Catholic Preaching

Catholic Preaching

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Catholic Preaching episodes

  • First Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 17, 2024

    Fr. Roger J. Landry

    Conversations with Consequences Podcast
    Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
    February 17, 2024

     

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

    https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.17.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

     

    The following text guided the homily: 

    • This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the first Sunday of Lent, as we will journey with Jesus into the desert.
    • Most people have little desire to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a tourist visit. Even in the midst of a rather frigid and snowy February in the northeast, few of us are dreaming about the Sahara, Arabian or Gobi deserts. But at a spiritual level, we should always have a great love for the desert, because the desert is what helps us to understand the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent, in which we join and imitate Jesus in the desert and ponder the fruits of what he learned and experienced there upon his return. Every Lent, the same Holy Spirit whom we read in this Sunday’s Gospel drove Jesus into the desert wants to drive us into the desert with him. Lent is meant to help us recapitulate Christ’s 40 days away from everything so that we, apart from every distraction, can focus on our relationship with God and others and on who we are — and, with Christ’s help, can confront and overcome the way that the devil seeks to distort those relations and that image.
    • To go into the desert is increasingly difficult for people today. We’re so connected that if we are out of cell phone range we can easily feel totally lost. While the Lord is not calling us all physically to go to the sands of the Mojave, he is calling us to the state of the desert, removing ourselves from distractions, from our screens and devices, newspapers and magazines, and the various things that may be fine in themselves but crowd our lives with noise so that we can’t hear God and with clutter so that we can’t see God. The first temptation we face in Lent is to refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that our Lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up booze and sweets. We need silence. We need prayer. As Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah from Guinea wrote in his recent book The Power of Silence, “God is silence, and the devil is noisy. … God’s first language is silence.… In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God. [God] waits for our silence to reveal Himself. Regaining the sense of silence is therefore a priority, an urgent necessity. … The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and toward others.” The first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ’s voice from the desert saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31).
    • The next lesson we need to grasp is what is supposed to be the fruit of that time in the desert. What does the Holy Spirit who drives us to this Lenten desert experience want to help us to achieve? Jesus shares this lesson with us as soon as he finished that first 40-day retreat. He returned saying, “Repent and believe in the good news.” These are the words he shared with us earlier this week, as we were marked with ashes on Wednesday. To repent — what metanoia means in Greek — is to revolutionize the way we look at things, at the world, at ourselves, at others, so that we might put on the way Christ looks at things. It means to turn one’s thoughts around, or better right side up. It’s as if we’ve been going in one direction and Jesus tells us, “Stop, turn around and go in this new direction.” Jesus is not calling us to a minor course correction, but to something far closer to a 180-degree turn. He wants us to examine all those parts of our life that are not in alignment with him and convert in such a way that we begin to turn with him full-time (which is what con-vertere means). That’s what he hopes to accomplish in us by our 40-days with him in prayer and silence.
    • When we look at the way the devil tried to tempt Jesus in the desert, we see the three fundamental ways he seeks to get human beings out of spiritual alignment. Yet we also learn from Christ how to come back into alignment, which is what Jesus seeks to help us do each Lent.
    • As we see in the lengthier accounts in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke of Jesus’ temptations in the desert, which must have been related by Jesus himself since no one else was there, we see that one diabolical temptation was to try to get Jesus to disorder his relationship with God the Father. This happened when the devil tempted Jesus to throw himself off the parapet of the temple, presuming that God would save him by sending his angels to prevent his even dashing his foot against a stone. The devil seeks to tempt us to believe that God will prevent any harm to us or others whenever we do something risky and fatal. The devil wants to get us to get us to jump off various cliffs and then blame God for letting us suffer. He tempts us toward spiritual suicide. Jesus shows that the proper response is never to put the Lord our God to the test, but in fact to love him and throw ourselves into his arms rather than from dangerous precipices into sin.
    • The second temptation was to disorder our relationships with others. The devil promised that he would give Jesus rule over all the cities of the world, to be in control over everyone else, to have them serve him rather than he serve them, if only he would take the bargain of falling down before the devil in homage. Jesus resisted the temptation toward this type of diabolical control by quoting Scripture about worshipping and serving the Lord our God alone. The devil tries to tempt us, too, to distort our relationship with others, so that we will seek to exercise over them dominion, control and power. The antidote is to follow Jesus’ advice, to serve God and others made in God’s image and likeness, reverencing the Lord in them, striving to serve them with love rather than be served, to lay down our lives for them as Christ himself did.
    • The third fiendish temptation was to disorder our relationship within ourselves, using what God has given us egocentrically for our own purposes rather than for God and others. This is shown in the temptation the devil gave to Jesus to change stones into bread after forty days of hunger. How strong this temptation must have been for someone so famished! But Jesus replied that we live not on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. We’re supposed to use our talents not selfishly but for God and others, and ultimately for our true good, that the word of God may be done in us.
    • In response to these three fundamental temptations, Jesus not only shows us how to resist with the power of the Word of God but also as Divine Physician prescribes for us on Ash Wednesday the medicine we need when he speaks about the three traditional Lenten practices of prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Prayer helps us to order our relationship with God against the temptation of presumption. Almsgiving helps us to reorder our relationship properly with our others against the temptation of control and power. Fasting helps us to reorder ourselves within, making sure our body obeys a properly formed conscience, against the temptation to order everything to satisfying our pleasures. That’s why the three practices constitute a crucial part of our Lenten program, of living with Jesus in the desert and entering into his resistance to every temptation. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are not part of a spiritual multiple-choice test but are a three-drug cocktail we need to treat the illness of sin. Prayer strengthens our faith in God, fasting our hope toward the fulfillment of our physical and spiritual hungers, and almsgiving our love for others as Christ has loved us. They are at the root of our spiritual renewal.
    • This Lent, as the Spirit drives us into the desert with Jesus, Jesus, out of mercy, is not going to have us fast the entirety of our time. This Sunday he will feed us with the nourishment that satisfies hungry hearts, as he gives himself as the Word that fills our silence. The Mass is where our fasting, prayer and charity reach their zenith. In preparation for the Eucharist, we fast, at least an hour, so that we may hunger more and more for every word that comes from the Father’s mouth, and especially for the Word-made-flesh. In the Mass, we enter into the supreme form of prayer, Jesus’ own from the Last Supper and Calvary. And we not only receive Jesus’ greatest alms — his body, blood, soul and divinity — but are helped by him from the inside, to “do this” in memory of him, living truly Eucharistic lives by giving our body and blood, sweat, tears and heart in loving service to others. As we prepare to receive Jesus on this first Sunday of Lent, we ask him for the graces to live this 40-day calling us to “come with him apart from the crowds to a deserted place” in the most bold and holy way possible, so that we can experience the joy that comes from repentance and faith, and become signs with him to the whole world that this is the time of fulfillment and the kingdom of God is at hand.

      •  

      The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

      Gospel
      Mk 1:12-15
      The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,
      and he remained in the desert for forty days,
      tempted by Satan.
      He was among wild beasts,
      and the angels ministered to him.After John had been arrested,
      Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God:
      “This is the time of fulfillment.
      The kingdom of God is at hand.
      Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

      The post First Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 17, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

      9 min
    • The Fasting the Lord Wants, Friday After Ash Wednesday, February 16, 2024

      Father Roger J. Landry

      Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
      Friday after Ash Wednesday
      February 16, 2024
      Is 58:1-9, Ps 51, Mt 9:14-15

       

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

      https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.16.24_Homily_1.mp3

       

      The following points were attempted in the homily: 

