Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

May 11, 2024Matrimonial Missionaries of Love and Life, Nuptial Mass of Liam Coulter and Zoe Tarasiewicz, May 11, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan
Nuptial Mass of Liam Andrew Coulter and Zoe Tarasiewicz
May 11, 2024
Tob 8:4-8, Ps 112, Rom 12:1-2.9-18, Mt 7:21.24-29

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The following text guided the homily:
This beautiful day has a divine prehistory. The same Lord who brought Liam and Zoe into existence in cooperation with the love of their parents, the same Lord who gave them to new life in the baptismal fonts of St. Benedict Catholic Church in Seattle and St. Michael the Archangel Church in Levittown, Pennsylvania, implanted within both of them the seed of a burning desire to live up to the prophetic dimension of Baptism, later sealed and strengthened by the Sacrament of Confirmation. With great generosity, after graduating from college, they committed themselves to spreading the Gospel as FOCUS missionaries, trying to bring the light of their love for Jesus to university students wherever they would be sent.
But God had more in mind for them than the amount of young people they would be able to help grow in their relationship with Jesus and his Bride the Church. God, who cannot be outdone in generosity, was preparing them at the same time for another vocation. Through God’s providence working through a FOCUS regional director, they were assigned together as missionaries at Columbia University, where together they tilled that part of the Lord’s vineyard and, with their teammates, produced much fruit. And through their regular team prayer and holy hours, subway travel, meetings, Masses, meals, retreats, mission trips, SEEK conferences, training sessions, and more, they both began to sense in the other someone more than a fellow missionary. As soon as Zoe was promoted to Regional Director and it was possible for them, technically no longer teammates, to date, they didn’t waste any time. They had their first date a year ago tomorrow. When Liam told me about his intentions, I told him I blessed the idea with both hands and so many others who knew and loved them eagerly cheered. Because of the deep foundation of friendship and mutual esteem they had developed serving Christ and others together, but mainly because of the complementary vocational graces God had given each of them, their relationship flourished. 364 days later, here we are, as we together witness their commitment to take on another missionary task.
The vocation of Holy Matrimony, like every calling, has a mission. Summoned to be a domestic Church, every Christian marriage and family, like the Church as a whole, more properly does not just “have” a mission, but “is” a mission. Every married couple is meant be what St. John Paul II called “a saved community, … called upon to communicate Christ’s love to their brethren, thus becoming a saving community” (FC 49). Every Christian married couple is meant to be evangelized evangelizers. At the beginning of the Church, as you recall, the Lord Jesus sent out first the 12 apostles and then the 72 disciples in pairs, even though they could have theoretically covered twice as much ground in the same time if he had sent them out solo. But in his plan, Jesus wanted to send us out as pairs, so that people would not only be able to hear from them the good news of the kingdom, but see it in the way that the two apostolic disciples would love each other, forgive each other, pray together, and more. Throughout the history of the Church, as we seek faithfully to carry out the Great Commission Jesus gave us at his Ascension, the Holy Spirit has continued to send out disciples two by two, joined hand in hand in Holy Matrimony. Today, Liam and Zoe are being sent out as matrimonial missionaries of love and life, not just to Austria, but to the whole world. And today we come to ask God to bless them and make their mission of love and life abundantly fruitful.
To be effective missionaries to others, they, like any couple, must first be missionaries to each other. They must help each other, as Jesus told us in the Gospel they chose for their wedding, to build their life on him the rock. Taken from the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Christ emphasizes that it’s not everyone who calls upon him as Lord, but only those who do the will of his Father in heaven, who build their life on him and what he teaches, who will enter his Kingdom. In the Holy Land at Jesus’ time, there was obviously not the type of heavy construction equipment we use today. Jesus, like St. Joseph, was a tekton, or builder, which meant everything from a carpenter to a cabinetmaker, construction worker, engineer and architect. To build on craggy uneven rocks was challenging and time-consuming, involving lots of measurements, toilsome drilling with hand tools to make even foundations, and other arduous tasks. The people who were not willing patiently to put in that work would turn to dry, flat creek beds at the bottom of valleys where they would try to erect something fast. When the seasonal rains would come, however, the water flowing down from the hills would inundate the creeks, and the flood would take the house, its possessions and sometimes its occupants and wash them away. Zoe and Liam want to build differently. They want to build wisely. They want to construct their home and family life solidly on the rock of God’s word and the person of Christ the indestructible Cornerstone. Because they have common sense and maturity, they know that the rains will fall, the floods will come, and the winds will blow and buffet against every house and apartment where they’ll live. They know that they will experience not just sunny days, not just richer, healthier, and better times, but also poorer, sicker and worse ones, and they want to build their common existence solidly on the bedrock of deep faith. Together they want to build their future life on the Lord’s revelation about marriage. They want to construct it on a life of prayer and Christ’s work in the Sacraments. They want to erect it on Christ’s command to love each other as he has loved them first.
And we rejoice that they indeed have already been missionaries to each other, helping to strengthen each other’s faith on Christ the rock, for the last three years. Liam told me about Zoe in marriage preparation, “She challenges me to grow like no other woman [ever has]. I see a desire in her heart to pursue God that is hard to come by. … I love her love of God. She strives to please God and to serve Him in all things. I love her desire to make God known to others through her sharing of the faith. … I love that she is not afraid to call me higher. She has inspired me to live a more disciplined and ordered life. She has also helped me through her encouragement to do hard things. She has also motivated me to be more sacrificial with my time [as] I have seen how she sacrifices her time for the sake of others, and I realized that I desire to do the same. She has helped me to grow in gentleness.” He concluded, “I love how joyful she is and her love of life,” and thanked God for show she has enriched him with that joy and love.
Zoe, you told me during our sessions that Liam “is a great missionary” and has had a similar impact on helping you to ground yourself ever more in your relationship with God. You recounted how impressed and moved you have been by his humility, how “he owns his weaknesses and mistakes better than most people I know and is able to receive feedback and criticism in order to grow. He is always striving to be a better and holier man.” You added that you love his “pursuit of the true and good. … He chooses, by his intellect and will, to do the thing that is right, even if it is challenging or uncomfortable. He is very generous and challenges and inspires me to be more generous. I love that Liam comes off as a tough guy, but when you get to know him, he is deep, thoughtful, and has a big heart. I love Liam’s ability to connect with people [and how] intentional [he is] about maintaining relationships. He is a hard worker, persevering, motivated, very intelligent and confident. He’s not afraid of conflict, especially when we have disagreements or issues, and helps us to work through them. … He has inspired me to be more generous through his own generosity with others, and to be more intentional in maintaining relationships, … to be more uncompromising in pursuing the good. He has also inspired me to grow in my relationship with and devotion to Our Lady through the Rosary. We encourage each other to persevere in prayer, grow in virtue, and follow God’s call even when it is hard.”
In short, you have been helping each other already to experience a little bit of the advice St. Paul gives every missionary disciple, and every married couple, in today’s second reading to know how to build their mutual existence on the solid foundation of Jesus the Cornerstone. The great apostle urges you, “Let your love be sincere,” and then gives a list of behaviors so that your love will for each other will be as sincere as Christ’s love for you: to hate what is evil and hold onto what is good; to love each other with mutual affection; to anticipate each other in showing honor, the love and honor you will publicly profess in a few minutes you wish to give each other for the rest of your life; to help each other to be fervent and zealous in serving the Lord through serving each other as you would serve Christ in the flesh; to rejoice together in the hope Christ places in you even on days you might be tempted to complain or despair; to endure in affliction even in the midst of the sorrows and contradictions that inevitably accompany every marriage; to persevere in prayer, knowing that God is with you listening and responding; to have the same regard for each other, not looking down on each other, but always being concerned for what is noble; and to live at peace to the extent possible, never letting the sun go down on your anger, and seeking to abide together with the Prince of Peace even after quarrels. With sincere love like this, you will strengthen each other in your commitment as followers of Christ and as evangelizers.
This brings us to the other point that St. Paul gives you and all of us in the second reading: the context in which you are being sent out to proclaim and live the Gospel is not easy. It’s not easy on the campuses of Columbia, Brown, Vermont, Boston University. It won’t be easy in Vienna. Wherever you end up over the course of your marriage, in most places it will be challenging. But it wasn’t easy for St. Paul and the first wave of missionary disciples either. As you prepare to transmit to others as a married couple something of the total self-giving love of God, what St. Paul calls offering “your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God,” the apostle tells you, “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” Your self-giving love for each other, your conforming yourself to Christ in marriage with all your mind, heart, soul and strength, is a witness, a Gospel, that the world very much needs to hear and to see lived. Marriage today is a courageous and counter-cultural act. So many in our age are afraid of making a commitment — especially a commitment that is for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness or health, all the days of one’s life. Seeing so many relationships break down, many millennials and Gen-Zers prefer to keep their options open, they refuse to entrust their future to another, they seek to receive some of the comfort and benefits that come from relationships that in many outward ways resemble marriage but without giving themselves totally to what God desires and true love entails. Many others are confused about what marriage is, with some thinking it’s just romantic symbolism, or a piece of paper, or a temporary union for as long as two shall love, or a changing reality whose meaning can be defined or redefined by the parties themselves, the popular culture or the courts. You’re making a public act, in contrast to the spirit of this age, that marriagemeans something, and something essential to human happiness and flourishing. Your witness to the beauty of human love in the divine plan is one of the most powerful lessons both of you, individually and together, have given as missionaries at Columbia and beyond. Today you’re professing that you’re entering into not a contract but a covenant, a sacred commitment not just to each other but to God, consecrating your love in a special way within the love of the God who created you, brought you together, and who today is making a sacred commitment to you to accompany you all the days of your life. You’re openly declaring your faith that you desire not just to make the other happy, but to be God’s instrument to help make the other holy. You’re avowing that the gift you ultimately want to give each other is not merely a beautiful ring, or the exchange of last name, or even the gift of yourself, however faithful, fruitful, free and total; rather, you’re plainly affirming that that you are seeking to give God to each other, to help the other grow in God’s image and likeness, to assist the other remain in God’s love and enter fully into his joy. You’re stating that you want your bond truly to be a holy matrimony, one that will lead you, hand-in-hand, we pray, down the nave of a sanctuary for more beautiful than this, the golden streets of the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 21:21), for a Nuptial Banquet that will know no end. And you are making a joint commitment as missionaries to help others, especially the young, not to be conformed to this age either, but to be transformed by the way Jesus seeks to renew our minds, so that we might discern what God’s will is in every circumstance and choose what is good, pleasing, perfect, loving and life-giving, what will lead them together with us, we pray, to happiness, holiness and heaven.
During this Mass, you’ve asked to add two elements that signify your faith and the help you’re asking God so that you will better construct your life on him and live up to your vocation as matrimonial missionaries in sacramental communion. Toward the end of Mass, you will process together as husband and wife to the Altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Daughter of Zion who teaches us how to be faithful disciples of her Son, the woman God the Father chose to be the mother of his Son and Jesus himself from the Cross chose to be our Mother, the one who brought Christ to Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist and has continued to bring the message of love and mercy to Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima and more, the loving Lady who interceded with her Son for the couple in Cana of Galilee for his first miracle and who doubtless is interceding for you now. You will also entrust yourself to her maternal intercession a prayer of consecration you both have composed. You will present her flowers, asking for her prayers that the divine grace her Son bestows will truly flourish in your marriage. We join you in those heartfelt, filial prayers.
The second element you wanted to incorporate is that when you profess your vows, you will be holding in your hands a crucifix you asked me to bless for your new home, one that will be on the altar today as the Divine Bridegroom descends. Making your vows embracing Christ on the Cross is a prophetic witness that, as you enter into the covenant of marriage, you do so strengthened by Christ’s cruciform love for you, as you beg him to help you love each other by that same standard. St. Paul called all Christian husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the Church and handed and handed himself over for her to sanctify her” (Eph 5:25), to seek in marriage to say to each other, “This is my body given for you,” making your married life a commentary on the words of consecration. It’s a challenge of course to commit oneself until death no matter what comes. It requires great faith in God, in each other, and in God’s capacity to draw good, even love, from difficulties, economic hardships, problems with veils in wedding processions, suffering and even death. But as you hold the Cross, you recognize that God the Father drew the greatest good of all time — his Son’s resurrection and our salvation — from the greatest evil of Jesus’ crucifixion and that he, similarly, will make all things work out for the good for those who love him, as both of you do (Rom 8:28). As you make these vows to each other and to and before God, we pray that you will model your married life on the mystery of the Lord’s Cross and see in the cross the deepest expression of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord for you and a sign of hope that he will help you become capable of loving each other to that sacred extreme.
