become what we eat, and Jesus is foretelling that when we consume him, we become one with his life; since he is eternal, to consume him is to receive everlasting life. He tells us, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert but they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.” Then he specified even more: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
These are extraordinary words, which we shouldn’t water down and or pass over. First, they sound cannibalistic, as if Jesus is saying that we need to eat him the way we consume animals or animals consume carcasses. Of course, that’s not what his words mean. We’re not killing Jesus in order to consume his flesh; he’s giving us under the miraculous appearances of bread and wine his entire Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Second, once we let those works sink in, we get to Jesus’ mind-blowing promise: that when we eat him, we will not die but live forever. He swears an oath and says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day” and tells us why: because “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” He tries to explain this mystery by analogy to his own relationship to God the Father: “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” The upshot of this mystery is that by receiving Holy Communion, by eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood, his life becomes the principle of our life. We draw our life from him just as he draws his life from the Father. And since his life is eternal, death for us will just be a passage into a new and permanent form of life, in communion with him who has triumphed over death and holds all life in existence.
There are two responses to Jesus’ words. One is doubt. We see it first in the passage this Sunday, when the crowds murmured, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” To them, he was basically a preaching carpenter from Nazareth, and they questioned his credentials. Afterward, as we’ll hear next Sunday, the crowds question the substance of his remarks, quarreling, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” and later, in a passage we will consider in two weeks, they will say, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” We shouldn’t dismiss these objections, because many of our contemporaries will raise the same ones. Jesus makes huge claims, both about his origin as well as our destiny through the gift of the Eucharist he gives. The only way either of them could make sense is if Jesus were truly far more than a man, if he were God who had come down from heaven, and if through consuming his flesh and blood, we would be doing more than eating cells with 46 chromosomes but coming into contact with divine life.
That’s why we need to pass to the second response to Jesus’ words, precisely faith. Jesus said to the doubting crowds, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.” To believe in his words, Jesus says, we must be drawn by God the Father. We need the gift of divine grace. Jesus continues, “It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” God the Father wants to teach us, but we need to listen to him and learn from him. That’s the fundamental openness of faith, that we’re docile to God and his teaching, that we allow him to stretch us beyond our human categories, that we trust in his ability to do what by human experience is simply impossible and therefore miraculous. Jesus’ listeners at the time did not realize that God the Father had drawn them to his Son right there in the Capernaum synagogue and that he was attempting to teach them right then and there through Jesus. But they were resistant to listening and to learning. They needed to trust in Jesus enough to trust in his words, words that would only make better sense a year later, when, during the next Passover, Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands and totally transform them into his body and blood under the appearances of human food and say, “Take and eat. This is my body.” And “Take and drink. This is the chalice of my blood.” Faith, however, involves this trust. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote for us in his famous Eucharistic Hymn Adoro Te Devote for the first Corpus Christi celebration 760 years ago, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing is truer than the word of truth.” Drawn by the Father, listening and learning as he sought to teach us through Jesus, we trust in what Jesus says because we trust in him, the one sent by God the Father.
We will have a chance to enter more deeply into Jesus’ challenging words again over the two weeks, but for now, we need to ensure that this conversation with Jesus is truly consequential. Consequential in allowing God the Father to draw us toward his Son in the Holy Eucharist. Consequential in having us truly listen to him and learn from him as he seeks to draw us into the greatest mystery of salvation history of all. It wasn’t enough for God’s love that he took on our humanity at the incarnation. It wasn’t enough that he died for us on Calvary and rose on the third day. He wanted to make it possible for us to draw our life from him by means of the Eucharist, by eating his flesh and drinking his blood, which he has given for the life of the world and for your life and for mine. Therefore, we need to ensure that this Sunday’s conversation is consequential in getting us to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink his blood in a life-giving way, seeking to become whom we eat, and draw our life from him — in all aspects of our existence — just as he draws his life from the Father. And consequential in getting us to stake our whole life on what he affirms: that through this act, Jesus will give us eternal life by raising us up on the last day. May this Sunday’s Gospel be consequential in all of these ways!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 6:41-51
The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said,
“I am the bread that came down from heaven, ”
and they said,
“Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?
Do we not know his father and mother?
Then how can he say,
‘I have come down from heaven’?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“Stop murmuring among yourselves.
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,
and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets:
They shall all be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the Father
except the one who is from God;
he has seen the Father.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
The post Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 10, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
8 min
August 03, 2024Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 3, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 3, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.3.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we enter into the second of five weeks of meditation on the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, in which Jesus speaks to us prophetically about the reality of his presence in the Holy Eucharist and how we should respond to it.