      • In the readings from Sacred Scripture the Church gives us today, she wants us to ponder the true meaning of the fasting to which we’re called in Lent and in life. Two days ago on Ash Wednesday, Jesus told us that he wanted us to fast differently from all the rest who look gloomy, neglect their appearance and even put white paste on their face to make them appear more pallid so that everyone else may recognize they’re fasting. Jesus tells us that the type of fasting he wants of us is meant to be done for and in communion with the Father who relates to us in secret. He wants us to anoint our head and wash our face so that no one will be able to notice that we’re fasting. God wants from us a different type of fasting.
      • On the surface of today’s Gospel, Jesus implies that he was preaching but not practicing his teaching on fasting. His contemporaries perhaps had heard rumors that before his public ministry, Jesus had fasted for 40 days in the desert, but it didn’t appear that he and his followers were fasting at all now. That’s why the disciples of St. John the Baptist came to him to ask why his disciples weren’t fasting the way John, his followers and the Pharisees fasted. John, we know, was an heroic faster, living basically off of locusts and wild honey, and we can presume that many of his disciples were imitating his asceticism. Unlike the Pharisees who used to criticize Jesus to try to entrap him, John’s disciples seemed to have a genuine interest in the truth about what they needed to do and were shocked that Jesus and his disciples seemed to be lax when it came to this important spiritual discipline. Delicately and respectfully, they asked Jesus why his “disciples” were not fasting, as if Jesus himself, the Lamb pointed out by John, might be an exception to the discipline. Jesus, in response, gave us an important principle: “Can the sons of the wedding chamber [the loose translation “wedding guests” doesn’t do justice to the Greek, which I’ve translated literally above and can more loosely and accurately be translated groomsmen] mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them and then they will fast.”
      • In giving us this principle, Jesus highlighted two things:
        • First, he identified himself, basically, as the long awaited Bridegroom of the People Israel described by the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea and defines the apostles as the groomsmen awaiting the time when the Bridegroom would go to meet the Bride and the bridesmaids and take them for the wedding reception. It was not a time of mourning — one of the purposes of Jewish fasting is mourning over one’s sins — but of celebration. Jesus points out here that the fundamental attitude of those who associate with him needs to be joy, even celebration, at his presence. We Christians are sons of the wedding chamber heading toward the eternal wedding banquet and we need to be marked by the joy that always is associated by those in the wedding party.
        • Second, Jesus mentions that a time will come when the Bridegroom is violently ripped away from them — which happened in the Garden of Gethsemane and then on Calvary — and they would fast (and mourn) on that day like a bride would if her husband were kidnapped or killed.
        • The question we should ask as Christians, however, is why are we fasting today? Why do we fast throughout Lent? The Bridegroom who was ripped away for a time rose from the dead and returned 40 hours later. Before he ascended into heaven he assured us that he was going to be with us always until the end of time. The same Bridegroom is with us in the tabernacle who was with the disciples of John the Baptist and the sons of the wedding chamber in today’s Gospel. All of his redemptive work can be considered the renewal of a spousal covenant in his blood and that Covenant is eternal, very much alive in every instant. So why do we fast if the Bridegroom is still with us? The reason is because, even though he is with us, we’re not entirely with him. Parts of us are in communion with him and parts of us are not. The reason why we fast is to seek to bring those parts that are not united with him into union. Our fasting is to increase our hunger for what God hungers, until every cell of our body desires what he desires.
        • That’s the type of fasting God speaks about in the first reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. The Israelites were fasting but God wasn’t pleased because they thought that their going without food during daylight hours alone was somehow enough to get the Lord to listen to their prayers. God sent the Prophet Isaiah to sound his call to conversion so that they would grasp that the fasting the Lord desires is for them to hunger for what the Lord starves. “Cry out full-throated and unsparingly,” the Lord instructs Isaiah. “Tell my people of their wickedness. … They ask me to declare what is due them, pleased to gain access to God [by their bodily prayers]. Why do we fast, [they ask], and you do not see it? Why do we afflict ourselves and you take not of it?”
        • The Lord then responds to their questions. He says, because “on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits, [not mine], and drive all your laborers [rather than treat them with charity and mercy]. Your fast ends [not in communion and love but] in quarreling and fighting, striking with wicked claw,” an image that brings to mind the way bears would attack each other to death. “Would that today you might fast so as to make your voice heard on high!” God loves them and wants to answer their prayers but not when they think all they need to do is abstain from food while continuing with unjust and evil practices contrary to his will.
        • God then tells them for what he hungers, and instructs them about the type of fast that will get them to hunger for the same things. “This is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, … setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless, clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.” God wants us to be starving for what he starves, for us to release his sons and daughters imprisoned unjustly, breaking the yokes that bind them to slavery and servitude, feeding his hungry children, clothing the naked ones, and caring especially for our family members. Jesus himself would say that he had come to set the captives free. As he would say later, when he spoke about the Last Judgment (Mt 25:31-46), he personally identifies with all of those in such circumstances, reminding us we would be judged on how we responded to him in disguise when he was hungry, or naked, or imprisoned, or sick.
        • At the beginning of Lent, God wants to remind us that our fasting is meant to help us unite with those who fast everyday not by religious choice but by poverty and circumstances. It’s not only meant to help us to understand their lot better and engender compassion but also meant to help us to feed them. The food we don’t eat on a given day is not meant just to remain in our refrigerator for tomorrow but shared with those who have no food today. The purpose of our fasting is to unite with Christ those parts of us that are not yet hungering for what God hungers and through the Prophet Isaiah God tells us very clearly what he hungers for. And God wants us to be hungrier to care for the poor, needy and oppressed than someone who hadn’t eaten for days would be for a piece of bread.
        • Today as we come to Mass, Jesus, the Bridegroom, wants us to help us learn how to hunger ever more for what he hungers. He wants to teach us how to fast so that his desires may grow to become more and more our desires. He doesn’t want us to fast in a gloomy or mournful way, but in a joyous way, as sons of the wedding chamber, because to serve those in need should bring us joy. The Eucharistic fast we live is to hunger for this communion with the Lord, to desire him even more, and to desire and love him is to seek, desire and love what he seeks, desires and loves. So we come here with our longing, having fasted for him. In response, the Bridegroom welcomes us not merely as sons of the wedding chamber but as the Bride herself in the consummation of the nuptial union of love, as we — on the altar that is the marriage bed of the union between Christ and the Church — prepare to receive within the body and blood of the Bridegroom, becoming one flesh with him. This is what we ultimately are made to hunger for, and the more we hunger for Jesus, the more we will hunger for what he hungers, and the more readily we will go out to continue his mission of caring for a wounded world starving for him, often without knowing it.

          •  

          The readings for the Mass were: 

          Reading 1
          IS 58:1-9A
          Thus says the Lord GOD:
          Cry out full-throated and unsparingly,
          lift up your voice like a trumpet blast;
          Tell my people their wickedness,
          and the house of Jacob their sins.
          They seek me day after day,
          and desire to know my ways,
          Like a nation that has done what is just
          and not abandoned the law of their God;
          They ask me to declare what is due them,
          pleased to gain access to God.
          “Why do we fast, and you do not see it?
          afflict ourselves, and you take no note of it?”
          Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits,
          and drive all your laborers.
          Yes, your fast ends in quarreling and fighting,
          striking with wicked claw.
          Would that today you might fast
          so as to make your voice heard on high!
          Is this the manner of fasting I wish,
          of keeping a day of penance:
          That a man bow his head like a reed
          and lie in sackcloth and ashes?
          Do you call this a fast,
          a day acceptable to the LORD?
          This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
          releasing those bound unjustly,
          untying the thongs of the yoke;
          Setting free the oppressed,
          breaking every yoke;
          Sharing your bread with the hungry,
          sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
          Clothing the naked when you see them,
          and not turning your back on your own.
          Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
          and your wound shall quickly be healed;
          Your vindication shall go before you,
          and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
          Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,
          you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!
          Responsorial Psalm
          PS 51:3-4, 5-6AB, 18-19
          R. (19b) A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.
          Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
          in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
          Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
          and of my sin cleanse me.
          R. A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.
          For I acknowledge my offense,
          and my sin is before me always:
          “Against you only have I sinned,
          and done what is evil in your sight.”
          R. A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.
          For you are not pleased with sacrifices;
          should I offer a burnt offering, you would not accept it.
          My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit;
          a heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.
          R. A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.
          Gospel
          MT 9:14-15
          The disciples of John approached Jesus and said,
          “Why do we and the Pharisees fast much,
          but your disciples do not fast?”
          Jesus answered them, “Can the wedding guests mourn
          as long as the bridegroom is with them?
          The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
          and then they will fast.”