At every Mass, we Catholics believe we enter liturgically in time into the eternal events of Jesus’ once-and-for-all sacrifice from the Upper Room and Calvary for us and our salvation. This is where we experience the renewal of our minds and commit ourselves to put on the mind of Christ as we hear and heed the Word of God. This is where we seek to build our life on the living Christ as he sacramentally comes down on the altar for us. This is where the early Christians used to build canopies over altars to symbolize that the altar is the marriage bed where the union between Christ and his Bride the Church is consummated, as the Bride of Christ receives within herself the Body and Blood of Christ the Bridegroom, and is capacitated to live filled with the spousal love of God.
The altar is indeed the marriage bed where generations of Catholic couples, in imitation of Tobias and Sarah, have prayed not just on their wedding day but throughout their marriage, that the Lord may pour out his mercy upon them, deliver them from every evil, and strengthen them in the noble purpose of Christian marriage as long as they both shall live. It’s where married couples say together “Amen, Amen!,” that beautiful Hebrew verb for “uphold” or “support,” confessing overtly that they will make Christ and his divine mercy given for us in the Eucharist, the efficacious sign of his inseparable love, the true foundation of their life. Today, around this marriage bed, we all join you in praying, that God, who has waited for this day since the foundation of the world, will bless you with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, and through you, the love of God you radiate, and the matrimonial mission of life and love he gives you today, bless us all.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Tobit
Tobiah arose from bed and said to his wife,
“My love, get up. Let us pray and beg our Lord to have mercy on us and to grant us deliverance.”
She got up, and they started to pray and beg that deliverance might be theirs.
He began with these words:
“Blessed are you, O God of our fathers;
praised be your name forever and ever.
Let the heavens and all your creation praise you forever.
You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve to be his help and support;
and from these two the human race descended.
You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make him a partner like himself.’
Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose.
Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age.”
They said together, “Amen, amen,”
The Word of the Lord.
Responsorial Psalm: Happy are those who fear the Lord
Happy are those who fear the LORD, who greatly delight in God’s commands.
Their descendants shall be mighty in the land, a generation upright and blessed.
Wealth and riches shall be in their homes; their prosperity shall endure forever.
They shine through the darkness, a light for the upright; they are gracious, merciful, and just.
They shall never be shaken; the just shall be remembered forever.
They shall not fear an ill report; their hearts are steadfast, trusting the LORD.
Their hearts are tranquil, without fear, till at last they look down on their foes.
Lavishly they give to the poor; their prosperity shall endure forever; their horn shall be exalted in honor.
A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans
I urge you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God,
to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.
Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.
Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection;
anticipate one another in showing honor.
Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality.
Bless those who persecute [you], bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Have the same regard for one another;
do not be haughty but associate with the lowly;
do not be wise in your own estimation.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil;
be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all.
If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.
The Word of the Lord.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
will enter the kingdom of heaven,
but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house.
But it did not collapse;
it had been set solidly on rock.
And everyone who listens to these words of mine
but does not act on them
will be like a fool who built his house on sand.
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house.
And it collapsed and was completely ruined.”
When Jesus finished these words,
the crowds were astonished at his teaching,
for he taught them as one having authority,
and not as their scribes.
The Gospel of the Lord.
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23 min
May 11, 2024Seventh Sunday of Easter and Ascension (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 11, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter and the Ascension, Vigils
May 11, 2024

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The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday. I should probably say “conversations” in the plural, since, depending upon where you live in the United States, you will have one of two Gospels. Those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will hear the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Those everywhere else will have the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus, since the bishops in those ecclesiastical provinces decided in 1998 and 1999 to transfer the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday. They did so because they recognized that if they didn’t, Catholics who do not attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss this celebrating liturgically this very important event in the Lord’s life. Ironically, however, in making that decision to move the Ascension to the 43rd day after Easter, the bishops in those provinces were eliminating that Catholics would hear Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. That Catholics in the US do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension is unfortunate and I would like to make what is now an annual appeal: that just as the Church is praying for unity to be restored to the celebration of Easter between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, so we might pray and speak to the Catholic bishops in our land about restoring unity to the celebration of the Ascension on the 40th. Since, however, we are still in a situation where there is not unity, please permit me to say something about both Gospels, conscious of the fact that, since Jesus is our interlocutor in every prayerful and consequential liturgical conversation, everything is intrinsically coherent.
We’ll take the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter first, since it happened first in time. In it we have the awesome privilege not only to eavesdrop on the extraordinarily rich interpersonal dialogue Jesus had with God the Father the night he was betrayed but to enter into that conversation.
In the section of John 17 we have this year, Jesus mentions five things:
First, Jesus prays that God the Father will protect us, that we may be one in communion just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one. A little later he asks the Father specifically to keep us from the evil one. The point is that the devil constantly seeks to divide us, whereas God wants to bring us into true communion with Him and each other. Any of us who really believe in Jesus, who love him, must pray and work for unity. The fact that Christians as a whole have been divided by so many schisms across the centuries, the fact that even Catholics are often divided into ideological camps, is a great scandal, one that Jesus wants you and me to help remedy.
Second, Jesus prays that we may “share [his] joy completely.” As he told us last Sunday, he came so that his joy might be in us and our joy be made complete. The Easter Season is meant to help us to focus precisely on that joy, the joy that flows from God’s love, from his continuous presence, and from his triumph over sin and death. If we don’t live the Christian faith with joy, we risk making the Good News seem like a lie.
Third, Jesus mentions that the world will hate us, just like it hated Jesus, because we do not belong to the world any more than Jesus does but belong to God. Jesus many times in the Gospel promised us that we would be hated by those who don’t want to believe, love and follow God, that what they did to him, they would try to do to us. He said God the Father would permit this, just like he permitted it to happen to Jesus, so that we would be able to give more effective witness. At the end of the Beatitudes Jesus would say, “Blessed are you when people hate you, revile you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me” for “your reward will be great in heaven.” This hatred we suffer from others is not strong enough to take away our unity, or negate the Father’s protection, or rob us of our joy. It only will if we fear that hatred from others more than we trust in the love of God.
Fourth, Jesus asks the Father to consecrate us in the truth, adding that he has consecrated himself for us so that we can be consecrated in truth. To be consecrated literally means to be cut off (sacer) to be with (con) some other reality. In consecrating us, God sets us apart, he cuts us from worldliness, from the profane, so that we can be with him. Consecration is a sacred dedication in which we transfer our belonging, the title of the ownership of our life, totally to God. It’s like the Covenants of the Old Testament in which he becomes our God and we become his people, the sheep of his flock. He does this first in baptism, in which we’re marked by a special seal. He does so also, as Jesus says, by his Word, which is meant, like a double-edged sword, to prune us of anything that doesn’t belong to God. Do we live this sense of belonging? That we belong to God, for example, more than the most loving husbands and wives belong to each other?
All four of these points culminate in mission. Jesus says, “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.” Being set apart to belong to God, we now share Christ’s mission. Just as the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus sends us. He sends us consecrated in the Truth that sets us free, as messengers of the Words of Eternal Life. He prepares us for the opposition we will receive from some, just like the apostles and missionaries in every age have endured, but likewise he promises us the Holy Spirit who will help us in trial to give effective spiritual witness. And he sends us out united, seeking to bring them into community. Jesus says in next year’s portion of John 17, that he wants us to be one “so that the world may believe that you, Father, sent me and love them just as much as you love me.” To help others believe in Jesus and in the love that God has for them, we must evince that love with each other.
That’s what the Gospel for the Seventh Sunday of Easter is all about.
If we turn to the Gospel that the Church proclaims this year on the Ascension, which took place over six weeks after Jesus’ words in the Upper Room, we see how Jesus essentially reiterates what he said in John 17. He tells us, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized,” whoever in other words, accepts the gift of consecration, “will be saved.” He mentions the opposition we will get from demons, serpents, even others who seek to poison us, so that we won’t be afraid of “any deadly thing.” And we see how the apostles respond to Jesus’ valedictory as he ascends to heaven by going forth and preaching everywhere, while, St. Mark tells us, “The Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.” Those signs were not just physical healings and other powerful miracles. They were the compelling signs of Christian joy, unity, and courage in the face of threats. They were the witness of their belonging to God and their consecration within Christ’s consecration, a testimony that no intimidation, not even torture, could sever. And we’re Christians today because of the way they faithfully responded to Jesus’ words in the Upper Room and Jesus’ words before he was taken to heaven.
What Jesus tells us in both of these Gospels can be applied to the truth about what he seeks to do in us through our communion with Him in the Holy Eucharist. This week the Church in the United States will begin a four-part, 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, with routes leaving from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Canadian and Mexican borders, all converging in Indianapolis on July 16, the day before the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years. I am privileged to be able to carry Jesus for these nine-plus weeks on the eastern route, starting in New Haven, Connecticut, as we ask him to bless our Land. It is in the Eucharist that Jesus seeks to fulfill the prayer he made on Holy Thursday that we be one as he and the Father are one. The same Holy Spirit who is the loving union between the Father and the Son comes down upon us every Mass not just to change bread and wine into Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, but to make us “one body, one spirit in Christ.” The sacrifice of the Mass helps us to enter into the consecration of Christ, to fill us with joy, to protect us from the devil’s division by our clinging to our Eucharistic Lord, and to prepare us to be sent out on mission not just with the words of truth but with the word-made-flesh, truth incarnate within. The greatest accompanying sign that accompanies the Church’s witness is meant to be, first, the Risen Christ himself made truly present on our altars and in our tabernacles, and then the union through communion the Holy Spirit makes, which is what helps convince the world that God the Father sent the Son and truly loves us as he loves the Son. That’s why the Eucharistic Revival is so important for the revival and flourishing of the Church. That’s what the Eucharistic Pilgrimage beginning this week is so important because the journey of the pilgrim Church on earth is ultimately a Eucharistic procession with the Risen Jesus all the way to the heavenly Jerusalem where God’s desire for us to be one in the communion of saints within the communion of persons who is our Triune God will be fulfilled.
As we prepare for the gift of Sunday Mass, no matter what Gospel we’ll hear, we give God thanks that his prayer during that first Mass on Holy Thursday and his Great Commission have no expiration date. And we ask the Holy Spirit whom Jesus ascended to heaven to send down to us will help us to respond to Jesus’ words as faithfully as his first followers, so that great multitudes after us may hear and live Jesus’ life saving, joy-filling words, and come to faith and, through the Mass, communion with God and us.

The Gospels on which this homily was preached were:
Gospel
Jn 17:11b-19
Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:
“Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me,
so that they may be one just as we are one.
When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me,
and I guarded them, and none of them was lost
except the son of destruction,
in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
But now I am coming to you.
I speak this in the world
so that they may share my joy completely.
I gave them your word, and the world hated them,
because they do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
I do not ask that you take them out of the world
but that you keep them from the evil one.
They do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world,
so I sent them into the world.
And I consecrate myself for them,
so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”
Gospel
Mk 16:15-20
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Go into the whole world
and proclaim the gospel to every creature.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;
whoever does not believe will be condemned.
These signs will accompany those who believe:
in my name they will drive out demons,
they will speak new languages.
They will pick up serpents with their hands,
and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.
They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them,
was taken up into heaven
and took his seat at the right hand of God.
But they went forth and preached everywhere,
while the Lord worked with them
and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.
The post Seventh Sunday of Easter and Ascension (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 11, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
May 10, 2024The Joy That Relativizes All Pain, Sixth Friday of Easter, May 10, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Memorial of Saint Damien of Molokai
May 10, 2024
Acts 18:9-18, Ps 47, Jn 16:20-23

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.10.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted during the homily:
It’s easy to see why the Church gives us today’s Gospel passage on the day after the Ascension of the Lord. Jesus says to us today, “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy away from you.” These words certainly apply to what is to happen, we pray by God’s mercy, to each of us one day when we see Jesus in all his glory and have a chance to rejoice with all the saints. But we know that these words were said during the Last Supper and were referring more precisely to what would happen over the course of the subsequent three days, that Jesus would be taken away from them, that they would mourn as many around them among the chief priests, scribes and Pharisees were rejoicing, but that when Jesus would return risen from the dead, they would indeed rejoice with a joy that would know no bounds or end.
What I’d like to focus on today, however, are two things that Jesus says to us in the Gospel that are central for our living our Catholic faith in light of Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension to God’s right hand where he’s gone to prepare a place for us.