Jesus’ words to us during these weeks are especially relevant considering we are in the heart of the National Eucharistic Revival, having just completed the National Eucharistic Congress and the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that led to it. The Revival is meant to help us revivify our relationship with the Eucharistic Jesus and equip us as apostles to help others enter into a similar, life-changing relationship with him. Jesus’ words are also relevant because of the outrageous opening ceremonies that took place a week ago at the Summer Olympics in Paris, when organizers somehow thought it was appropriate at the beginning of this athletic competition gratuitously to mock the Last Supper of Jesus as if it were a bacchanal orgy. The most important Catholic response to such an offense is not to cry and complain, but to pray, do reparation and take even more seriously what the desecrators want to impugn. Jesus this Sunday and over the course of the rest of the month will speak to us directly of what he wants us to prioritize.
At the beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel, we see that those who received Jesus’ free meal in the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fish, on which we focused last Sunday, were looking for another free meal. Jesus called them out on it, because he wanted to help them grow in faith. “Amen, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs” — in other words, because you saw me perform a miracle and it’s led you to put faith in me and in my words — “but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” They came because of their material hunger and saw Jesus as a means to address their material hungers and needs. This is not evil in itself. Jesus would teach us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Many come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase medications, or find a job to help support loved ones. God wants to hear these prayers. As a loving Father, he wants us to bring our needs to him. It wasn’t this that Jesus was criticizing. Jesus was criticizing the fact that they had stopped there, that they were concerned most about their material needs.
Jesus tells them, and tells us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” So many people, good people, spend most of their adult lives working to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and their families. We all know how important that is, but Jesus is saying that as hard as we work to fulfill that duty of love, we must work much harder for the food that he will give us, the food of eternal life. What is that food that God puts on the table? What is that nourishment of eternal life? If most people spend forty hours a week or more, sometimes working two or three jobs for perishables, what is the imperishable nutrition for which Jesus tells us we should labor even more strenuously?
There are four interconnected answers to that question:
The first is knowing God’s Word. In the battles to which Jesus was exposed in the desert, Jesus was asked by the devil to turn stone into bread to feed his incredible hunger after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus responded by saying, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To work for this food means to strive to know, understand, treasure and put into practice all the words that come from God’s mouth to feed us.
This leads directly to the second common interpretation of the food that endures to eternal life: Doing God’s will. Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to accomplish his work.” That’s why it’s unsurprising that Jesus later in this Bread of Life Discourse at the Capernaum synagogue, will say, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.”
The third is the work of faith. When Jesus says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, that the Son of Man will give you,” the crowds immediately replied, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” There’s a particular type of work necessary to labor for the enduring nourishment Christ gives, and Jesus makes it very clear: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” We need to believe in Jesus and believe in what he says and does. That work of faith is the most essential element in laboring for eternal life in general, but also it’s essential for us to believe in what Jesus says about the upcoming fourth response.
The fourth answer is the one that ought to be obvious to us who have heard the Bread of Life discourse many times: it’s Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist.
All four of these interpretations, of course, go together in the celebration of the Mass. We begin with God’s word, we make an act of faith with regard to it, we unite ourselves with God’s will and “do this in memory of [him]” and then have the awesome privilege of receiving the Word made Flesh, God’s daily spiritual self-gift. Becoming one body with Christ in the Eucharist is meant to help us become one with his will and faithfully accomplish it in the world.
But the main point for us is not simply to know what is the imperishable nourishment for which we should be striving but actually to live for it, to labor for it, direct our efforts toward this as our goal, as our reward, as our desire.
At the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, still obsessed about food and free meals, the crowds ask Jesus, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” saying, “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” We remember the story of the manna. If we don’t, it will be this Sunday’s first reading. The Jews were grumbling in the desert, fearful that they would starve to death. So Moses brought their complaints and pleas to God, and God replied by saying, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day” (Exod 16:4). And every morning for forty years, they awoke to find a miraculous edible dew that looked like coriander seed, with the white like gum resin, tasting like wafers made with honey (Num 11:7; Exod 16:31). The Israelites had no idea what it was, and hence called it “manna,” which literally means, “What is it?” Moses told them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat” and instructed them to gather as much of it as each one needed for a day. This is how they survived in the desert for forty years, until they reached the promised land. Every morning except the Sabbath God in his wisdom made the Israelites get the manna, but even on the Sabbath, they would eat the second daily portion of manna that they had gotten the day before. The Book of Exodus tells us that God made them do this every day in order to “test them,” to see whether or not they would follow his instruction and be faithful (Exod 16:4).