          The post The Fasting the Lord Wants, Friday After Ash Wednesday, February 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

          14 min
        • Choosing the Lenten Path of Life, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, February 15, 2024

          Father Roger J. Landry

          Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
          Thursday after Ash Wednesday
          Memorial of St. Claude la Colombière
          February 15, 2024
          Dt 30:15-20, Ps 1, Lk 9:22-25

           

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

          https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.15.24_Homily_1.mp3

           

          The following points were attempted in the homily: 

          • Throughout Lent, we focus first and foremost on God’s desire to save us and we recognize, as we heard yesterday with St. Paul, that “now is the day of salvation.” This Lent, today, is the time to respond. “God so loved the world,” St. John tells us in his most famous passage, “that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God does not want us to perish. He didn’t even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, so that we might not die but have life to the full. But God’s will is not enough, because he chose to make us free. We need to respond to his gift of salvation. Todays’ readings, on our second day in the pilgrimage of Lent, are about the choices we are called to make in response to God’s offer and to the grace he gives us that St. Paul appealed yesterday that we wouldn’t take in vain.
          • The choice is framed by Moses in today’s first reading. The Israelites were drawing toward the end of their 40-year pilgrimage in the desert. Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, accompanied them through the desert for four decades and now they were on the opposite side of the Jordan from the long-awaited Holy Land. God had told Moses that he would die before crossing, so Moses, in today’s first reading, was finishing a sort of last will and testament, a summary of what God had done for them and taught them. As the long experience of their time in the desert had taught them, God’s wondrous actions were not enough. The ten plagues weren’t enough. Their passing through the Red Sea on dry land wasn’t enough. The manna from heaven, the daily quails, the water from the rock and the theophanies associated with giving the Ten Commandments were not enough. None was sufficient to keep many of the Jews faithful. Many of them complained that they should have remained with their fleshpots in Egypt, others made a golden calf, even Aaron the high priest fell into the clutches of a wavering faith. So Moses wanted to urge them to choose and choose wisely. He framed the decision facing them as it truly was, a decision of life and death: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” Moses reminded them that the choice for God is a life-giving choice, a choice full of blessing; and that the choice against God — even if it might seem at first a choice that leads to life and happiness — is actually fatal. This is not something, of course, that they recognized. Throughout the desert they complained that they had left their fleshpots in Egypt behind just to perish in the desert by following the Lord. Along the way, many times they thought that the choice for God was a choice for death. But it is a choice for life. And those who sought the counterfeit path of turning their hearts away from God, of refusing to listen, of adoring and serving other gods, never made it out of the desert.
          • That’s the choice that faces all of us in Lent as we enter not into a 40-year but 40-day journey. Lent historically and actually is a catechumenate, an ecclesial preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil or, for those of us who have already been baptized, a 40-day renewal of the meaning of our baptism. Like the Jews, we have been set free from the slavery of sin and death, passing through the waters of baptism like the Jews passed through the Red Sea. We are presently in the desert with Jesus for these 40 days looking with him toward the eternal promised land that is anticipated in the celebration of Easter. It’s a time for us to focus on the graces of our liberation and the choice God has given to our freedom between life-giving fidelity through “loving him, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments,” through “heeding his voice and holding fast to him,” or the path that leads to death under the seduction of bringing life.
          • The contrast between these two paths is highlighted in today’s Psalm, which is the first of all the Psalms and the one that in a sense orients the praying of any and every psalm. It describes the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night” as like a “tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” He receives life and is able to give life from his contact with the “living water” of God. On the other hand, the “wicked” man, the one follows “the counsel of the wicked, … walks in the company of way of sinners, [and] sits in the company of the insolent” is compared to “the chaff that the wind drives away.” There are no roots, no substance, no life. The Psalm says, “The way of the wicked vanishes.” That’s the choice facing us as we begin Lent. The question arises: Isn’t this choice a no-brainer? Who, after all, would consciously choose death over life? It’s like the choice between eating filet mignon or tree bark. In the Gospel, however, we see why the choice, though conceptually simple, is morally challenging.
          • Jesus tells us today that the path of life is paradoxically a path of self-denial. Just as he was going to “suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes and be killed” before being raised to unending life on the third day, so “if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
 and take up his cross daily and follow me.
” He gets even more explicit about that paradox: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
 but whoever loses his life for my sake will save.” In order to obtain life, we need to die to ourselves. We need to lose our life for the sake of God and the Gospel in order to retain it. In the choice between self-denial and self-affirmation, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it really is the former. In the path between the Cross and the comfy recliner, we think the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. In the path between following Christ to Calvary and going to a beach resort, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. The path of life doesn’t seem to be life-giving, and the path of death, on the contrary, does. But that’s what Jesus wants us to grasp. There’s a choice between forfeiting oneself to gain the whole world or forfeiting the whole world to gain oneself. Today as we make the ninth anniversary of the Coptic Martyrs of Libya, who were all beheaded on the beach by ISIS, we see illustrated what the real choice is for life, blessing and prosperity.
          • This is why living a good and holy Lent is so important. Lent is meant to help us to make the choice for real life, to help us to walk in the footsteps of Christ, to plant ourselves in his living water in the midst of the desert so that we may grow to eternity. But we need to make the full and conscious choice for life, which requires the full and conscious choice to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Christ. The three Lenten practices, when we choose to live them generously, are all geared to do this. All three teach us self-denial: fasting denies the dominion of our lower appetites, almsgiving denies our selfishness, prayer denies our egocentrism. Each, in a sense, is a Cross that leads to our self-death, because to many it may seem that giving into our cravings, spending what we have on ourselves, and using our time for our own pursuits actually constitute the path of life, but they’re not. And these three practices help us to follow Christ in his own fasting, his giving of himself to the point of death, and his prayer. For this process of communion with Christ and the life he comes to give us to occur, however, we really must choose bold resolutions that can help facilitate these spiritual fruits, rather than soft ones that, even if we keep them, won’t really lead to the crucifixion to the worldliness that is necessary in order to experience the life that Jesus wants to give.
          • To persevere in living this way, we not only need God’s grace and personal resolve but the help of others. That’s why the saint the Church remembers today is so important. St. Claude la Colombière (1641-1682) is is most famous for his having been for a short but crucial time the spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, to whom Jesus appeared to reveal the mystery of his Sacred Heart. Even though she had been receiving apparitions of Jesus, there was so much she didn’t understand. St. Claude was the one who was given to her to help understand her sufferings and how they are meant to be related to the mystery of Christ’s human and divine love shown on Calvary. The feast of this great spiritual direction is a good day for us to ponder the importance of spiritual direction in general, both the spiritual direction we receive and that we’re called to give to others, passing on to them the light God has given us so that they may walk less in darkness. It’s a feast on which to pray for our spiritual directors and to ask God’s grace to become apt spiritual guides for others. St. Margaret Mary said of him, “His gift is to lead souls to God,” and would that that be able to be said about each of us: that we help others to see God and the way God is working in their life, that we help them choose life by embracing Christ on the Cross. We know what happened with St. Margaret Mary. As she had been receiving apparitions from Jesus, she eventually confided to her superiors and various priests came in to examine here. Some thought she was crazy. Others thought she was possessed. They hurt her quite a bit and their evaluations caused her huge problems in her community. The priest theologians who were called in were not properly trained to help her. Finally, God sent her St. Claude, who was able to be Jesus’ instrument to tell her that she wasn’t a freak, that she wasn’t being diabolically played, but that this came from the Lord. And then he helped her fulfill what the Lord was asking of her. Here’s what she wrote in her autobiography: “In the midst of all my fears and difficulties my heart, … I was made to speak to certain theologians, who, far from reassuring me in my way, added still more to my difficulties, until at last Our Lord sent the Rev. Father de la Colombière here. I had already spoken to him in the beginning of my religious life. My Sovereign Master had promised me shortly after I had consecrated myself to Him, that He would send me one of His servants, to whom He wished to make known according to the knowledge He would give me thereof, all the treasures and secrets of His Sacred Heart that He had confided to me. He added that He sent him to reassure me with regard to my interior way, and that He would impart to him signal graces from His Sacred Heart, showering him abundantly over our interviews. When that holy man came and was addressing the community, I interiorly heard these words: ‘This is he whom I send thee.’ I soon realized this in the first confession on the Ember days; for, although we had never either seen or spoken with each other, the Reverend Father kept me a very long time and spoke with me as though he understood what was passing within me. …  I opened my heart and made known to him my inmost soul, both the good and the bad; whereupon he greatly consoled me, assuring me that there was nothing to fear in the guidance of that Spirit. … He further taught me to value the gifts of God and to receive with respect and humility the frequent communications and familiar converse with which he favored me, adding that I ought to in a continual state of thanksgiving towards such infinite goodness.… But as this infinite Goodness did not wish that I should receive any consolation without its costing me many humiliations, this interview drew several upon me, and the Reverend Father himself had much to suffer on my account. For it was said that I wanted to deceive him and mislead him by my illusions, as I had done others. He was, however, in no way troubled by what was said, but continued nonetheless to help me, not only the short time he remained in this town, but always.” As we are now marking the 350th anniversary of the apparitions of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary (from December 27, 2023 through June 16, 2025), we give thanks to God for how St. Claude helped guide her and we thank the Lord for those figures he has placed in our life to guide us so that we may choose life by giving our life for Christ and the Gospel, and bear fruit in every season.
          • Today, with Moses, Jesus and the Church place before us this choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse, between the fruitful tree and the chaff. Mass is the time that we lose our life for him who lost his for us. God so loves the world that he gives us his only Son continuously in our participation in his life-giving death and resurrection in the Eucharist, as we opt to lose our life with him so as to be saved by him forever.