The first is his image of childbirth as an analogy of what he was about to endure and what we as Christians need to endure. To describe the passage from grief to joy, he said, “When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world.” After the Fall, no woman looks forward to labor, but once a child is born, the pain of contractions and childbirth are all relativized due to the great joy of holding her baby in her arms. To experience that joy, however, you have to go through birth pangs. You can’t have the joy of a mom without it. It’s similar in the spiritual life. In order to enter into the joy of Jesus’ resurrection, we need to enter into his labor, his contractions, his pangs to bring about a new world. We need to enter into his Passion, death and resurrection. One of the reasons why many people, including Catholics, don’t experience the joy of Easter sufficiently is precisely because they haven’t entered into labor with Christ. They haven’t grieved with Jesus over the sins that brought about the pains of spiritual childbirth. Jesus permits us some sufferings precisely so that we can appreciate the joy that comes from his redeeming presence. There’s a similar pain in the life of spiritual motherhood or fatherhood exercised by parents as well as by religious and priests. St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “My children, for whom I am again in labor until Christ be formed in you!”(Gal 4:19). We suffer until the presence, the love, the joy of Christ be brought to completion in others. In summary, in human life there’s a concomitant experience between the pangs of childbirth and the joy of holding one’s child after it, but the latter is meant to overwhelm the former.
That leads to the second point I want to capture from today’s Gospel: how Jesus says that when he comes back, “on that day you will not question me about anything.” They will have no more questions precisely because Jesus through his Resurrection — and all the more through his Ascension and eventual second coming — will become the definitive Answer to every fundamental question we have. If we’re wondering about the meaning of our or a loved one’s or a sick child’s suffering and death, we’re able to see that after the childbirth contractions of those sufferings, even after a life full of sufferings, there is to be a joy greater than a mom’s holding her first born child. The Resurrection of Jesus is what gives meaning to the pangs experienced by the martyrs, to the sufferings we experience in trying to live by or spread our faith.
We see both of these truths at work in the experience of St. Paul in today’s first reading. Soon after Paul arrived in Corinth and was rejected by the Jews in the Synagogue, Jesus appeared to him in a vision and said, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you” and “I have many people in this city.” What was St. Paul afraid of? He wasn’t afraid of physical suffering. He had already had his share of beatings, stonings, perilous journeys, imprisonments and revilement. He was a little afraid, it seems, of preaching about this necessary childbirth we need in order to experience Christian joy. On Wednesday, we encountered St. Paul in Athens, when he gave an extraordinary rhetorical address announcing to the Athenians in the Areopagus the identity of the “unknown god” to whom they had erected an altar. But as beautiful as that philosophical and theological oratory was, it wasn’t particularly effective. Other than a few people, the vast majority politely either scorned what he said or blew him off, saying that they would hear about this from him on another day. And they did this because he was talking about Jesus’ having been raised from the dead. Paul didn’t even bother saying that this unknown God had be brutally crucified. After that failure, Paul crossed the isthmus into Corinth and, with God’s help, reached a conclusion. He gives witness to it in his first letter to the Church in Corinth, which came later. “When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God,” he wrote, “I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive [words of] wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:1-5). What was that power and wisdom? It’s Christ crucified and our need to be crucified with him. “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:22-24). As we see in the early preaching of St. Paul — different from St. Peter’s — Paul didn’t feature Christ’s crucifixion because he knew that it was a “scandal” to Jews (who would obviously struggle to accept that the Messiah, who was expected to evict occupying forces and reestablish the Davidic kingdom, would be publicly executed by that same occupying force, not to mention that he would both claim to be God and then be killed, something that they would have considered unfathomable) and a “folly” to Greek pagans (because wisdom was the art of living and dying well, and someone who couldn’t avoid crucifixion was obviously a fool). But after Athens, he resolved that, rather than running away, he would begin to show how Jesus on the Cross was the power and wisdom of God, the power of divine love and the true wisdom of how to live and die so as to live forever. That’s what Jesus was telling him not to be afraid to proclaim. And St. Paul would proclaim it not principally with words but with his own life, entering into Jesus’ own childbirth to such a degree that he would be able to say to the Galatians later that he had been crucified with Christ and the life he now lived in the flesh he lived by faith in the Son of God who loved him and gave his life up for him (Gal 2:20). Jesus’ resurrection was the dramatic explanation of, the definitive response to, the purpose of his and all suffering, and St. Paul was able to lead many on that passage from childbirth to joy.
One saint who entered into the pangs of Christ’s paschal mystery in his own life is Joseph de Veuster (1840-1889), whom we remember as Saint Damien of Molokai. Born in Belgium to a religious family, when he was 24, his brother Auguste, whom he had followed into the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, was too ill to go as a missionary to Hawaii, and Damien took his place. He was ordained a priest there and worked for nine years mostly on the island of Hawaii. He showed early signs of his pastoral zeal and willingness to undergo the pangs of spiritual parenthood in a letter he to his parents, imploring them, “Do not forget this poor priest running night and day over the volcanoes night and day in search of strayed sheep. Pray night and day for me, I beg you.” In 1873, Bishop Louis Maigret briefed the Sacred Hearts Fathers on the need for priestly ministrations in Kalaupapa on the Island of Molokai, which King Kamehameha V had set up seven years earlier to quarantine lepers. Of the 816 with Hansen’s Disease in the enclave, 200 were Catholic, and he had received letters from several of them begging him to send a priest so that they might suffer and die with the consolation of the sacraments. The bishop knew what he was proposing: a slow martyrdom, as chaplain to a walking graveyard. Fully conscious of the consequences, Fr. Damien stepped forward to take the assignment. When he arrived on May 10, 1873 — the reason why we celebrate his feast day on May 10 — Bishop Maigret prophetically introduced him to the colony of lepers as “one who will be a father to you, and who loves you so much that he does not hesitate to become one of you, to live and die with you.”
The 33-year old priest got right down to work — every type of work. He built churches, homes and beds. He created farms and schools and worked to enforce basic laws. He fought to have medicine sent and to get his people whatever medical care was possible. At first, it was hard for him to approach the lepers because he had a natural revulsion to the fetid odor given off by their leprous sores. To overcome this olfactory repugnance, he began to smoke a pipe so that the smell of tobacco would make it possible for him to approach the lepers with dignity as he began to dress their ulcers. While what he could do for their deteriorating bodies was limited, he knew that he could help prepare their souls to meet the Lord, to help them live with an eternal purpose. Helping them to focus on the joy after the pangs of childbirth in this world, they could better endure the sufferings of leprosy. The first thing he did was to give increased attention to the funeral rites. He knew that if the lepers saw how much care he showed them at their death, they might begin to sense the value of their lives. He brought them the sacraments at their bedsides and tidied their rooms and beds to await the imminent visit of the Lord Jesus. He formed choirs, taught them how to sing beautiful hymns at Requiem Masses, and trained others to play musical instruments. He cleaned the cemetery and adorned it with flowers. He even made coffins. At the same time, he instituted perpetual adoration, so that the lepers would know that the Lord Jesus was with them always and so that they would have the opportunity to pour out their hearts to Him in their need. Father Damien knew, too, that this was what sustained him. “I find my consolation,” he wrote in a letter, “in the one and only companion who will never leave me, that is, our Divine Savior in the Holy Eucharist.… Without the Blessed Sacrament a position like mine would be unbearable. But having Our Lord at my side, I continue always to be happy and content.” It is unsurprising that his witness began to win over the members of his community. Six months after his arrival, he had 400 people — half the village and two thirds of those who were not Catholic at his arrival — preparing for baptism. A cheerful spirit began to radiate in the community in place of the former dejection. In December of 1884, Fr. Damien discovered that he had contracted leprosy, and his spiritual contractions would begin. He wrote, “My eyebrows are beginning to fall out. Soon I will be disfigured entirely. Having no doubts about the true nature of my disease, I am calm, resigned, and very happy in the midst of my people.” He had entered into communion with their leprosy as well, but was suffering in Christ. To those who asked him how he was holding up, he said, “Our Lord will give me the graces I need to carry my cross and follow him, even to our special Calvary at Kalawao.” He died on Tuesday of Holy Week in 1889. Just as the Lord Jesus loved us enough that he came into our world, took on our human flesh, and through many contractions and sufferings redeemed it, so Fr. Damien entered into the lepers’ world, courageously took on their dreaded disease, and united it and them to the Lord. In the Opening Prayer of the Mass, we asked God the Father to grant us, through St. Damien’s intercession and like him, to be “faithful witnesses of the heart of your Son Jesus” through being “servants of the most needy and rejected.” Together with the Holy Spirit, he was a faithful witness of the heart of Jesus, because with faith, he heard Jesus’ words about loving his neighbor and acted on them to the point of laying down his life. He lived out the moral communion that flows from our baptismal communion, loving the lepers with the very love of Christ, and becoming for them and for us an icon of Christ’s tender, merciful love for every person, which no illness, however repulsive, can disfigure. He was willing to endure all the sufferings necessary to give them birth into a new world that would know no end.
During Mass, all of us enter into Jesus’ childbirth, his labor pains, as we enter in time into his eternal passage through suffering and death to the joy of new life. It’s here that we bring all our labor pains and end up, not by holding a beautiful baby in our hands — as happy an experience as that is for every one — but something even greater. We get to hold Jesus Christ in our hands just like Mary and Joseph did, and then become one with Him on the inside. Many people don’t experience anywhere near the joy that this is supposed to give because they haven’t gone through the stages of grieving, the pains coming from their grievous sins, the wounds received by the grievous sins of others. But this is what the Mass makes possible. And during this second day of the Decenarium of the Holy Spirit, we can ponder the Gift of Courage as we pray in the Veni Creator Spiritus, the “firmans virtute perpeti,” that God the Holy Spirit may make us strong with his perpetual power, the power and wisdom of Christ crucified to Whom the Spirit wishes to conform us. As we unite ourselves to Christ’s delivery and Christ’s Eucharistic birth, he and the Spirit both say to us what Jesus said to Paul at the beginning of today’s first reading, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you. For I am many people in this city” and we rejoice to be one of those many!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ACTS 18:9-18
One night while Paul was in Corinth, the Lord said to him in a vision,
“Do not be afraid.
Go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you.
No one will attack and harm you,
for I have many people in this city.”
He settled there for a year and a half
and taught the word of God among them.
But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia,
the Jews rose up together against Paul
and brought him to the tribunal, saying,
“This man is inducing people to worship God contrary to the law.”
When Paul was about to reply, Gallio spoke to the Jews,
“If it were a matter of some crime or malicious fraud,
I should with reason hear the complaint of you Jews;
but since it is a question of arguments over doctrine and titles
and your own law, see to it yourselves.
I do not wish to be a judge of such matters.”
And he drove them away from the tribunal.
They all seized Sosthenes, the synagogue official,
and beat him in full view of the tribunal.
But none of this was of concern to Gallio.
Paul remained for quite some time,
and after saying farewell to the brothers he sailed for Syria,
together with Priscilla and Aquila.
At Cenchreae he had shaved his head because he had taken a vow.
Responsorial Psalm PS 47:2-3, 4-5, 6-7
R. (8a) God is king of all the earth.
or:
R. Alleluia.
All you peoples, clap your hands,
shout to God with cries of gladness,
For the LORD, the Most High, the awesome,
is the great king over all the earth.
R. God is king of all the earth.
or:
R. Alleluia.
He brings people under us;
nations under our feet.
He chooses for us our inheritance,
the glory of Jacob, whom he loves.
R. God is king of all the earth.
or:
R. Alleluia.
God mounts his throne amid shouts of joy;
the LORD, amid trumpet blasts.
Sing praise to God, sing praise;
sing praise to our king, sing praise.
R. God is king of all the earth.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia SEE LK 24:46, 26
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Christ had to suffer and to rise from the dead,
and so enter into his glory.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel JN 16:20-23
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn,
while the world rejoices;
you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.
When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived;
but when she has given birth to a child,
she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy
that a child has been born into the world.
So you also are now in anguish.
But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice,
and no one will take your joy away from you.
On that day you will not question me about anything.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you.”
The post The Joy That Relativizes All Pain, Sixth Friday of Easter, May 10, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
21 min
May 09, 2024Jesus’ Ascendant Blessing, Solemnity of the Ascension, May 9, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord
May 9, 2024
Acts 1:1-11, Ps 47, Eph 1:17-23, Mk 16:15-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The text that guided the homily was:
Today on the Solemnity of the Lord’s Ascension into heaven, we can look at the three principal things that the Church normally marks on this feast, the three chief aspects of this mystery we ponder when we meditate on the second glorious mystery of the Rosary: the reality of heaven and Christ’s ascent there; his great commission to the apostles and the Church to continue his work; and the parting gift, the perpetual blessing he gives us to help us complete that mission and one day join him in heaven with many others, the Holy Spirit.