Jesus, however, applies the history of the manna to the reality of his presence in the Holy Eucharist, saying that he is the “true manna,” the “true bread … that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” The crowd’s response was materialistic but nevertheless prophetic: “Sir, give us this bread always,” and Jesus replied, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
If the Jews needed to consume the manna every day in the desert, and Jesus is the true Manna, he is implying that we should be working for this “true Bread” every day. In the Our Father, Jesus taught us to pray, not, “Give us today all the bread we’re going to need this week” or “Give us now all we’ll ever need,” but “Give us this day our daily bread,” because he wanted us to recognize that every day God wants to grant that prayer. The early saints of the Church commented at length about the Greek word we translate as “daily” — epi-ousios — which literally means “super-substantial.” They said it referred less to the material bread that we need to consume for physical survival, but to the bread that goes beyond our substance — the Eucharist — that we need for our souls. The early saints said that Jesus was teaching them to pray that the Father would give them every day the Eucharist. In response to the request of the Jews, “Sir, give us this bread always,” Jesus has, by giving us his body and blood and making it available not just on Sunday in special way, but every day.
God has desired to give us each day this “daily bread come down from heaven,” because he knows that we need to be spiritually fed each day. I’m convinced from both personal and pastoral experience that one of the real proofs of whether we recognize that the Eucharist really is Jesus, and whether we truly love the Lord, can be seen in our attitude toward daily Mass. Even if a Catholic cannot physically be present every day at Mass because of other pressing responsibilities, our hearts should always be longing for this encounter. Our life should be a persistent prayer of spiritual communion. That should be our great hunger. “Sir, give us that bread always” and “Give us today our supersubstantial Bread!” should be our most persistent aspirations. And our gratitude to God’s answering that prayer by raining down for us each day this true Bread from heaven should know no bounds.
“Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” This Sunday, and each day this week, we have a chance, with gratitude and God’s help, to do so.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 6:24-35
When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there,
they themselves got into boats
and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus.
And when they found him across the sea they said to him,
“Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered them and said,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
you are looking for me not because you saw signs
but because you ate the loaves and were filled.
Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you.
For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.”
So they said to him,
“What can we do to accomplish the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”
So they said to him,
“What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?
What can you do?
Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written:
He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
So Jesus said to them,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven;
my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.
For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven
and gives life to the world.”So they said to him,
“Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them,
“I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
The post Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 3, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
July 26, 2024 The Social Nature of the Human Person, 2024 Napa Institute Summer Conference, July 26, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
2024 Napa Institute Summer Conference
Meritage Resort, Napa, Institute
“What Does It Mean To Be Human”
July 26, 2024

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Napa 2024, The Social Nature of the Human Person

The post The Social Nature of the Human Person, 2024 Napa Institute Summer Conference, July 26, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
31 min
July 20, 2024 Beholding God the Father’s Chosen and Beloved Son, 15th Saturday (II), July 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Napa Institute Chapel, Omni Hotel, Indianapolis
Saturday of the 15th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist
July 20, 2024
Mic 2:1-5, Ps 10, Mt 12:14-21

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The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
MI 2:1-5
Woe to those who plan iniquity,
and work out evil on their couches;
In the morning light they accomplish it
when it lies within their power.
They covet fields, and seize them;
houses, and they take them;
They cheat an owner of his house,
a man of his inheritance.
Therefore thus says the LORD:
Behold, I am planning against this race an evil
from which you shall not withdraw your necks;
Nor shall you walk with head high,
for it will be a time of evil.
On that day a satire shall be sung over you,
and there shall be a plaintive chant:
“Our ruin is complete,
our fields are portioned out among our captors,
The fields of my people are measured out,
and no one can get them back!”
Thus you shall have no one
to mark out boundaries by lot
in the assembly of the LORD.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 10:1-2, 3-4, 7-8, 14
R. (12b) Do not forget the poor, O Lord!
Why, O LORD, do you stand aloof?
Why hide in times of distress?
Proudly the wicked harass the afflicted,
who are caught in the devices the wicked have contrived.
R. Do not forget the poor, O Lord!
For the wicked man glories in his greed,
and the covetous blasphemes, sets the LORD at nought.
The wicked man boasts, “He will not avenge it”;
“There is no God,” sums up his thoughts.
R. Do not forget the poor, O Lord!
His mouth is full of cursing, guile and deceit;
under his tongue are mischief and iniquity.
He lurks in ambush near the villages;
in hiding he murders the innocent;
his eyes spy upon the unfortunate.
R. Do not forget the poor, O Lord!
You do see, for you behold misery and sorrow,
taking them in your hands.
On you the unfortunate man depends;
of the fatherless you are the helper.
R. Do not forget the poor, O Lord!
Gospel
MT 12:14-21
The Pharisees went out and took counsel against Jesus
to put him to death.
When Jesus realized this, he withdrew from that place.
Many people followed him, and he cured them all,
but he warned them not to make him known.
This was to fulfill what had been spoken through Isaiah the prophet:
Behold, my servant whom I have chosen,
my beloved in whom I delight;
I shall place my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
He will not contend or cry out,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break,
a smoldering wick he will not quench,
until he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the Gentiles will hope.
The post Beholding God the Father’s Chosen and Beloved Son, 15th Saturday (II), July 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
18 min

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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.