            •  

            The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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

            The post Choosing the Lenten Path of Life, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, February 15, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

            20 min
          • Returning Wholeheartedly to the Lord, Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024

            Fr. Roger J. Landry

            Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
            Ash Wednesday
            February 14, 2024
            Joel 2:12-18, Ps 51, 2 Cor 5:20-6:2, Mt 6:1-6.16-18

             

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

            https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.14.24_Homily_1.mp3

             

            The text that guided today’s homily was: 

            • In today’s first reading, the Lord through the Prophet Joel gives us the essential theme of Lent. “Return to me with your whole heart!” Lent is about returning home, returning to God, returning to the life of faith. No matter how far we may have wandered, God wants to welcome us, like, in Jesus’ famous parable of the Prodigal Son, the Father welcomed with joy his son who was lost and had been found, dead and brought to lie again. God invites us, he encourages us, he summons us back and wants to embrace us. And he hopes that we will respond not partially but with our whole heart, our whole mind, our whole soul and all our strength. As we prayed in today’s Psalm, God wants to give us a “clean heart,” thoroughly washed from sin and guilt. Just as St. Paul urged the Christians in Corinth in today’s second reading to “be reconciled to God,” so God himself today appeals to us to convert, not to receive his grace in vain, but to act with urgency to be reconciled. Now is the acceptable time, he says. Now — not later, not even tomorrow — is the day of salvation. He is hoping that we seize this gift!
            • The ashes we receive are a reminder to us not to procrastinate on grabbing hold of that gift of salvation.
              • First, ashes are a sign of our mortality, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. Lent reminds us that we will die and we never know the day or the hour. But ashes also point beyond death. Like at the beginning of creation when we were formed from the dust of the earth and God infused into us the breath of life, so ashes point to the fact that we are not just a mortal body but have an immortal soul, which God wants to infuse with his life. Yes, we will die, but God wants to raise us, even now. Ashes remind us that Lent is ultimately not just about death but also about resurrection, and how Christ calls us to share in his triumph.
              • Second, ashes are a sign of repentance. We see them used this way, for example, by the prophet Jonah, by Daniel, and by the Maccabees. They are a summons to repent and believe in the Word of God. The conversion to which they point is not meant to be a minor course correction in life, eliminating a bad habit or striving to acquire a new good one. Ashes point to how the conversion to which we’re summoned is ultimately a death and resurrection, in which we die to our old ways and rise to a new life of faith with Christ.
              • Third, as we see famously in the Book of Esther, they are a means of supplication, of prayer, for others, for their salvation. Ashes are a sign that we recognize we need a Savior and that, as St. Paul reminds us, now is the day to embrace that Savior’s outstretched hand. God, as we pray in the Psalm, wants to restore us to the joy of salvation and Lent is meant to bring about that joyful restoration!
              • The ashes will be imposed in the sign of the Cross on our forehead, in the same spot that when we were baptized, our parents and godparents traced the sign of the Cross. They’re placed there intentionally so that we will know the connection between the ashes and our baptism, the day on which we died and Christ rose from the dead within us, the day on which we committed (or our parents and Godparents committed in our name) to live faithfully in communion with God Father, Son and Holy Spirit and to reject Satan, all his evil works and empty promises. Lent is a time in which we, grateful for our baptism, and revivified in our baptismal graces, recommit ourselves to striving to become the saints to which baptism summons us.
              • Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks to us about the three practices that help us to grow in those realities to which the ashes and our baptism point: to die to ourselves so that Christ the Savior might live, to ask for and correspond to the graces he breathes into our soul so that we might live faithful to the Gospel. Jesus calls us to pray, to give alms and to fast. Prayer helps us die to our ego so that we may live for and with Christ, putting on his mind. Almsgiving has us think of others’ needs and act to help them with those needs, rather than be obsessed about our own pleasures. Fasting checks the domination of our appetites over us and makes possible our hungering for what really matters, what God in fact hungers. These three practices are the way by which God the Father helps to restore our proper relationship with him through prayer, with others through charity, and within ourselves through fasting. They are a means by which we enter into Jesus’ prayer, his fasting for 40 days in the desert, and his total self-giving down to the last drop of his blood. Today is a day in which we make bold resolutions with regard to all three and receive the help of our Savior to be faithful to them. So I’d urge you to be courageous in making such commitments to pray, fasting and charity, so that this Lent may be the greatest Lent of your life, and so that you might respond fully to the graces God lavishly pours out during this Season. If you’re still thinking about what to do, I’d urge you to consider the various suggestions made in the email I sent out to you this morning.
              • To help us on the 40-day journey that begins today, Jesus gives himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We begin every Mass with the penitential rite, seeking to return to God with our whole heart because he is gracious and merciful. Each Mass we enter into the “now” of our faith and strive to make him whom we’re so awesomely privileged receive in the Eucharist the true priority in our life. Each Mass we come having fasted so that we might hunger for what he hungers to give us. And at Mass, we receive Jesus as our greatest alms, who seeks to transform us so that we may give him, together with ourselves and what we have, to others, making our lives a commentary on the words of consecration, “this is my body,” “this is my blood,” this is all I am and have, given out of love for you.
              • Just like God called Joel to blow a trumpet in Zion, so this is the trumpet of salvation we’re called to blow at Columbia. Because now is the acceptable time. Now is indeed the day of salvation. Now is the occasion in which, responding to the Lord’s call, we return to him with our whole heart.

                •  

                The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                Reading 1
                Jl 2:12-18
                Even now, says the LORD,
                return to me with your whole heart,
                with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
                Rend your hearts, not your garments,
                and return to the LORD, your God.
                For gracious and merciful is he,
                slow to anger, rich in kindness,
                and relenting in punishment.
                Perhaps he will again relent
                and leave behind him a blessing,
                Offerings and libations
                for the LORD, your God.

                Blow the trumpet in Zion!

                proclaim a fast,
                call an assembly;
                Gather the people,
                notify the congregation;
                Assemble the elders,
                gather the children
                and the infants at the breast;
                Let the bridegroom quit his room
                and the bride her chamber.
                Between the porch and the altar
                let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep,
                And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people,
                and make not your heritage a reproach,
                with the nations ruling over them!
                Why should they say among the peoples,
                ‘Where is their God?’”

                Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land

                and took pity on his people.

                Responsorial Psalm
                Ps 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 12-13, 14 and 17
                R. (see 3a) Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.
                Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
                in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
                Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
                and of my sin cleanse me.
                R. Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.
                For I acknowledge my offense,
                and my sin is before me always:
                “Against you only have I sinned,
                and done what is evil in your sight.”
                R. Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.
                A clean heart create for me, O God,
                and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
                Cast me not out from your presence,
                and your Holy Spirit take not from me.
                R. Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.
                Give me back the joy of your salvation,
                and a willing spirit sustain in me.
                O Lord, open my lips,
                and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
                R. Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.
                Reading 2
                2 Cor 5:20—6:2
                Brothers and sisters:
                We are ambassadors for Christ,
                as if God were appealing through us.
                We implore you on behalf of Christ,
                be reconciled to God.
                For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin,
                so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

                Working together, then,

                we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.
                For he says:

                In an acceptable time I heard you,

                and on the day of salvation I helped you.

                Behold, now is a very acceptable time;

                behold, now is the day of salvation.

                Verse Before the Gospel
                See Ps 95:8
                If today you hear his voice,
                harden not your hearts.
                Gospel
                Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
                Jesus said to his disciples:
                “Take care not to perform righteous deeds
                in order that people may see them;
                otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.
                When you give alms,
                do not blow a trumpet before you,
                as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets
                to win the praise of others.
                Amen, I say to you,
                they have received their reward.
                But when you give alms,
                do not let your left hand know what your right is doing,
                so that your almsgiving may be secret.
                And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

                “When you pray,

                do not be like the hypocrites,
                who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners
                so that others may see them.
                Amen, I say to you,
                they have received their reward.
                But when you pray, go to your inner room,
                close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.
                And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

                “When you fast,

                do not look gloomy like the hypocrites.
                They neglect their appearance,
                so that they may appear to others to be fasting.
                Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.
                But when you fast,
                anoint your head and wash your face,
                so that you may not appear to be fasting,
                except to your Father who is hidden.
                And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.”