The first reality we celebrate today is heaven. Today we celebrate the day Jesus returned home, to the place from which he came to earth to save us. He returned differently than he left, taking our human nature with him across the threshold of death into life. 43 days before his Ascension, during the Last Supper, Jesus told his closest followers about this connection between his ascension and our resurrection and assumption. He said, “I am going to the Father, … the one who sent me” (Jn 14:17, 16:5). But he also said, “You have faith in God, have faith also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” Heaven is the place where Christ has prepared for us so that we might rejoice with him forever. “He mounts his throne to shouts of joy” and he wants us to be able to experience one day with him that joy.
Jesus often spoke about the great joyof heaven. He took his contemporaries’ most popular celebration — an eight-day sumptuous wedding banquet — and used it time and again to describe the unending joy of the eternal wedding banquet (Mt 22, Mt 25, Lk 12, Rev 19, Rev 21). St. Paul and Isaiah affirm that “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor the human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9; Is 64:4). This is what St. Paul prayed that the Ephesians realize in today’s second reading, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” Heaven is our hope. Heaven is our glorious inheritance. But it’s a hope and an inheritance to which we’re “called.” To obtain it, we have to respond to that call, by following Christ the Lord all the way, through a life of faith in him, in imitation of the love with which he loved us.
And that begins with our desire. Our focus on Jesus’ Ascension, not just today but every few days when we pray the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, is meant to stoke our desire. We heard St. Paul tell us on Easter Sunday: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:1-2). We are called to seek the things that are above, to hunger for heaven, for God, for eternity. The Solemnity of the Ascension is meant to stoke our desire for Christ’s face, to see him with the eyes of our heart enlightened. We prayed in the opening prayer today that Christ’s Ascension may give us hope to follow him all the way: “For the Ascension of Christ your Son is our exaltation, and, where the Head has gone before us in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.” And we know that in heaven, Jesus is not just awaiting us. He’s interceding for us. God the Father, as St. Paul tells us in the second reading, “rais[ed] him from the dead and seat[ed] him at his right hand in the heavens, far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion” and “put all things beneath his feet.” He’s praying for us so that we may know “the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.”
The second reality we mark today is the mission Jesus gives us as he ascends: to be witnesses to him, to his message, to his work. He has all power in heaven, as we see in the Ephesians, but in gives that power to us in the Church to fulfill his mission. He tells us in St. Matthew’s version of Jesus’ last words, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” In St. Mark’s today, he tells us, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature,” and he gives the Church his authority to drive out demons, speak new languages, heal the sick and overpower serpents and toxins. Jesus loved us enough, and he trusted us so much, that he placed his own mission and authority into our hands. And he wants us to go out to help others become his followers, to be set free by his truth, to live in his presence in this world so that we may live with him ascended forever. As I like to say, Jesus could have stayed on earth until the end of time saving everyone himself, one-by-one, so that our frailties wouldn’t get in the way of this most important mission of all time. Instead, he ascended, taking the training wheels off of our discipleship, removing from us any excuse to pass the buck. He wants us to help draw others to the throne of grace in this world and forever. That’s the great commission. But he hasn’t left us on our own. St. Luke tells us in his version of the Ascension that Jesus “led them out as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them. As he was blessing them,he parted from them and was taken up to heaven.” Jesus departed as he was blessing us. Pope Benedict commented once that the Risen Jesus is blessing us perpetually in heaven: “Jesus departs in the act of blessing. He goes while blessing, and he remains in that gesture of blessing. His hands remain, stretched out over this world. … The gesture of hands outstretched in blessing expresses Jesus’ continuing relationship to his disciples, to the world. In departing, he comes to us, in order to raise us up above ourselves and to open up the world to God. That is why the disciples could return home from Bethany rejoicing. In faith we know that Jesus holds his hands stretched out in blessing over us. That is the lasting motive of Christian joy.” Jesus is continually blessing us. He is blessing us when we wake up in the morning. He’s blessing us as we do our studies and work, write papers or take exams. He’s blessing us in our homes and in family and communal life. He’s blessing us when we eat. He’s blessing us in hard times. He’s blessing us right now. He’s blessing us always. And through his hands raised in blessing, he’s seeking to transforms us into his enfleshed benediction of the world.
The third reality we mark is the help he gives us to complete that mission. He sends us the Holy Spirit. In the valedictory address St. Luke records in the Acts of the Apostles, today’s first reading, Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And that’s the power that came down upon them on Pentecost, what St. Paul in today’s second reading called the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him.” During the Last Supper, Jesus had said something startling, which we pondered two days ago at daily Mass: “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16:7). He was describing the incredible gift of the Holy Spirit’s presence as something even greater than his own presence. Today as we begin the decenarium or ten days of prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we huddle around Mary like the apostles praying for greater docility and openness to the Holy Spirit’s fire.
Jesus’ act of continual blessing happens here at Mass, as he continues to speak to us and more importantly continues to be with us blessing us from the inside with his own life, allowing us to receive his risen and ascended Body and Blood, which is our participation here on earth in his ascension even now. Jesus pointed to the Ascension when he was describing his continued presence in the Eucharist until the end of time. When his disciples were mumbling in Capernaum about how he could give us his flesh to eat and blood to drink, he said, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending to where he was before?” Living a truly Eucharistic life, entering into Jesus’ consecration in the Mass, is the path of our Ascension. “Amen, amen I say to you,” Jesus told us, “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him on the last day,” because “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.… He who eats me will live because of me.” Eternal life is knowing Christ Jesus, and we know him in a Biblical way through the consummation of the one-flesh spousal union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride the Church here at Mass, effected by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is also the means in which we stoke our desire to see the High Priest who reigns in heaven and bids us approach the throne of grace to receive mercy. This is the means by which, united with Christ, we are sent out by him with his blessing at the end of the liturgy, to “go and announce the Gospel of the Lord!,” with the power of the Holy Spirit, that the world so much needs. God has indeed mounted his throne to shouts of joy and wants to transform us by his blessing and the power of the Holy Spirit to become a “blare of trumpets for the Lord!” helping others, with us, to seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Acts 1:1-11
In the first book, Theophilus,
I dealt with all that Jesus did and taught
until the day he was taken up,
after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit
to the apostles whom he had chosen.
He presented himself alive to them
by many proofs after he had suffered,
appearing to them during forty days
and speaking about the kingdom of God.
While meeting with them,
he enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem,
but to wait for “the promise of the Father
about which you have heard me speak;
for John baptized with water,
but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
When they had gathered together they asked him,
“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
He answered them, “It is not for you to know the times or seasons
that the Father has established by his own authority.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,
and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
throughout Judea and Samaria,
and to the ends of the earth.”
When he had said this, as they were looking on,
he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.
While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going,
suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
They said, “Men of Galilee,
why are you standing there looking at the sky?
This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven
will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9
R. (6) God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
All you peoples, clap your hands,
shout to God with cries of gladness,
For the LORD, the Most High, the awesome,
is the great king over all the earth.
R. God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
God mounts his throne amid shouts of joy;
the LORD, amid trumpet blasts.
Sing praise to God, sing praise;
sing praise to our king, sing praise.
R. God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
For king of all the earth is God;
sing hymns of praise.
God reigns over the nations,
God sits upon his holy throne.
R. God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading II
Eph 1:17-23
Brothers and sisters:
May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,
give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation
resulting in knowledge of him.
May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened,
that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call,
what are the riches of glory
in his inheritance among the holy ones,
and what is the surpassing greatness of his power
for us who believe,
in accord with the exercise of his great might,
which he worked in Christ,
raising him from the dead
and seating him at his right hand in the heavens,
far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion,
and every name that is named
not only in this age but also in the one to come.
And he put all things beneath his feet
and gave him as head over all things to the church,
which is his body,
the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.
Alleluia
Mt 28:19a, 20b
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Go and teach all nations, says the Lord;
I am with you always, until the end of the world.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 16:15-20
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Go into the whole world
and proclaim the gospel to every creature.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;
whoever does not believe will be condemned.
These signs will accompany those who believe:
in my name they will drive out demons,
they will speak new languages.
They will pick up serpents with their hands,
and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.
They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them,
was taken up into heaven
and took his seat at the right hand of God.
But they went forth and preached everywhere,
while the Lord worked with them
and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.
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16 min
May 08, 2024Guided by the Holy Spirit to the Truth that Leads to Greater Perfection, Sixth Wednesday of Easter, May 8, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Memorial of Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich
May 8, 2024
Acts 17:15.22-18:1, Ps 148, Jn 16:12-15

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.8.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the Gospel, on the eve of the “Decenarium of the Holy Spirit” that begins tomorrow on the Solemnity of the Ascension, Jesus speaks to us about how the Holy Spirit “will guide you to all truth” because, he says, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” Kindergarteners are not taught calculus, quantum physics or advanced semiotics for a reason, because they cannot handle it yet. There are various steps in learning and assimilation in the spiritual life as well, and God knows how he has made us. The transition from natural religion to the covenants of the Old Testament was an enormous step in the learning curve; from Old Testament to New Covenant another. But that learning continues. It continued for the Church at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, helping Christians not only to understand the significance of so much Jesus taught and did but to learn how to align their lives to that truth. That growth continues for each of us. The Holy Spirit continues to want to lead us to all truth, making explicit what was implicit in what has already been given and making vibrant what has been dormant. Are we open to that continued formation? Are we hungry for it?
This is a key work of the Holy Spirit. St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem, he uses the expression “Spirit of Truth” 42 times and how the Holy Spirit helps us to know, love and live the truth another 56, far more than any other expression. In a relativistic age, and one desperate for a New Evangelization, St. John Paul II focused on the mission of the Holy Spirit with regard to the truth more than under any other title. He wrote there, “It becomes clear that this ‘guiding into all the truth’ is connected not only with the scandal of the Cross, but also with everything that Christ ‘did and taught.’ For the mystery of Christ taken as a whole demands faith, since it is faith that adequately introduces man into the reality of the revealed mystery. The guiding into all the truth is therefore achieved in faith and through faith: and this is the work of the Spirit of truth and the result of his action in man. Here the Holy Spirit is to be man’s supreme guide and the light of the human spirit.”
We see the Holy Spirit’s work in and through St. Paul as together with the Spirit the Apostle sought to lead the Athenians from what they knew into something much deeper. He began with their religiosity, surrounded by the statues of all the pagan gods, and praised their wisdom in the statue dedicated to the god they didn’t know. The statue to the Unknown god comes from the time of Epimenides who, according to Athenian legend, had been brought by them from Crete to rescue Athens after one of the leading families had murdered someone at the altar in the temple and soon the city began to suffer from political strife, a plague and various sorts of pollution, all of which the Athenians understood as a curse. Epimenides suggested that there might be a god unknown to them who would be willing to help Athens if proper sacrifices were made to him, and so the Athenians built many altars and made many sacrifices and the city was saved. Epimenides as a poet had written, “They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. But you are not dead: you live and abide forever, for in you we live and move and have our being.” In his Letter to Titus, Paul referenced how Cretans were “always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (Tit 1:12) which showed his familiarity with Epimenides, whose history and line about God being the one in whom we “live, move, and have our being” is quoted on Mars Hill.
Much like we spoke about when Paul preached to the Jews in the Synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia, he was accustomed to begin with people’s aspirations, then go to how Christ is the fulfillment of them, how Jesus was rejected but God the Father raised him, and how now everyone needs to make a choice. While the premises needed to change while he was speaking to the non-Jewish Athenians at the Areopagus, the general structure remained. He began with their aspirations for salvation, citing the unknown god of Epimenides, their general religiosity seeking God, and the revelation they have in common through creation. He sought to help them to know the Unknown God, and not just as one God among others, but as the one true and only God. He helped them to see that God was not made by hands out of marble but by their Maker. He helped them to see that he gave us Creation to get to know him through seeking, even groping, in order to find him. He helped them to see how God wants an intimate relationship with all of us, so that in him would “live and move and have our being” and grasp that we “are his offspring,” that he seeks to adopt us as his beloved children. And he helped them to see that life isn’t a debating society, that religion is not just a thing to think about, but the most consequential thing we do, because there is a judgment coming on which our continued life will depend. He concluded by speaking about Jesus’ bodily resurrection and saying that, in contrast to the Greek notion of the continuance alone of the soul, it is meant to harbinger our own.
What was the reaction? We see them depicted in the stained glass windows in the Chapel of St. Paul on Columbia’s campus. There were three. The first group scoffed. The second procrastinated, saying that St. Paul’s message wasn’t important enough to act on today. The third was faith, as we see in Dionysius and Damaris. Those three reactions we can look at with regard to the work of the Holy Spirit in leading us into all truth. Some scoff, as if such a thing were impossible, who think they already know everything they need to and respond with hardened soil to God’s progressive revelation. Others put it off and read the daily newspaper or go about the chores of daily life. But the Holy Spirit wants us to respond by “joining” the Holy Spirit and “believing.”