                 

                The post Returning Wholeheartedly to the Lord, Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                11 min
              • The Leaven of Faith That Perseveres Through Temptation, Sixth Tuesday (II), February 13, 2024

                Fr. Roger J. Landry

                Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
                Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
                Memorial of Blessed James Miller, Martyr
                February 13, 2024
                Jas 1:12-18, Ps 94, Mk 8:14-21

                 

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

                https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.13.24_Homily_1.mp3

                 

                The following points were attempted in the homily: 

                • In the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples with him in the boat to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. Leaven, we know, is small and almost imperceptible but it gives growth to bread. The leaven of the Pharisees was what we observed in the Gospel yesterday, this incessant desire for signs, for external works of the law, for arguing with Jesus and rejecting him. It’s, as Jesus says elsewhere, their hypocrisy, their being whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside but full of filth and death on the inside. It’s their focus on straining out gnats and swallowing camels.  It’s a religious externalism serving to enhance pride. It’s literally a “separation” from others, including sinners, out of the idea that that is pleasing to God. The leaven of Herod means a sensual, political and spiritually worldly approach to life without sincerity in the relationship with God, something we see in St. Mark’s Gospel earlier when Herod just wants to meet Jesus when he hears about him because some said he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. In both cases, their leaven was an absence of real faith. It was not a focus on God but on themselves, on their own works, their own pleasures, their own doubts and questions.
                • Jesus then described a different type of leaven, what we might call a divine yeast, shown in the two different miracles of the multiplications of loaves and fish. The leaven Jesus wants is faith, is trust in Him, is confidence that even if the apostles didn’t bring bread into the boat that somehow God would take care of them like he took care of the vast multitudes with the multiplications. Jesus asks us the same question he asked them, “Do you still not understand?” He further asks, “Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?,” bringing back what he said before the interpretation of the Sower and the Seed, basing himself on Isaiah, that he gives us parables to force us to work a little to understand them. The multiplication of the loaves and fish were similar to parables, he implied, that he wanted us to ponder to get their bigger meaning. Jesus wants this leaven of faith to grow in us, so that we trust in him increasingly. He tells us elsewhere in the Gospel that unless we convert and become like little children, we will not enter the kingdom of God. To become childlike is to grow in trust. Sometimes as we age we become more cynical, less faithful, less trusting in God or in anyone else. We become “wise” in worldly calculations but foolish in faith. Jesus wants to give us a different type of growth.
                • St. James talks about the bad leaven of growth in succumbing to temptation versus the good leaven of growth through persevering faith in temptation. The one who perseveres faithfully during trials, he says, is “blessed” and will receive the “crown of life” after having been proven. On the other hand, he describes the curse of succumbing to temptation and what it can lead to, death. He first says that no one should say, “I am being tempted by God,” because God doesn’t tempt. He permits temptations so that we may pass the test of temptations with fidelity, but he doesn’t send them. The root of our temptations, St. James describes, is our desires. God has made us desire good things and we always desire things under the “aspect of good.” Thieves desire the good of material possessions. Vengeful people desire the good of others’ not doing harm. Lustful people desire the good of human sexuality and the feeling of love. The problem is that they desire these goods in a disordered way, outside of the hierarchy of goods willed by God. They want property without working for it, or the other’s ceasing to do evil through suffering violence, or sex and love apart from marriage and the love of God. Once we begin to desire things disordinately, we get drawn by those desires to sin, and if we don’t repent, we become corrupt and spiritually die, by making the fulfillment of such desires more important than God. St. James describes the process in the following way: “Each person is tempted when lured and enticed by his desire. Then desire conceives and brings forth sin, and when sin reaches maturity it gives birth to death.”
                • The solution to this growth in sin through caving into our tempted desires is the leaven of the Word of God, not just knowing it, by clinging to it and living it. St. James says that God “willed to give us birth by the word of truth that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.” The Responsorial Psalm builds on this, that the man who takes God’s instruction is blessed: “Blessed the man whom you instruct, O Lord, whom by your law you teach, Giving him rest from evil days. … When I say, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your mercy, O Lord, sustains me; When cares abound within me, your comfort gladdens my soul.” God wants to sustain us, just like Jesus was sustained in the desert while being tempted by the devil, by his holy word, not just known but believed and enfleshed. God wants not only to help the leaven of faith in us to grow but to help us become his leaven to raise up the world.
                • One who shows us the fruit of divine leaven as a disciple and apostle is the great, yet still practically unknown, American Beatus the Church celebrates today, LaSallian Brother James Alfred Miller. A native of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, he was martyred for the faith in Guatemala on this day in 1982. Pope Francis, in his 2018 exhortation on holiness, Gaudete et Exsultate, wrote about the “saints next door,” and in many ways Blessed James is an all-American holy neighbor, a man of faith who became true leaven. He was born in 1944 — he would have turned 80 this September 21 — and grew up working hard on his family’s dairy and chicken farm in Custer, Wisconsin, praying at home, and wanting to be priest. He was fascinated by other countries, reading an encyclopedia from cover to cover to get to know foreign countries and regions where he hoped to bring the faith. When he entered Pacelli High School and met the Brothers of the Christian Schools, he quickly discerned he had a vocation to share in their educational apostolate. He entered the juniorate of the community at 15 (much like boys at that time could enter high school seminaries at 14), became a postulant and novice at 18, professed first vows at 21 and final vows at 26. He was sent by the Christian Brothers to St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota, where, hoping to share in their missionary apostolates, he got Bachelors’ and Master’s degrees in Spanish. He was described by those who knew him as likeable, sociable, simple, humble, generous, honest, kind, intelligent, ordered, courageous, prayerful, zealous, and hardworking. His fellow Christian Brothers dubbed him a “common, good guy,” “very human,” “a man of union and communion,” who had the “gift of gab,” a perpetual smile, a “deep faith and love for his religious vocation,” and a contagious, boisterous guffaw. He also, they noted, was perpetually “late to class and community prayers,” something that Cardinal José Luis Lacunza of Panama, presiding over his beatification, joked had prepared him very well for service in Latin America, “where punctuality is not numbered among our virtues!” His first assignment was to teach Spanish, English and religion for a few years at Cretin High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. While there, he supervised the maintenance of the school, earning the nickname “Brother Fix-It.” He also coached football, a sport at which, at 6’2” and 220 pounds, he was prone to excel. In 1969, after a fellow Christian Brother got sick at the Brothers’ school in Bluefield, Nicaragua, “Hermano Santiago” was sent to replace him. For four-plus years, he taught sixth grade, then high school, while also repairing the residence, running a bookstore and starting a soccer team. In 1974, Brother James was transferred to Puerto Cabezas where, as director of the school, he catalyzed an increase of enrollment from 300 to 800 students, helped build an industrial arts complex, offices, an auditorium and science center, taught, founded a volunteer fire department and served as janitor, fixing the plumbing, cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the floor. His practical know-how won the attention of the Somoza Government, who contracted him to build ten more schools in the rural region so that the children of the area would have a chance at an education. When the Sandinistas took over the country, because of his having erected schools for the Somoza government and his general work of education and care for the human dignity of people long neglected, he was put on a list of those to be “dealt with.” His superiors therefore decided to summon him back to Cretin High School in Minnesota. He feared that the people of Puerto Cabezas would see his departure as an act of cowardice and so he wrote them telling them he would return, but he never got his wish. After two years of trying to return to Latin America, his superiors sent him to their Mission in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, to teach at the Indigenous House School and work at the Indian Center, training indigenous Mayans in agricultural techniques, leadership skills and basic educational subjects. St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle had told his spiritual sons, “Your zeal must go so far that you are ready to give your life, so dear to you are the children entrusted to you,” and Hermano Santiago took his founder’s instruction to heart. His new assignment was as dangerous as the one in Nicaragua. The Guatemalan government regularly conscripted indigenous students, even though they were exempt by law, into service. The government resented the Christian Brothers’ constantly appearing to present documentation to liberate their students. Word quickly spread that members of the G-2 death squad were looking for the “sub-director,” Brother James’ office at the school. He well knew the danger, but responded with humor, realism and faith. When asked if he were afraid, he replied, “Are you kidding? I never thought I could pray with such fervor when I go to bed!” He wrote his sister a month before he died, “One of two frightening things could happen to me in Guatemala: I could be kidnapped, tortured and killed or I could simply be gunned down.” He added, however, “You don’t think about that, that’s not why you’re there. There’s too much to be done. You can’t waste your energies worrying about what might happen. If it happens, it happens.” He insisted, “I pray to God for the grace and strength to serve Him faithfully among the poor and oppressed in Guatemala. I place my life in His Providence. I place my trust in Him.” On Saturday, February 13, 1982, after returning with students from a picnic, Brother Fix-It mounted a ladder to repair a broken lamp on the outer wall of the school. At 4:15 pm, four hooded men, whom the government would later call “subversive criminal elements,” sped past in a car with windows down and submachine guns loaded. They shot Hermano Santiago seven times in the neck and chest, as shocked children looked on from a window in the school. He fell from the ladder, dead. His funeral was held first in Huehuetenango and then in St. Paul, Minnesota, before he was buried in Ellis, Wisconsin, at a cemetery just outside the family farm. At his beatification on the Huehuetenango soccer field, Cardinal Lacunza called him a “martyr, an excellent educator and an evangelical defender of the poor and oppressed” who “made himself one of us and for us gave his life.” He suggested that Hermano Santiago died in witness of Christ’s great commission to teach all nations and was an icon of Christ the Teacher who died to give witness to the truth. “There is nothing that bothers totalitarianisms … more than education,” Lacunza said, since the greatest way to ensure that people remain docile to manipulation is by keeping them “ignorant, without criteria or values.” If education is subversive to tyrants, the Gospel is even more of a threat. One of the Christian brothers who had known Blessed James throughout his religious life said he loved to do things “very quietly, behind the scenes” — like leaven — and “never asked for recognition.” Now, all he did is in the foreground, with his having received the most important acknowledgment a human being can. His beatification shows that the Lord continues to exalt the humble. It also shows that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven remain those who keep the faith and teach others to do the same. He persevered until the end, fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith — and he trained not only his students but the whole Church to do the same.
                • Blessed James shows us the meaning of today’s Psalm, “Blessed the Man whom you instruct, O Lord,” and he sought to pass on that saving instruction to others, at the risk of his life. We ask the Jesus who is with us in the boat of the Church and is about to implant himself in us as the most powerful leaven of all, himself, to help us become, not like the Pharisees or the Herodians or the Sadducees, but like him, Blessed James and the blessed whom he instructs and who glorify him.

                  •  

                  The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                  Reading 1
                  JAS 1:12-18
                  Blessed is he who perseveres in temptation,
                  for when he has been proven he will receive the crown of life
                  that he promised to those who love him.
                  No one experiencing temptation should say,
                  “I am being tempted by God”;
                  for God is not subject to temptation to evil,
                  and he himself tempts no one.
                  Rather, each person is tempted when lured and enticed by his desire.
                  Then desire conceives and brings forth sin,
                  and when sin reaches maturity it gives birth to death.
                  Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers and sisters:
                  all good giving and every perfect gift is from above,
                  coming down from the Father of lights,
                  with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change.
                  He willed to give us birth by the word of truth
                  that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
                  Responsorial Psalm
                  PS 94:12-13A, 14-15, 18-19
                  R. (12a) Blessed the man you instruct, O Lord.
                  Blessed the man whom you instruct, O LORD,
                  whom by your law you teach,
                  Giving him rest from evil days.
                  R. Blessed the man you instruct, O Lord.
                  For the LORD will not cast off his people,
                  nor abandon his inheritance;
                  But judgment shall again be with justice,
                  and all the upright of heart shall follow it.
                  R. Blessed the man you instruct, O Lord.
                  When I say, “My foot is slipping,”
                  your mercy, O LORD, sustains me;
                  When cares abound within me,
                  your comfort gladdens my soul.
                  R. Blessed the man you instruct, O Lord.
                  Gospel
                  MK 8:14-21
                  The disciples had forgotten to bring bread,
                  and they had only one loaf with them in the boat.
                  Jesus enjoined them, “Watch out,
                  guard against the leaven of the Pharisees
                  and the leaven of Herod.”
                  They concluded among themselves that
                  it was because they had no bread.
                  When he became aware of this he said to them,
                  “Why do you conclude that it is because you have no bread?
                  Do you not yet understand or comprehend?
                  Are your hearts hardened?
                  Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?
                  And do you not remember,
                  when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand,
                  how many wicker baskets full of fragments you picked up?”
                  They answered him, “Twelve.”
                  “When I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand,
                  how many full baskets of fragments did you pick up?”
                  They answered him, “Seven.”
                  He said to them, “Do you still not understand?”

                  The post The Leaven of Faith That Perseveres Through Temptation, Sixth Tuesday (II), February 13, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                  19 min
                • Of One Mind in Believing the Sign Jesus Gives, Sixth Monday (II), February 12, 2024

                  Fr. Roger J. Landry

                  Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
                  Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
                  Votive Mass for Persecuted Christians
                  February 12, 2024
                  James 1:1-11, Ps 119, Mk 8:11-13

                   

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

                  https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.12.24_Homily_1.mp3

                   

                  The following points were attempted in the homily: 

                  • Today in the Gospel, Jesus sighs with exasperation when the Pharisees came to argue with him and to ask him to perform “a sign from heaven” in order to test him. Jesus hadn’t come from heaven to earth to put on a show but to save people. The signs or miracles that he had been working in abundance were already giving evidence of the trustworthiness of his words and mission. He had himself announced in the Synagogue of Nazareth what Isaiah had prophesied about the Messiah, that he would make the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the lame walk, the blind see, the prisoners experience liberation, and all people enter into a time of Jubilee, and that’s precisely what he had been doing. But no matter how many of these signs pointing to his divine mission and authority he did, the Pharisees just didn’t want to accept them, because they had already made up their mind about him. Immediately before this scene, he had just fed 4,000 men with 7 loaves and a few fish he had multiplied. He had one-by-one on several occasions cured all the sick who had been brought to him. In their presence, he had healed withered hands and paralyses, he had cast out demons, he had even raised a little girl from the dead. But they still wanted another sign.
                  • The reality was that no matter how many signs that Jesus performed, they had made up their mind that they wouldn’t believe him; they were just hoping for a time in which when he sought to do a sign he would fail so that everyone would treat him as an impostor. Remember what had happened before when Jesus had finished various exorcisms. Rather than accept that as a sign, they accused him of casting out demons by the power of the Beelzebul, the prince of demons. When he later raised Lazarus from the dead on the fourth day — something no one would have imagined, because the Jews believed resurrection was possible until the third day, but on the fourth, they believe that there was no way a person could come back from the dead — rather than believe then, the same people who were plotting to get Jesus put to death wanted to have Lazarus killed as well, destroying the evidence of Jesus’ signs. And they sought to do the same thing with the one sign he announced he would do in St. Matthew’s Gospel in response to the same request. He said no sign would be given except the sign of Jonah, that just as Jonah had spent three days in the belly of the whale, so he would spend three days in the belly of the earth before being raised from the dead. Even after that sign, however, they still didn’t want to believe and instead they bribed the guards to like to say that Jesus’ disciples had come to steal the body while they were asleep. No matter what Jesus did — even rising from the dead on the third day after they had watched up be crucified and breath his last — they were not going to accept the sign as pointing to his divine mission or identity. No proof would be enough. No wonder why Jesus was so exasperated at their lack of faith!
                  • The sign of Jonah is a sign that is still very important for us in the present. As we will pray later in the Eucharistic Prayer (Reconciliation I), “Before his arms were outstretched between heaven and earth to become the lasting sign of your covenant,” Jesus on Calvary, Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, remains the indelible sign of God’s covenant, a sign that effects what signifies. We are called not only to grasp that sign but, in a sense, perpetuate it. Today we begin what is normally two weeks of focus on the Letter of St. James, which, because of Lent’s starting on Wednesday, will be reduced to just two days. It’s unfortunate that we do not have a chance to cover the whole Letter, because the Letter of St. James is one of the clearest articulations of Christian behavior we find throughout the New Testament. Many Scripture scholars believe it’s a powerful application of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. The essence of St. James’ letter is that we are called to be doers of the Word, not just listeners, to become living commentaries of what Jesus has taught. Today St. James begins with, essentially, the Cross, our own share in Jesus’ Sign of Jonah. He tells us, “Consider it perfect joy when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let your perseverance be perfect so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” The Lord Jesus allows us trials and tests so that we may grow in faithful perseverance, which is necessary for us to become to full stature in Christ. The word for perseverance used by St. James is hypomone, which points to the perseverance of Jesus on the Cross as the Sign of God. Such trials for us are tests, tests that not only we can pass, but with faith, will pass. Just as Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, so we, too, will rise if we persevere with him with faith.
                  • Many times, St. James tells us a little later in today’s passage, we don’t have persevering faith. Our faith, he says, like the waves of the sea, undulating back and forth. Something we ride the wave of faith and put out boldly when we’re being tested, but then rather than continuing to advance, we pull back in faith. We don’t persevere. We’re of “two minds” and “unstable” in all we do. But in order to grow in this holy hypomone, we need trials, we need to acquire that virtue of patience through passing tests where we’re tempted toward impatience. When we bear sufferings well, when we unite ourselves to Christ during troubles with our health or with our family, we not only grow in faithful perseverance but we also become a sign of faith for others. Our suffering well helps them to see that faith is real and teaches them how to have faith even when we have anguish, distress, persecutions and other trials. But we need to embrace these tests given to us by God to help us grow in faith, because these crosses are truly caresses. In the Psalm today, we see the conversion of the Psalmist on this point. “Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I hold to your promise,” he writes. “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I may learn your statutes. … In your faithfulness you have afflicted me!” God in his faithfulness allows us to be afflicted so that we may become more perfectly conformed to Christ and become united with him a sign of Jonah for the present age.
                  • Today as we offer a Mass for persecuted Christians we pray that in their tests and trials they may persevere and that we may persevere in helping them by our prayer, material support and interventions. We prayed at the beginning of this Mass about the union between our sufferings and Christ’s and about the spirit of hypomone we need, trusting in God’s promises. “O God,” we asked, “who in your inscrutable providence will that the Church be united to the sufferings of your Son, grant, we pray, to your faithful who suffer for your name’s sake a spirit of patience and charity, that they may be found true and faithful witnesses to the promises you have made.” Trials, when united to the Lord, strengthen our faith and make it possible for us to give supreme witness. This is St. James’ point. This is what the Church attests in this Votive Mass. This is what Christ shows us and calls us to in his own Cross and his summons for us to pick up ours daily and follow him.
                  • Today we ask God’s help that in our own day we may pass the tests of faith He gives us and become signs of Christ in the midst of a world that needs to see these signs. The great help we have for perseverance is daily Mass, when we enter into Jesus’ own passover, his own Sign of Jonah, and come out already experiencing a union with him in his passion, death and resurrection. Let us ask the Lord with whom we’re about to enter into a holy communion, to strengthen us from within with his own hypomone so that we may be a wave that doesn’t recede but pushes like a tsunami toward the eternal shore.