St. John Paul II wrote in 1965 a series of 13 Meditations on St. Paul’s sermon in the Areopagus and what we can learn from it. We don’t know for whom he wrote it or whether it was ever delivered. But a couple of years ago it was rediscovered and was published in English in 2020 by Ave Maria Press under the title Teachings for an Unbelieving World: Newly Discovered Reflections on Paul’s Sermon at the Areopagus. George Weigel and Scott Hahn give the Foreward and Introduction respectively. The main point of the future Pope’s reflections is that we learn from St. Paul in Athens some of the main markers for the New Evangelization today. And St. John Paul in those reflections focuses on the work of the Holy Spirit, not only during Creation hovering over the waters but especially in the redemption, that the Holy Spirit leads us not only to the truth about God but also the truth about ourselves. He writes that St. Paul’s message of conversion to the Athenians — “he demands that all people everywhere repent” — is one of the key works of the Holy Spirit, given to the Apostles in the Upper Room at the same time that Jesus was breathing on them and saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (10), John Paul says, “The Church firmly believes that Christ, who died and was raised up for all, can through His Spirit offer man the light and strength to measure up to his supreme destiny.” He goes on, “No one else, only he the Spirit of Truth… can touch that profound discrepancy that is within the human being, that brokenness that is in him.” He does so by bringing something greater than evil, love, which has “been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us” (Rom 5:5). The Spirit helps us, he adds, not only to be witnesses to Christ together with him in all contexts but to pray with him for those who will hear the world.
This work of the Holy Spirit in guiding us to the truth, in helping us to see in Christ on the Cross our Redemption and to unite ourselves to him so that in him we may live, move and have our being, is seen today in the holy one the Church in the United States remembers on this day. Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, a girl from across the Hudson River in Bayonne, was raised to the altars in the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark a decade ago this October, the first American ever to have her beatification ceremony in the United States. She sought to base her whole life on him the Truth to which the Spirit leads as a brilliant student and then a teacher. As soon as she entered the Bayonne public-school system, she couldn’t hide how smart she was, not only earning double promotions but graduating as the salutatorian of Bayonne High School at the young age of 16. She went to the College of St. Elizabeth in Convent Station, N.J., where she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in literature — academic achievements that were rare for women at the time. She took a teaching position at the Academy of St. Aloysius (now Caritas Academy) in Jersey City, where she taught Latin and English. During her two years with the Sisters of Charity, she taught at St. Elizabeth’s Academy in Convent Station. In these teaching positions, she was known not only for her clarity, but for her faith, often being found kneeling on the floor of the chapel praying the Rosary or adoring the Blessed Sacrament with outstretched arms. We see how docile she was to the Holy Spirit in how she allowed herself to be guided by him along the paths of holiness, whether at home, at school, in spiritual direction, or in the convent. She had long desired to become a cloistered Carmelite, but when she finally approached a Bronx monastery, the nuns thought that she should wait because of lingering problems with headaches, poor eyesight and other health issues. Her brother Charles, who had recently been ordained, and other family members suggested that she should join a teaching order to serve God with the brain he had given her and formed in the truth. She ultimately made a novena before the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception in 1924, asking Our Lady’s help — and Our Lady didn’t let her down. She discerned God was asking her to enter the order with which she was already familiar from her college days, the Sisters of Charity, founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint. She entered two weeks after her father’s death, in early 1925. And she sought to help guide others by the same Holy Spirit who had helped her in her discernment. Despite being a postulant for just three months, a novice for two years and a professed sister for five weeks — and despite much of that time being sick — she made great contributions to her order. She taught at St. Elizabeth’s Academy. She wrote two plays, several poems, letters, meditations and biographical recollections. And, most valuably, at the request of her spiritual director, Benedictine Father Benedict Bradley, and with the permission of her mother superior, she wrote 26 conferences on religious life that Father Bradley preached to her and her fellow novices as if he had composed them. Father Bradley acknowledged that he had received a grace to ask Sister Miriam Teresa to do something that was basically unheard of for someone so young in the religious life. “I believed that she enjoyed extraordinary lights, and I knew that she was living an exemplary life,” he stated. “I thought that, one day, she would be ranked among the saints of God, and I felt it was incumbent upon me to utilize whatever might contribute to an appreciation of her merits after her death.” It was only after her death that he put a note on the motherhouse’s bulletin board declaring, “The conferences that I have been giving to the sisters were written by Sister Miriam Teresa.” Her brother, Msgr. Charles, published those conferences a year later under the title of Greater Perfection.
The summit of that journey is a truly Eucharistic life, in which we seek to draw our life fully from him in whom we live, move and have our being. She wrote about how the Holy Spirit leads us to grow toward and through a Eucharistic life. “In partaking of the Blessed Sacrament,” she wrote, “we have a most powerful aid to sanctification. God himself comes to perfect us, if we but so will.” She so willed, and so advanced in holiness. She developed the point: “The imitation of Christ in the lives of the saints,” she wrote, “is always possible and compatible with every state of life. The saints did but one thing — the will of God. But they did it with all their might. We have only to do the same thing — and according to the degree of intensity with which we labor shall our sanctification progress.” She added, “The reason we have not yet become saints is because we have not understood what it means to love. We think we do, but we do not. To love means to annihilate oneself for the beloved. … To love is to conform oneself to the Beloved in the most intimate manner of which we are capable.” The way we learn to love like that is in the celebration of the Mass. We must, she wrote, “will with determined effort to live out our share of the sacrifice of the Mass in union with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to participate in that Sacrifice as frequently as it is offered. … Only in trying so to live, to make the Mass a vital thing in our daily actions, to live our faith in practice, to perform our tasks in the spirit of our living Head and according to the principles He … laid down for us — only in trying so to do shall we be rendering to God the things that are God’s, our being, our life, our soul, with the full capacity of our measure as creatures of God.” This is what we might call the Eucharistic unity of life, that she herself lived and helped her fellow sisters to live.
Today at Mass, Jesus at Mass continues through the power of the Holy Spirit to teach us and guide us into all truth. He continues to nourish us, leading us to appreciate even more what we’re about to do by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that in our Eucharistic Lord we may “live, move and have our being.” Let us, through the intercession of Blessed Miriam Teresa, ask for the grace to correspond to the Holy Spirit as much as they did, to choose the will of God with all our might and be led by the Holy Spirit to Greater Perfection in this world and final perfection with Blessed Miriam Teresa, St. Paul and all the saints!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ACTS 17:15, 22—18:1
After Paul’s escorts had taken him to Athens,
they came away with instructions for Silas and Timothy
to join him as soon as possible.
Then Paul stood up at the Areopagus and said:
“You Athenians, I see that in every respect
you are very religious.
For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines,
I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’
What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and all that is in it,
the Lord of heaven and earth,
does not dwell in sanctuaries made by human hands,
nor is he served by human hands because he needs anything.
Rather it is he who gives to everyone life and breath and everything.
He made from one the whole human race
to dwell on the entire surface of the earth,
and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions,
so that people might seek God,
even perhaps grope for him and find him,
though indeed he is not far from any one of us.
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’
as even some of your poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since therefore we are the offspring of God,
we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image
fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination.
God has overlooked the times of ignorance,
but now he demands that all people everywhere repent
because he has established a day on which he will ‘judge the world
with justice’ through a man he has appointed,
and he has provided confirmation for all
by raising him from the dead.”
When they heard about resurrection of the dead,
some began to scoff, but others said,
“We should like to hear you on this some other time.”
And so Paul left them.
But some did join him, and became believers.
Among them were Dionysius,
a member of the Court of the Areopagus,
a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
After this he left Athens and went to Corinth.
Responsorial Psalm PS 148:1-2, 11-12, 13, 14
R. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise the LORD from the heavens;
praise him in the heights.
Praise him, all you his angels;
praise him, all you his hosts.
R. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Let the kings of the earth and all peoples,
the princes and all the judges of the earth,
Young men too, and maidens,
old men and boys.
R. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise the name of the LORD,
for his name alone is exalted;
His majesty is above earth and heaven.
R. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
or:
R. Alleluia.
He has lifted up the horn of his people;
Be this his praise from all his faithful ones,
from the children of Israel, the people close to him.
Alleluia.
R. Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia JN 14:16
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I will ask the Father
and he will give you another Advocate
to be with you always.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel JN 16:12-15
Jesus said to his disciples:
“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.
He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears,
and will declare to you the things that are coming.
He will glorify me,
because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine;
for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine
and declare it to you.”

The post Guided by the Holy Spirit to the Truth that Leads to Greater Perfection, Sixth Wednesday of Easter, May 8, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
May 07, 2024Jesus’ Astounding Words About The Holy Spirit, Sixth Tuesday of Easter, May 7, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Tuesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
May 7, 2024
Acts 16:22-34, Ps 138, Jn 16:5-11

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the Gospel Jesus says something truly shocking, something that is one of the most important things ever said about the Holy Spirit: “I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” Jesus is basically declaring that if we have a choice between Him and the Holy Spirit, we should choose the latter. That’s how important he says the Holy Spirit is. The great joy is that we don’t have to have to choose between the two. It is crucial, however, for us to ponder the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life and to examine whether we’re docile to the help He wants to give us to live by faith.
The Holy Spirit remains the “great unknown” not just in the life of so many of the Christian faithful. Next Monday at daily Mass we will encounter the scene in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul came to Ephesus and met some disciples. He asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They responded, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Pope-emeritus Benedict, at World Youth Day in Australia in 2008, said, “The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity,” and confessed that it was only as a young priest teaching theology that he began not only to recognize the importance that the Holy Spirit should play in his life as a priest and professor but that he came to know him intimately. He added, “It is not enough to know the Spirit; we must welcome Him as the guide of our souls, as the ‘Teacher of the interior life’ who introduces us to the Mystery of the Trinity, because He alone can open us up to faith and allow us to live it each day to the full.” And we don’t have to be a member of the Charismatic Renewal to allow the Holy Spirit to become that teacher and guide. If we wish to understand the faith, if we wish to live it, if we wish to pass it on, we must allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, even if we, like Joseph Ratzinger, are beginning as adults. For us, the “great unknown” must become the “great known,” the teacher, the leader, the consoler, the advocate.
The importance of the Holy Spirit in our life as Catholics cannot be overstated. Jesus tells us this in today’s Gospel when he emphasized that it was good that he left us, because in comparison with the gift of His ongoing recognizably physical presence, the gift of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our life is more important. That’s how crucial the Holy Spirit is meant to be in our life as disciples and apostles. Benedict told the Church down under, “The Holy Spirit is the highest gift of God to mankind.” As Catholics, especially as we prepare for the decenarium of the Holy Spirit that will begin in two days on the Ascension, we need to ask ourselves how should we be seeking to grow in our docility to this highest gift of God. Jesus in the Gospel today says about the Holy Spirit that “when he comes he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation: sin, because they do not believe in me; righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” We learn three very important works of the Holy Spirit, among others:
He will convict the world with regard to sin. Sin, Jesus says, is ultimately the failure to believe in him. The Holy Spirit not only convicts us of our failure to make Jesus the foundation of our life but at the same time helps us to grow in faith, to trust in Jesus totally and therefore what he says and does and calls us to.
He will convict the world with regard to righteousness, and righteousness is not fundamentally our work but God’s, it’s “Jesus’ going to the Father,” it’s Jesus’ holiness in communion with the Father. Our justification is our incorporation into Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, not just later but now. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to do.
He will convict the world with regard to condemnation. Condemnation is not principally our eternal self-alienation through trusting in sin more than in God; it’s the condemnation of the evil one. The Holy Spirit wants to help us join in that condemnation by helping us to reject Satan, all his evil works and empty promises, and insofar as Christ came into the world to save not condemn the world, to help us enter into our salvation.
We see this three-fold work at play in today’s first reading.
With regard to failing to make God in Jesus the foundation of one’s life, we see it in what led to today’s passage, where there was a young possessed slave girl in Philippi who was being used by what could only be called pimps there to do diabolical divinations. They were basing their life on cooperating with the devil and on the money that the devil was providing. This girl was following Paul and Silas and constantly saying, over the course of “many days,” “These people are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” After “many days,” Paul turned and said to the demons within her, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her,” and she was exorcised. It’s no surprise that those who do not make Jesus the foundation of their life are liable to using those made in his image.