                    The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                    Reading 1
                    JAS 1:1-11
                    James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,
                    to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings.
                    Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters,
                    when you encounter various trials,
                    for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
                    And let perseverance be perfect,
                    so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
                    But if any of you lacks wisdom,
                    he should ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly,
                    and he will be given it.
                    But he should ask in faith, not doubting,
                    for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea
                    that is driven and tossed about by the wind.
                    For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord,
                    since he is a man of two minds, unstable in all his ways.
                    The brother in lowly circumstances
                    should take pride in high standing,
                    and the rich one in his lowliness,
                    for he will pass away “like the flower of the field.”
                    For the sun comes up with its scorching heat and dries up the grass,
                    its flower droops, and the beauty of its appearance vanishes.
                    So will the rich person fade away in the midst of his pursuits.
                    Responsorial Psalm
                    PS 119:67, 68, 71, 72, 75, 76
                    R. (77a) Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    Before I was afflicted I went astray,
                    but now I hold to your promise.
                    R. Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    You are good and bountiful;
                    teach me your statutes.
                    R. Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    It is good for me that I have been afflicted,
                    that I may learn your statutes.
                    R. Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    The law of your mouth is to me more precious
                    than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
                    R. Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    I know, O LORD, that your ordinances are just,
                    and in your faithfulness you have afflicted me.
                    R. Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    Let your kindness comfort me
                    according to your promise to your servants.
                    R. Be kind to me, Lord, and I shall live.
                    Gospel
                    MK 8:11-13
                    The Pharisees came forward and began to argue with Jesus,
                    seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him.
                    He sighed from the depth of his spirit and said,
                    “Why does this generation seek a sign?
                    Amen, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.”
                    Then he left them, got into the boat again,
                    and went off to the other shore.

                    The post Of One Mind in Believing the Sign Jesus Gives, Sixth Monday (II), February 12, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                    12 min
                  • Imitating Christ, Paul and Our Lady in Caring for the Sick and Outcast, Sixth Sunday (B), February 11, 2024

                    Fr. Roger J. Landry

                    Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
                    Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
                    February 11, 2024
                    Lev 13:1-2.44-46, Ps 32, 1 Cor 10:31-11:1, Mk 1:40-45

                     

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

                    https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.11.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

                     

                    The following text guided the homily: 

                    • At the end of today’s second reading, St. Paul gives the first Christians in Corinth and all of us a summary of the Christian life: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Each of us is called, first, to imitate to Christ and to imitate those, like the saints, who excel in imitating Christ. Then, like Christ, St. Paul and the saints, we’re supposed to set an example so that others, through emulating us, may ultimately enflesh Christ’s words and actions. St. Paul is one in a great line of saints whose actions were a living commentary on the modern expression, “What would Jesus do?,” and the great convert of Tarsus urges us to model ourselves on his seeking to glorify God in everything we do.
                    • In today’s Gospel, we see what Jesus did and what we’re called, with the saints, to reproduce. One of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away their flesh and bones and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for basically the rest of their life apart from the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them, except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from work, from the synagogue and temple, and basically from love and mercy. They were ostracized from all things human, forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they had to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law, as we see in today’s first reading, to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!,” as if their whole identified were summed up by that off-putting adjective. Anyone who accidentally touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, ritually unclean.
                    • What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature who desperately broke all convention to come close to Jesus and kneel before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch his infection. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touchedthe leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of the frightened onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched the man in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure so that he, so long a persona non grata, could legitimately return to the human community.
                    • This is the Jesus we’re called to imitate. The Lord turns to each of us today and says, “Come, follow me!” (Lk 18:22) and, “I have done this as an example so that, as I have done for you, you also should do (Jn 13:15). We’re not called, necessarily, to imitate Jesus in caring for those with Hansen’s disease, because, thanks be to God and to the gift of modern infectious disease medicine, leprosy has been mostly eradicated in the U.S. — with fewer than 200 cases per year — and in most of the world, where there are fewer than 200,000, located in 14 countries, with half still in India. Most of us, likewise, are not gifted with the Lord’s divine power to work stupendous miracles of healing, so we’re not called to imitate Christ the wonder-worker. But what Christ is calling us to do is to love the untouchables with the same love that he does, the love which would make him go to the Cross again for them if he needed to.
                    • While there are thankfully far fewer men and women with Hansen’s disease, there are still many outcasts. There are bodily lepers, whom the world considers ugly or unattractive, or whose illnesses are too long-lasting that few want to care for them or even to have society care for them at the end of life. There are psychological lepers, with mental illness or disabilities, whom some just relegate to institutions or allow them to live derelict on the streets. There are moral lepers, like drug addicts, prostitutes, death-row inmates, and those who have committed very public and embarrassing sins, who are shunned to the sidelines as practically irredeemable. There are economic lepers, like the homeless, the very poor, or those of a particular social class, who live as exiles from society and from the things most take for granted. There are racial lepers, like gypsies, Bedouins, migrants and refugees, who, because of skin color, lineage or the lack of a properly colored identification card, are refused welcome and treated as social castaways. There is a new class of “cancelled” lepers, who because of unpopular opinions or mistakes have been permanently excluded from enlightened society or even the possibility of employment. There are unborn lepers, who, because they’re unwanted by, or inconvenient to, parents, are left unprotected and vulnerable to legal slaughter. And there are many emotional lepers, who, because of their own psyche or others’ actions, feel complete alone and abandoned. All of these are among the ones Jesus wants us to reach out and heal through our very human touch, to bring back from the peripheries into communion.
                    • We see in the lives of the saints that very often their path to holiness began when they cared for an outsider. One day St. Francis of Assisi was a carefree young soldier riding his horse outside of Assisi preparing to seek glory in battle. He saw a leper on the path begging for alms. Francis’ horse jerked out of repugnance. The future saint, himself, was filled with horror and disgust. He looked at the leper for what seemed like an eternity, but then, pierced by conscience, dismounted, drew close to the man, and took his emaciated, cold and inert hand and placed within it a coin. Then Francis lifted that hand up to his lips and kissed the wounded flesh of the rejected and abject man. As the leper withdrew his hand, Francis raised his head to look at him in the eyes, but the man was no longer there. Neither was the old Francis. Francis realized that it was obvious Christ in the disguise of a leper who had met him. From that point forward Francis, and eventually the Franciscans around him, would visit the leper community two miles outside of Assisi to care for those presen, seeking to love them with the love with which they sought to love Christ in a leprous disguise.
                    • A similar conversion happened in the life of St. Martin of Tours. He was a fourth-century Roman soldier approaching the gate of Amiens, France, on a frigid day. It was there that he met a homeless man, practically naked, shivering in the cold. Martin had no money to give him and so was initially just going to gallop on. But, moved interiorly, he got off his horse, took out his sword and cut his heavy Roman cape in half, giving half of it to the poor man. When Martin went to sleep later that evening, Jesus appeared to him in a dream wearing the other half of his cape and saying, “Martin has clothed me in his garment.” It was what led first to his baptism, and ultimately to his becoming Saint Martin of Tours.
                    • Likewise for us, the path to our sanctity begins with our loving those whom the world finds unlovable. As we learn from the examples of Saints Martin and Francis, Saints Vincent de Paul and Teresa of Calcutta, Saints Damien of Molokai and Marianne Cope, every time we care for an outcast, we are caring for Christ. The Lord himself told us that everything we do or fail to do to “one of the least of [his] brothers and sisters” we do, or fail to do, to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Christ takes on the disguise of the pariah and the amount of love we show the castaway is the amount of love we have for him. It’s easy to love those who are lovable, Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount. “Even pagans do as much” (Mt 5:46). But it’s hard to love those who are seemingly unlovable, and that’s the standard Jesus gives us. Like a leper, Jesus himself became full of disgusting, open bodily wounds, was cast out of the city of Jerusalem and left abandoned with other outcasts on crosses. As Isaiah wrote about him 700 years earlier, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely, he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (Is 53:2-6). If we would draw near to Christ, he wants for us to do so, and waits for us, on a modern Calvary in the disguise of contemporary rejects.
                    • Today’s Gospel is a powerful one to have on this World Day of the Sick, held since 1992 on February 11, the Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, the great shrine in the French Pyrenees where so many of the sick converge to pray to God and many leave with miraculous healings, and so many others leave strengthened to make up what is lacking in their flesh of Christ’s sufferings for the sake of the Church (Col 1:24). This Church of Notre Dame de Lourdes has been built not just with one of the world’s greatest physical replicas of the Grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes as the retablo, but also with a formal association with the French sanctuary. When St. Bernadette was kneeling before the image of Our Lady as we are privileged to do here, our Lady pointed to a spot and asked her to drink from the stream. As there appeared to be no stream, Bernadette dug in the ground, seeminly unsuccessfully. But by the next day, water began to flow from that spot, now 32,000 gallons of water a day. Those who are healed normally bathe in that water. For the last 111 years, the Shrine in Lourdes ships cases full of Lourdes water here, that we are able to give out to those who are sick and request it, and many people, with that water, have likewise experienced healing. For us at Columbia, we are so lucky to be able to worship here before this image of Our Lady of Lourdes, where we can count on her prayers just like she prays for those at the foot of the French Pyrenees. Today on this World Day of the Sick the whole Church prays and is summoned to do what our worship here each day is meant to inspire: to bring to Christ through Our Lady’s intercession our fervent prayers for everyone who is sick and ask for the grace that we might care for them, just as the malades are lovingly cared for in Lourdes.
                    • Today’s Gospel is also a beautiful one to have three days before we begin the Holy Season of Lent. During Lent, each of us is called to approach Jesus with faith, with all our sins that are eating away our soul like Hansen’s disease destroys flesh and bones, and say, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Jesus wants to say to each of us in return, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Lent is a time of such cleansing. The practice of prayer helps us to overcome the leprosy of egocentrism and to put God first. The practice of almsgiving helps us to conquer the leprosy of selfishness and to place others ahead of ourselves. The practice of fasting helps us to triumph against the leprosy of pleasure-seeking, of making our bellies our god, so that we can learn how to hunger for what God hungers. Lent is a period of purification and healing. Each of us needs to be humble enough, and smart enough, to recognize our state and come to God so that he, moved with compassion, can stretch out his hand and touch us. Please prepare well over these next two days to live the best Lent of your life and commit yourself to imitating the saints in the way they lived Lent in imitation of Christ’s prayer, fasting and giving of himself in alms.
                    • At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus told the healed leper, “See that you tell no one anything.” Jesus well knew that if news of the miracle became widespread, everyone would be coming to him first as a free medical doctor and secondly as the long-awaited Messiah whom they would interpret in political terms, as someone who would boot the Romans and reinstitute a Davidic temporal kingdom. Jesus wanted to avoid those misconceptions because he had come not as a new political candidate or as a new Hippocrates but as a Savior. But the former outcast’s response to Jesus’ stern warning, however, was to ignore it totally. St. Mark says, “The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. Jesus remained outside in deserted places,” basically changing places with the leper, exactly validating Jesus’ concerns that underlined his warning and command. Today at the end of this Mass during which Jesus is going to give us a far greater miracle than what he worked for the leper in the Gospel, giving us his Body and Blood and touching us on the inside, he’s going to give us his blessing and a command, namely “go and announce the Gospel of the Lord,” to “go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” He wants us to pass on the Gospel with far greater enthusiasm than fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers are going to be cheering their lungs out during tonight’s Super Bowl. Jesus wants us to share with others the same healing Gospel he gives us, the same truth that will set us free, the same words of eternal life that will help us rise from sin and death. As he prepares to reach out his hand to touch and cleanse us — he does not want us to let go of his hand, but to journey with him in holiness each day, as we seek to do everything, eating, drinking and beyond, for God’s glory. He wants us to imitate Saint Paul, Saint Francis, Saint Martin, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Vincent, Saint Damien and Saint Marianne, as they imitated Christ, so that others after us may imitate us in our faithfully going to Christ to be made clean. He wants us to imitate his mother, Our Lady, in her prayer and compassion on the multitudes. The same one who said to us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, “I was ill and your cared for me,” is about to say, “This is my Body given for you” and “This is the chalice of my blood, poured out for you.” Let us today ask him ultimately for the grace to imitate Christ’s own self-giving so contagiously that others may see Christ’s healing, saving, light in our light. Praised be Jesus Christ!