In relation to righteousness, Paul and Silas were living confident in God’s providence even in the midst of their sufferings. After they had been brutally beaten with rods and locked limb to limb in the innermost jail cell for doing the exorcism, it would have been easy for them to lick and nurse their wounds, as their jailer eventually would do after the earthquake. It would have been easy for them to have been bitter. It would have been tempting for them to just go to sleep and end what to some might have been a nightmare of a day. But instead, because they were filled with the Holy Spirit, they were “praying and singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened.” They were praising God in joyful song. The Holy Spirit came to the aid of their weakness and was helping them to pray as they ought. Earlier in the Acts of the Apostles, after Saints Peter and John had suffered flogging on account of the name of Jesus and for a miracle they did for a cripple, they were together with the other members of the Church praying, not to be removed from danger, but that they might be able to proclaim the Gospel with all boldness (parrhesia). And St. Luke tells us that the place where they were praying shook. Today we see as Paul and Silas were praying, how the Holy Spirit shook the place they were praying!
With regard to condemning the evil one, we could of course look at the exorcism they celebrated, but we can also see how Paul and Silas cooperated with the Holy Spirit in defeating the evil one, his works and his empty promises. When their jailor was about to take his own life because whenever prisoners had escaped it was the jailor who would have to suffer the penalty of an escaped convict — namely death — Paul knew by the power of the Holy Spirit just what to say to him to bring him from the point of death to the threshold of life. “Do no harm to yourself; we are all here,” St. Paul said. From giving into the temptation of the evil one to commit suicide, he now rushed in asking, “What must I do to be saved?,”and they gave him the simplest OCIA itinerary imaginable: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you and your household will be saved.” He did, as did his family, and they all received the same Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit, the greatest gift of God Most High, the one who convicts us about sin, justice and judgment, comes to us at every Mass. We begin Mass by examining all the ways we have not based our existence on Jesus. We seek to unite ourselves to Jesus as we seeks to take us to the Father. And we join in his triumph over the devil. The Holy Spirit seeks to perfect these works at every Mass. Just as he overshadowed Mary at the Annunciation, so he overshadows the altar and the priest at the consecration to transform bread and wine into the eternal Son of God incarnate. And so he overshadows the Church to make us one body, one Spirit in Christ. Pope Benedict said in Australia, “The Eucharist is a ‘perpetual Pentecost’ since every time we celebrate Mass we receive the Holy Spirit who unites us more deeply with Christ and transforms us into Him.” Today we turn to the Holy Spirit, the “better part,” and pray: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love!” Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 Acts 16:22-34
The crowd in Philippi joined in the attack on Paul and Silas,
and the magistrates had them stripped
and ordered them to be beaten with rods.
After inflicting many blows on them,
they threw them into prison
and instructed the jailer to guard them securely.
When he received these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell
and secured their feet to a stake.About midnight, while Paul and Silas were praying
and singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened,
there was suddenly such a severe earthquake
that the foundations of the jail shook;
all the doors flew open, and the chains of all were pulled loose.
When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open,
he drew his sword and was about to kill himself,
thinking that the prisoners had escaped.
But Paul shouted out in a loud voice,
“Do no harm to yourself; we are all here.”
He asked for a light and rushed in and,
trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas.
Then he brought them out and said,
“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus
and you and your household will be saved.”
So they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to everyone in his house.
He took them in at that hour of the night and bathed their wounds;
then he and all his family were baptized at once.
He brought them up into his house and provided a meal
and with his household rejoiced at having come to faith in God.
Responsorial Psalm PS 138:1-2ab, 2cde-3, 7c-8
R. (7c) Your right hand saves me, O Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
I will give thanks to you, O LORD, with all my heart,
for you have heard the words of my mouth;
in the presence of the angels I will sing your praise;
I will worship at your holy temple,
and give thanks to your name.
R. Your right hand saves me, O Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Because of your kindness and your truth,
you have made great above all things
your name and your promise.
When I called, you answered me;
you built up strength within me.
R. Your right hand saves me, O Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Your right hand saves me.
The LORD will complete what he has done for me;
your kindness, O LORD, endures forever;
forsake not the work of your hands.
R. Your right hand saves me, O Lord.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia See Jn 16:7, 13
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I will send to you the Spirit of truth, says the Lord;
he will guide you to all truth.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel Jn 16:5-11
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Now I am going to the one who sent me,
and not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’
But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts.
But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go.
For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.
But if I go, I will send him to you.
And when he comes he will convict the world
in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation:
sin, because they do not believe in me;
righteousness, because I am going to the Father
and you will no longer see me;
condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”
The post Jesus’ Astounding Words About The Holy Spirit, Sixth Tuesday of Easter, May 7, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
May 06, 2024Testimony Together with the Holy Spirit, Sixth Monday of Easter, May 6, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter
May 6, 2024
Acts 16:11-15, Ps 149, Jn 15:26-16:4

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.6.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today Jesus continues to teach us, in the continuation of his Last Supper Discourse in John 15, the means by which we will remain in him as branches on the vine and remain in his and the Father’s love by keeping his commandment to love others as he has loved us, to the point of laying down our life for them. On Saturday he told us that we would be persecuted and hated by all. In today’s Gospel, he says that we will be expelled from houses of worship and that people will kill us thinking that they’re doing a divine service. These will all be means to enhance our trust in him and lead to our bearing greater fruit. He says that he has told us all of this — on the eve of his Crucifixion, but which the Church looks back on now in the light of the Resurrection — so that “when their hour comes you may remember that I told you” and “not fall away” out of fear. In the midst of those challenging words, he does give us an extraordinary remedy: God the Holy Spirit. “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,” Jesus tells us, “he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.” We will not be orphans. We will be assisted by God himself to give a joint testimony of fidelity to Christ and enter into his faithful witness to the Father. This joint testimony, no matter the circumstances, is the heart of the Christian life.
In the first reading, we see that witness taking place for the first time in Europe, as Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke went to Philippi to proclaim the Gospel. On Saturday, we heard how the Holy Spirit prevented them from going to Ephesus (the Province of Asia) or to Bithynia (north central Turkey today) so that they could promptly respond to the dream whereby a European from Macedonia was begging them to come to share the Gospel. Having arrived, Paul and his companions went where the Jews would normally assemble on the Sabbath when there was no Synagogue, by the river. Even though obviously none of these evangelists had been with Jesus physically “from the beginning” of his public ministry, unlike those in the Upper Room on Holy Thursday, they had been with him in a far more meaningful way, with him, the Word, from before the foundation of the world. He had them in mind from before the foundation of the world to receive Him within and to bring Him to the ends of the earth. And one of the Holy Spirit’s tasks was to remind them of everything Jesus had taught. Jesus, similarly, has had each of us in mind from that same beginning and the same Holy Spirit has been sent to us.
There’s a beautiful and theologically very rich expression that St. Luke uses to describe Lydia who had come to the river that day from Thyatira. St. Luke tells us that she was a dealer in purple cloth, which meant she was very wealthy, because purple was pretty much restricted to the imperial family because the necessary purple dye was so costly to obtain; it had to be harvested one drop at a time from a toxic Aegean shellfish. Therefore, in Christianity, she would have had a lot to “lose” insofar as Christians were so generous in sacrificing what they had for the needs of the brothers and sisters. St. Luke tells us that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.” Not her ears, but her heart. It means she was interiorizing within the center of her personality what Paul was saying, that she was loving, willing and embracing what she was coming to know. The same Holy Spirit who was testifying with and through Paul and his companions was opening up her heart at the same time so that she would be able to receive the seed of the word on good soil and bear much fruit. Lydia heard with great attentiveness of heart, literally her heart was “leaning” toward the word ready to move. That’s the way we should be listening to this morning’s readings as well. That’s the way we should be listening to the Lord in prayer. That’s the way we should be listening to the Pope and the Bishops exercising the Magisterium, following in the footsteps of St. Paul (and St. Peter).
There’s a beautiful way this scene ends that shows the greatness of her attentiveness. She who was so hospitable to the Word of God immediately grasped the way Christians are always supposed to be hospitable to those who announce the Word, and how those who announce the Word also must have attentive hearts. So after she and her whole household were baptized — immediately, we presume, there at the river, much like the faith of the Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip the Deacon had baptized earlier in the Acts of the Apostles — she said to St. Paul and his companions, “If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my home.” Lydia’s home became the first Church in Europe, where she welcomed not only Paul, Timothy, Silas and Luke, but Christ who sent them, and the Father who had sent Christ. And St. Paul received this invitation as readily as Lydia had received the Word. The Word wasn’t just something that Lydia had listened to and accepted as an intellectual truth claim; it was something that changed her life, changed her home, changed everything. And she began to give witness to Christian hospitality together with the Holy Spirit immediately.
Today at Mass, as we prepare to enter into the Paschal Mystery, we recall that Jesus said all of the words in today’s Gospel to us during the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed. Little did the apostles know — despite all that Jesus had done to try to get them ready for his hour — that within hours these words would be getting fulfilled. At that moment, they didn’t really remember what he had told them because they had not been listening with adequately open and receptive hearts. But they’re all interceding for us so that we will learn from their mistakes and fully embrace what Jesus is saying. As he gives us his Body and Blood, the full manifestation of his love, the sign of his triumph even over the crucifixion and death, he summons us boldly to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to give the same witness. God so loved the world, St. John tells us, that he gave his only Son. And Jesus so loves the world that he gives us the Holy Spirit so that we might be able to go out into the world, in communion with him and his sacrificial love, and give our bodies, our souls, our homes, our lives to the work of salvation. If today you hear the Lord’s voice, harden not your hearts, but receive God’s help to open your hearts to it with full attention! Today we say to the Lord, “If you consider us believers, come and stay within us!”

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ACTS 16:11-15
We set sail from Troas, making a straight run for Samothrace,
and on the next day to Neapolis, and from there to Philippi,
a leading city in that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony.
We spent some time in that city.
On the sabbath we went outside the city gate along the river
where we thought there would be a place of prayer.
We sat and spoke with the women who had gathered there.
One of them, a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth,
from the city of Thyatira, a worshiper of God, listened,
and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention
to what Paul was saying.
After she and her household had been baptized,
she offered us an invitation,
“If you consider me a believer in the Lord,
come and stay at my home,” and she prevailed on us.
Responsorial Psalm PS 149:1B-2, 3-4, 5-6A AND 9B
R. (see 4a) The Lord takes delight in his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Sing to the LORD a new song
of praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel be glad in their maker,
let the children of Zion rejoice in their king.
R. The Lord takes delight in his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Let them praise his name in the festive dance,
let them sing praise to him with timbrel and harp.
For the LORD loves his people,
and he adorns the lowly with victory.
R. The Lord takes delight in his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Let the faithful exult in glory;
let them sing for joy upon their couches.
Let the high praises of God be in their throats.
This is the glory of all his faithful. Alleluia.
R. The Lord takes delight in his people.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia JN 15:26B, 27A
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Spirit of truth will testify to me, says the Lord,
and you also will testify.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel JN 15:26—16:4A
Jesus said to his disciples:
“When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father,
the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,
he will testify to me.
And you also testify,
because you have been with me from the beginning.
“I have told you this so that you may not fall away.
They will expel you from the synagogues;
in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you
will think he is offering worship to God.
They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me.
I have told you this so that when their hour comes
you may remember that I told you.”
The post Testimony Together with the Holy Spirit, Sixth Monday of Easter, May 6, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
May 05, 2024The Way the Love of God Was Revealed To Us, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 5, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
May 5, 2024
Acts 10:25-26.34-35.44-48, Ps 98, 1 Jn 4:7-10, Jn 15:9-17
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.5.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
In the midst of the ongoing traumas, controversies and difficulties that have dramatically disrupted campus life, as students go through the various highs and lows associated with final exams, papers, moving out and transitioning to the summer or to life after Columbia, the Lord wants to help us focus on the most important constant in human life. Last week, you recall, Jesus gave us the image of the Vine and the Branches and told us that if we remain in him and he in us then he promised us we would bear great fruit. Today’s words come right after that image. Having spoken about what we might call the ontological communion that’s meant to exist between us and Jesus and in Jesus with others, Jesus turns to the moral communion. I think they constitute the most important words in the history of the world.
These words are important whenever anyone says them, but the fact that God himself said them when he did, in the way that he did, and then put them into his own body language, makes them the most life-changing phrase ever: “I love you,” he tells us. We need to stop and ponder the reality of those words. On the night he would be betrayed by Judas and abandoned by the others, rather than thinking about the enormous physical sufferings he would endure within hours, he prioritized telling the apostles, and through them, us, “I love you.” But then Jesus puts those words into a context that ought to astound us even more: “Just as the Father loves me, I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does; he eternally loves Jesus with all he is, giving him everything except what it means to be Father. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us, and is sent down upon us like he came down upon Cornelius and his household in today’s first reading to unite us to God and to all the other members of Jesus’ Mystical Body. Since as St. John tells us in the epistle, “God is love,” God wishes to bring us into his interpersonal, Trinitarian communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.
We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I’ve seen it several times over the course of my priesthood when children in foster care get adopted. I saw it regularly when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double windsor knot perfect, with every strand of hair shampooed and combed or gelled in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. What was going on was crystal clear: they had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. I’ve seen similar quasi-miraculous transformations many times here on campus during my first two years. If this is what can happen with a crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when we realize that God loves us with an infinite, unchanging love? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in a young person’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?” Jesus wants us to experience that life-changing truth.
In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” (Redemptor Hominis, 10) If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, in chaste romances and in marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: since we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, if we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves.
The future John Paul II as a young priest was a university chaplain at St. Florian’s Church in Krakow. There he saw that many young people, made by God who is love, in love and for love, often lacked love, especially because of the traumas of the Second World War in which so many people in Poland were killed and the Nazi and then the Communist ideologies, neither of which had room for real love because it got in the way of totalitarian control. As a result they often sought love not where it could truly be found, but in various counterfeits, like utilitarian or mutually hedonistic relationships, in momentary feelings, or in different types of worldly ambitions. Father Karol Wojtyla sought in his work to try to introduce Christ’s love into the human experience of seeking love, because he knew that their hearts would be restless, as St. Augustine taught, until they rest in God and his enduring love. Students today can make similar mistakes. Many have been love-deprived in one way or another and they seek the love of a father, or a mother, the love of a brother, sister, or friends in relationships that aren’t really ordered to true love, to permanent commitment, and therefore will never be able to deliver. Because they haven’t experienced being loved at the depth of their being, they can struggle with self-esteem issues and as a result are prone to seeking their meaning in fame, money, influence, or a prestigious degree, and are vulnerable to being taken advantage of by people instrumentalizing them for their own pleasures and aims.
That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him. He wanted that to be the foundation of the life of the first disciples and apostles, so that they would know of the love of God even after their abandoning him, so that after his resurrection, they might learn how to receive it and live it. He wants us to know it, too. St. John, who was with Jesus that night, was transformed by his words. He not only wrote them down for all of us in the Gospel that bears his name, but regularly spoke of them to the next generation of the disciples. “In this way the love of God was revealed to us,” he wrote to the first Christians, “God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” Jesus is the incarnation of the love of God for each of us. He loved me, he loved you, and as St. Paul said, he gave his life up not just for the human race but for “me.”
But Jesus doesn’t stop there with the proclamation of his love in the Upper Room and on Calvary. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we can think we’re worthy of it, or because we know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we may not be capable of doing so faithfully. Love is meant to change us, to lift us up, and sometimes we just don’t want to cooperate with that resurrection. Like St. Peter after the Lord showed his love for him in his first miraculous catch of fish, we can cry out, not, “Thank you, Jesus. I love you, too!,” but “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” That’s why Jesus gives us the imperative to abide in his love, to rest in it, to let it change us and become the defining characteristic of our life. We don’t have to earn his love, we just need to accept it, marinate ourselves in it, and respond to it.
That response is the third step in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells us clearly how to remain in his love. “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love.” We can’t remain in his love if we break the commandments, not because he’ll pull his love away from us — his love is everlasting and he’ll never retract it — but because the commandments all train how love to live in the love of God and in the love of neighbor. We can see this readily by looking at the Decalogue. We can’t love God if we’re worshipping other gods or giving into superstitions, if we’re abusing his holy name, if we’re blowing him off on the Lord’s Day. We can’t be loving him in those whom he loves if we’re dishonoring the parents he gave us, hating or killing those he created, taking advantage of them out of lust, stealing from the goods he gave them, lying to them, or getting envious over the human relationships or material goods with which he has blessed them. All the law and the prophets, Jesus tells us, hang on the two-fold commandment of loving God and neighbor and that’s why we can’t remain in his love if we’re violating the love that is contained in the commandments God has given us. The commandments train us how to love, and, therefore, how to remain in God, since God is love. Jesus adds here that he’s not asking of us anything he himself hasn’t done. He says, “Just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.” Love, as Pope Benedict was accustomed to say, is idem velle, idem nolle, Latin for willing and rejecting the same things as the Beloved. If we love God, we’re going to love what he loves. Jesus, in loving the Father, loved the Father’s will. Likewise, if we truly love the Lord and remain in his love, we’ll love what he loves and seek to do what he out of love wills for us and others.
But Jesus out of love for us makes it even simpler for us to know how to remain in his love. This is the fourth step in the Gospel. He summarizes all commandments into one, which he calls a “new” commandment and even “my” commandment. “This is my commandment,” he states, “love one another as I have loved you.” And he makes clear how he loves us and what real love leads to and is: It culminates in a total gift of ourselves for those whom we love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” and then calls us his friends because he has revealed to us everything he heard from his Father. Jesus wants us to help us in turn to learn how to love one another to the point of giving of our lives for them, as he gave his life for us. While few of us will be required to die for others, when we’re willing to do so, then we’re much more willing to make the types of smaller sacrifices that are necessary for love to remain and grow: forgiving others, being patient with them, sacrificing some of our desires to help them fulfill their own, and so on. St. John makes that very practical in the second reading when he tells the first Christians, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God for God is love.” We have to love others to abide in God’s love, to know God and the love he gives.
And so we see in these words of Jesus the whole pattern of the Christian life, which begins with grace, received in faith, overflowing in love. It begins, as St. John says in the second reading, not with our love but with God’s love, who sent his Son to lay down his life for us. But then that love transforms us so that we are strengthened from within to love by that same standard. Jesus says, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and he wants to help us be able to say, to each other and to others, “Just as Jesus loves me, so I love you,” treating others, like he treats us, as friends, with a willingness to sacrifice for them, to reveal to them what we have heard from God, to choose them whom God has chosen and to seek to bear fruit with them to eternal life.
And the fruit of this entire experience of being loved by God and loving according to God’s measure is true Christian happiness. Jesus, the happiest person who ever lived, says in today’s Gospel, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” The fruit of love is joy. We experience joy when we know how loved we are by God. We experience joy when we remain peacefully in that love without struggle. We experience joy when we share the love we have received with others and help them in turn learn the joy of being loved. We experience that joy even in great sacrifice made out of love for others, like we see in the stories of martyrs across the centuries, who were honored and willing to give their lives for the One who had given his life for theirs, for the ones for whom he had given his life, and out of witness to the love of God that conquers even death. Pope Francis has said repeatedly that the true mark of a Christian is joy and that joy is a fruit of knowing we’re loved by God, remaining in that love, and loving others like Christ loves, and remaining in those bonds of love, too.
The Lord knows that the standard of love to which he calls us is not easy. But every day at the altar he provides the means. No one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, he says, and every day he gives us access to that very love and life. He says we are his friends if we do what he commands us and on the same night he gave us the words of today’s Gospel, he commanded us, “Do this in memory of me.” Here we do. In the Holy Eucharist, we receive the greatest act of love that the world has ever known, Jesus’ own self-giving love from the Upper Room and Calvary in expiation for our sins, what Jesus called “the Sacrament of Love” in his appearances to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque 350 years ago. It is in this love, given to us each day on the altar, that we become capable of loving each other with the love of Christ. It is here that we will be equipped to bring that love outward to campus at a time in which it very much needs it. There is indeed no greater love than the love we are about to receive. If, as St. John Paul II declared, man cannot live without love, if his life will remain incomprehensible and senseless if he doesn’t encounter love, experience it, make it his own and intimately share in it, then here Christ gives us that remedy. Every time we receive the Eucharist, Jesus says to us, “Just as the Father loves me, I love you right now as I give my Body and Blood, my whole life, for you. You are my friend. You are precious to me. Remain in my love by abiding in my Eucharistic presence. And learn from me from the inside how to love in this greatest way of all, by giving your body and blood out of love for others and for me. This is the way you will be filled with my joy in this world and forever.” Amen.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ACTS 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48
When Peter entered, Cornelius met him
and, falling at his feet, paid him homage.
Peter, however, raised him up, saying,
“Get up. I myself am also a human being.”
Then Peter proceeded to speak and said,
“In truth, I see that God shows no partiality.
Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly
is acceptable to him.”While Peter was still speaking these things,
the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.
The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter
were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit
should have been poured out on the Gentiles also,
for they could hear them speaking in tongues and glorifying God.
Then Peter responded,
“Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people,
who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”
He ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
Responsorial Psalm PS 98:1, 2-3, 3-4
R. (cf. 2b) The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done wondrous deeds;
His right hand has won victory for him,
his holy arm.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
The LORD has made his salvation known:
in the sight of the nations he has revealed his justice.
He has remembered his kindness and his faithfulness
toward the house of Israel.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation by our God.
Sing joyfully to the LORD, all you lands;
break into song; sing praise.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2 1 JN 4:7-10
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
Alleluia JN 14:23
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, says the Lord,
and my Father will love him and we will come to him.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel JN 15:9-17
Jesus said to his disciples:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you
and your joy might be complete.
This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.”
The post The Way the Love of God Was Revealed To Us, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 5, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
29 min
May 05, 2024Remaining in Jesus’ Love, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 5, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
May 5, 2024
Acts 10:25-26.34-35.44-48, Ps 98, 1 Jn 4:7-10, Jn 15:9-17

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.5.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today in the Gospel Jesus says what I believe are the most important words in the history of the world. These words are important whenever anyone says them, but the fact that God himself said them in the way that he said them, and then put them into his own body language, makes them the most life-changing phrase ever: “I love you,” he tells us. We need to stop and ponder the reality of those words! “I love you.” But then Jesus puts them into a context that ought to astound us: “Just as the Father loves me, I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. He eternally loves Jesus with all he is, giving him everything except what it means to be Father. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us, and is sent down upon us like he came down upon Cornelius and his household in today’s first reading. Since as St. John tells us in the epistle, “God is love,” God wishes to bring us into his interpersonal, Trinitarian communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.
We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a Mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double windsor knot perfect, with every strand of hair shampooed and combed or gelled in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. But what was going on was crystal clear: they had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. If this is what can happen with a teenage crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when we realize that God loves us with an infinite, unchanging love? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in a young person’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?”
In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” (Redemptor Hominis, 10) If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: since we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, if we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves. That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him.
But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we may not think we’re worthy of it, because we know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we may not be capable of it. Love is meant to change us, to lift us up, and sometimes we don’t want to cooperate with that resurrection. Like St. Peter after the Lord showed his love for him in his first miraculous catch of fish, we can cry out, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” That’s why Jesus gives us the imperative to abide in his love, to rest in it, to let it change us and become the defining characteristic of our life.
But Jesus never gives us a task without providing the means. He tells us clearly how to remain in his love. “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love.” We can’t remain in his love if we break the commandments, not because he’ll pull his love away from us — his love is everlasting and he’ll never retract it — but because the commandments all train how love to live in the love of God and in the love of neighbor. We can’t love God if we’re worshipping other gods or giving into superstitions, if we’re abusing his holy name, if we’re blowing him off on the Lord’s Day. We can’t be loving him in those whom he loves if we’re dishonoring the parents he gave us, hating or killing those he created, taking advantage of them out of lust, stealing from the goods he gave them, lying to them, or getting envious over the human relationships or material goods with which he has blessed them. All the law and the prophets, Jesus tells us, hang on the two-fold commandment of loving God and neighbor and that’s why we can’t remain in his love if we’re violating the love that is contained in the commandments God has given us. The commandments train us how to love, and, therefore, how to remain in the love of God, since God is love. Jesus adds here that he’s not asking of us anything he himself hasn’t done. He says, “Just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.” Love, as Pope Benedict was accustomed to say, is idem velle, idem nolle, willing and rejecting the same things as the Beloved. If we love God, we’re going to love what he loves. Jesus, in loving the Father, loved the Father’s will. Likewise, if we truly love the Lord and remain in his love, we’ll love what he loves and seek to do what he out of love wills for us and others.
But even after telling us how to remain in his love through keeping the commandments, he makes everything simpler still, telling us: “This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you.” And he makes clear how he loves us and what real love leads to and is: It culminates in a total gift of ourselves for those whom we love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus wants us to love one another to the point of giving of our lives for them, as he gave his life for us. While few of us will be required to die for others, when we’re willing to do so, then we’re much more willing to make the types of smaller sacrifices that are necessary for love to remain and grow: forgiving others, being patient with them, sacrificing some of our desires to help them fulfill their own, and so on. As Jesus says that the greatest love is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, he immediately tells us, “You are my friends.” He calls us friends, he regards us as friends, because he has revealed to us everything he has heard from God the Father and has chosen and appointed us to go and bear fruit that will remain. And the way we reciprocate his love of friendship, is, he says, by doing what he commands, and laying down our life for him, our Friend, and for his friends.
And so we see in these words of Jesus the whole pattern of the Christian life, which begins with grace, received in faith, overflowing in love. It begins, as St. John says in the second reading, not with our love but with God’s love, who sent his Son to lay down his life for us. But then that love transforms us so that we are strengthened from within to love by that same standard. Jesus says, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and he wants to help us to say, “Just as Jesus loves me, so I love you,” treating others as friends with a willingness to sacrifice for them, to reveal to them what we have heard from God, to choose them whom God has chosen and to seek to bear fruit with them to eternal life.
And the fruit of this entire experience of being loved by God and loving according to God’s measure is true Christian happiness. Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” The fruit of love is joy. We experience joy when we know how loved we are by God. We experience joy when we remain peacefully in that love without struggle. We experience joy when we share the love we have received with others and help them in turn learn the joy of being loved. We experience that joy even in great sacrifice made out of love for others, like we see in the stories of martyrs across the centuries, who were honored and willing to give their lives for the One who had given his life for theirs, for the ones for whom he had given his life, and out of witness to the love of God that conquers even death.
The Lord knows that the standard of love to which he calls us is not easy. But every day at the altar he provides the means. No one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, and every day he gives us access to that very love and life. He says we are his friends if we do what he commands us and on the same night he gave us the words of today’s Gospel, he told us, “Do this in memory of me.” Here we do what he commands. In the Holy Eucharist, we receive the greatest act of love that the world has ever known, Jesus’ own self-giving love from the Upper Room and Calvary in expiation for our sins, what Jesus called “the Sacrament of Love” in his appearances to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque 350 years ago. It is in this love, given to us each day on the altar, that we become capable of loving each other with the love of Christ. There is no greater love than the love we are about to receive. Let us abide in that love, and from the inside, learn from Jesus how to love in this greater way, as missionaries of this charity, by giving our body and blood out of love for him and for others.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ACTS 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48
When Peter entered, Cornelius met him
and, falling at his feet, paid him homage.
Peter, however, raised him up, saying,
“Get up. I myself am also a human being.”
Then Peter proceeded to speak and said,
“In truth, I see that God shows no partiality.
Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly
is acceptable to him.”While Peter was still speaking these things,
the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.
The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter
were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit
should have been poured out on the Gentiles also,
for they could hear them speaking in tongues and glorifying God.
Then Peter responded,
“Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people,
who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”
He ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
Responsorial Psalm PS 98:1, 2-3, 3-4
R. (cf. 2b) The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done wondrous deeds;
His right hand has won victory for him,
his holy arm.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
The LORD has made his salvation known:
in the sight of the nations he has revealed his justice.
He has remembered his kindness and his faithfulness
toward the house of Israel.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation by our God.
Sing joyfully to the LORD, all you lands;
break into song; sing praise.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2 1 JN 4:7-10
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
Alleluia JN 14:23
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, says the Lord,
and my Father will love him and we will come to him.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel JN 15:9-17
Jesus said to his disciples:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you
and your joy might be complete.
This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.”
The post Remaining in Jesus’ Love, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 5, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
May 04, 2024The Sometimes Surprising Guidance of the Holy Spirit, Fifth Saturday of Easter, May 4, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Joseph’s Men’s Retreat
Malvern Retreat House, Malvern, Pennsylvania
Fifth Saturday of Easter
Votive Mass of Our Lady of the Cenacle
May 4, 2024
Acts 16:1-10, Ps 100, Jn 15:18-21

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
Today in the first reading we come to one of the truly pivotal events in the history of the spread of the Gospel, but it’s something that may initially surprise us. St. Luke tells us in Acts that Paul, Silas and Timothy traveled through Phrygia and Galatia wanting to go spread the Gospel in the “province of Asia” around Ephesus, but they were “prevented by the Holy Spirit.” A little later they tried to go into Bithynia, a north central province of present-day Turkey around Ankara, “but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.”
They were trying to spread the Gospel, to plant the seeds of faith, something that they and we both should anticipate that the Holy Spirit would have facilitated and blessed. But he did the exact opposite. He closed the doors. Why he did this appears a little later. After they have arrived in Troas, Paul had a dream of a Macedonian standing before him imploring, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” The following morning the three sought passage there at once, concluding that God had called them to proclaim the Gospel to them as well. Macedonia was in Europe, at the very north of Greece. The Holy Spirit shut the doors to Ephesus and to Bithynia precisely so that they could take the Gospel sooner to Europe, where the seeds of the Gospel would flourish. (Other Christians would continue the expansion into the province of Asia and into Bithynia, and Paul himself would eventually get to Ephesus).
There’s a very important spiritual lesson here for all of us. Often when we’re doing good things for the Lord, we can presume that God wants what we want, and when he seems to slam a door in our face, we wonder why he treats us that way. But often he forcefully closes one door so that we will notice that he wants us to walk through another. Docility to the Holy Spirit means that we’re docile even when he prevents us from doing something good for God so that he can have us do something else that will advance his kingdom in the way he knows is more needed. We lose a job in which we were doing a lot of good and can’t figure out why, until much later we see with God’s help that he wanted us to transfer to something else to build his kingdom. One young woman says no to an smitten young man’s advances, and he can’t see why, until God later introduces him later to the woman he wanted to be the man’s wife and only then does it make sense. In my own life, I had tried to apply to become a seminarian for my home Archdiocese of Boston, but the vocation director wouldn’t even give me an application. It seemed like such a contradiction to a clear sense of priestly calling, but if I had been accepted to the Archdiocese, then I would have never come to the Diocese of Fall River, likely never have received the type of excellent seminary formation with which I was blessed in Rome, never had a chance to be able to help the Archdiocese as an outsider during the priestly sexual abuse scandals and so many other things. Likewise over the course of my priesthood, there have been many times that the Holy Spirit said no to various assignments that I had been asked for from seminaries, universities, and other apostolates, but if any one of those had happened, I would almost certainly not have been asked to go to New York to serve at the United Nations with the privilege to participate in many life-giving apostolates, or to become a university chaplain at Columbia, which would have made impossible my participation in the Eucharistic pilgrimages that will begin two weeks from today. Often, it’s through the seeming contradictions and even through the sufferings we experience, rather than foreseeable and obvious apostolic opportunities, that God can reach people he never otherwise would have reached. We just never know what the Holy Spirit has in mind. Our task is to accept everything, whether seemingly adverse or propitious, with docility and faithfully allow him who blows where he wills to move us wherever he wants us.
We see a tremendous illustration of this in Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, taken from the end of the 15th chapter of St. John, which we’ve been pondering all week at daily Mass. It seems at first glance a very surprising conclusion. Jesus began the chapter with the image of the Vine and the Branches, promising that if we abide in him and he in us we will bear much fruit. Then he goes on to tell us how much he loves us — just as much as the Father loves him. He commands us to remain in that love by keeping his commandments, especially his command to love others in the same self-sacrificial way he has loved us. He calls us friends and informs us that he has revealed to us everything he heard from the Father. He discloses that he has chosen us — out of all the rest — and appointed us together with him to bear fruit. He tells uss that whatever we ask the Father in his name the Father will hear. And he states that he has told us all of this so that his own joy — the joy of the happiest person who has ever lived — will be in us and our joy fulfilled.
Yet, after all of these tremendously consoling revelations focused on abiding in God and his love, he begins to speak extensively about hatred. He tells us today that the world will hate us and persecute us just like it hated and persecuted him. This seems like such a non-sequitur, but it’s not. Jesus revealed everything ahead of time so that even when we suffer on account of his name, when we experience the ferocity of others’ opposition to him, to his word, to the Father, we should never forget that we’re still attached to him on the Vine, that he’s still abiding in us, that he still loves us as the Father loves him, that we’re still his friends, that we’re still chosen, and that we’re abiding in his love as we lay down our lives in love and prayer for those who are persecuting and hating us and making us their enemies. It’s obviously tempting for us to think the opposite. When we’re doing the Lord’s work, we can sometimes figure that God’s going to make everything turn to gold. But that gold comes only after the crucible. And the Holy Spirit sometimes allows us to suffer, as he did the martyrs, because he knows that the way we’ll proclaim the Gospel in suffering may bring far more people to Christ and his love, far more people to attach themselves as branches to the Vine, far more people chosen and appointed by God to bear fruit, than if we proclaimed the Gospel normally without suffering and persecution.
This all comes to the head in the Eucharistic Revival we are now living. It’s a shame that we need a Eucharistic Revival. We could wish that people would be faithful, that 100 percent of people prioritized the Lord, believed in his Real Presence, came to Mass, participated regularly in adoration, vigorously promoted priestly vocations to give us Jesus, and lived Eucharistic charity and apostolate. But if all of that were true, then we would not be in a situation now in which each of us would have to step up to the plate. We would lack the opportunity to give testimony. We perhaps might not grow anywhere as much in faith if others were all doing their jobs than we will if we respond to the graces of the moment. But the Holy Spirit has permitted it so that he would be able to renew us in tongues of fire, in hearts of fire, and send us out.
On this Saturday, as we celebrate the special votive Mass of Our Lady of the Cenacle, we see the way the Holy Spirit worked in her life. After the Annunciation, after by the power of the Holy Spirit she had conceived the Son of the Most High and son of David within, she might have anticipated that her life ahead would be one full of obvious blessings. But she soon recognized that her Son would be a sign of contradiction. God himself came to his own and his own did not accept him. There was no room for him in the inn. Simeon said Mary’s own heart would be pierced. The Holy Family had to flee to Egypt when Herod was trying to assassinate Jesus. Those of Nazareth would rise up to try to murder him by throwing him off a precipice after an amazing homily to which they nevertheless took offense. Other relatives would think Jesus out of his mind. The mobs would choose Barabbas over him. The King would be murdered by his subjects, the Savior by those he was rescuing, the Good Shepherd torn to death by his sheep. But she never ran away from the Holy Spirit’s shadow. She kept saying a fiat to whatever the Holy Spirit asked. And she taught the Church in the Cenacle to learn how to do the same as they prayed for the Holy Spirit’s outpouring on Pentecost. Today she praying for us and with us to do the same. To see all of the seeming contradictions and struggles we are having in living and sharing the faith as an opportunity to open ourselves up to how the Holy Spirit wants us to be ready for another mission, for people who will say, “Come over here and help us.” On a retreat, we get ready to respond promptly and wholeheartedly to that mission.
We recall that Jesus said the words of today’s Gospel on Holy Thursday as he was preparing to receive on Calvary all the hatred and persecution that the world could muster, so that when it happened, our hearts wouldn’t be troubled or afraid. It’s from the same Upper Room where he gave us his Body and Blood, the same Upper Room where Mary prepared Jesus’ first disciples for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that Jesus sends the Holy Spirit upon us in the Perpetual Pentecost that is the Mass. It’s here that the Holy Spirit constantly comes to help us open the door to Christ and then follow Christ the way out to wherever the Holy Spirit leads, even into hatred and persecution and suffering, conscious that even in the midst of that we can be glorifying the Lord with our life.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Acts 16:1-10
Paul reached also Derbe and Lystra
where there was a disciple named Timothy,
the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer,
but his father was a Greek.
The brothers in Lystra and Iconium spoke highly of him,
and Paul wanted him to come along with him.
On account of the Jews of that region, Paul had him circumcised,
for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
As they traveled from city to city,
they handed on to the people for observance the decisions
reached by the Apostles and presbyters in Jerusalem.
Day after day the churches grew stronger in faith
and increased in number.They traveled through the Phrygian and Galatian territory
because they had been prevented by the Holy Spirit
from preaching the message in the province of Asia.
When they came to Mysia, they tried to go on into Bithynia,
but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them,
so they crossed through Mysia and came down to Troas.
During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”
When he had seen the vision,
we sought passage to Macedonia at once,
concluding that God had called us to proclaim the Good News to them.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 100:1b-2, 3, 5
R. (2a) Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Sing joyfully to the LORD, all you lands;
serve the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful song.
R. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Know that the LORD is God;
he made us, his we are;
his people, the flock he tends.
R. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
The LORD is good:
his kindness endures forever,
and his faithfulness, to all generations.
R. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia
Col 3:1
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
If then you were raised with Christ,
seek what is above,
where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 15:18-21
Jesus said to his disciples:
“If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.
If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.
Remember the word I spoke to you,
‘No slave is greater than his master.’
If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.
If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.
And they will do all these things to you on account of my name,
because they do not know the one who sent me.”
The post The Sometimes Surprising Guidance of the Holy Spirit, Fifth Saturday of Easter, May 4, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 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.