                      •  

                      The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                      Reading I
                      Lv 13:1-2, 44-46

                      The LORD said to Moses and Aaron,

                      “If someone has on his skin a scab or pustule or blotch
                      which appears to be the sore of leprosy,
                      he shall be brought to Aaron, the priest,
                      or to one of the priests among his descendants.
                      If the man is leprous and unclean,
                      the priest shall declare him unclean
                      by reason of the sore on his head.

                      “The one who bears the sore of leprosy

                      shall keep his garments rent and his head bare,
                      and shall muffle his beard;
                      he shall cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’
                      As long as the sore is on him he shall declare himself unclean,
                      since he is in fact unclean.
                      He shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp.”

                      Responsorial Psalm
                      Ps 32:1-2, 5, 11

                      R. (7) I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.

                      Blessed is he whose fault is taken away,
                      whose sin is covered.
                      Blessed the man to whom the LORD imputes not guilt,
                      in whose spirit there is no guile.
                      R. I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.
                      Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
                      my guilt I covered not.
                      I said, “I confess my faults to the LORD,”
                      and you took away the guilt of my sin.
                      R. I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.
                      Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, you just;
                      exult, all you upright of heart.
                      R. I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.

                      Reading II
                      1 Cor 10:31—11:1

                      Brothers and sisters,

                      Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do,
                      do everything for the glory of God.
                      Avoid giving offense, whether to the Jews or Greeks or
                      the church of God,
                      just as I try to please everyone in every way,
                      not seeking my own benefit but that of the many,
                      that they may be saved.
                      Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.

                      Alleluia
                      Lk 7:16

                      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                      A great prophet has arisen in our midst,
                      God has visited his people.
                      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                      Gospel
                      Mk 1:40-45

                      A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said,

                      “If you wish, you can make me clean.”
                      Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand,
                      touched him, and said to him,
                      “I do will it. Be made clean.”
                      The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.
                      Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once.

                      He said to him, “See that you tell no one anything,

                      but go, show yourself to the priest
                      and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed;
                      that will be proof for them.”

                      The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter.

                      He spread the report abroad
                      so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly.
                      He remained outside in deserted places,
                      and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

                      The post Imitating Christ, Paul and Our Lady in Caring for the Sick and Outcast, Sixth Sunday (B), February 11, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                      23 min
                    • Imitating Christ and the Saints in Loving Even Outcasts, Sixth Sunday (B), February 11, 2024

                      Fr. Roger J. Landry

                      Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
                      Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
                      February 11, 2024
                      Lev 13:1-2.44-46, Ps 32, 1 Cor 10:31-11:1, Mk 1:40-45

                       

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

                      https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.11.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

                       

                      The following text guided the homily: 

                      • In one short sentence at the end of today’s second reading, St. Paul gives us a summary of the Christian life: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Each of us is called to imitate to Christ and to set the example, like St. Paul, so that others may emulate us. St. Paul is one in a line of saints whose actions were a living commentary on the modern expression, “What would Jesus do?,” and he urges us to imitate him in seeking to glorify God in everything we do.
                      • In today’s Gospel, we see what Jesus did and what we’re called, with St. Paul, to reproduce. One of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away their flesh and bones and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for basically the rest of their life apart from the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from work, from the synagogue and temple, and basically from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law, as we see in today’s first reading, to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!,” as if their whole identified were summed up by that adjective. They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, ritually unclean. That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was a sign of just how desperate he was.
                      • What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touchedthe leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure so that he, so long an outcast, could legitimately return to the human community.
                      • This is the Jesus we’re called to imitate. The Lord turns to each of us today and says, “Come, follow me!” (Lk 18:22) and, “I have done this as an example so that, as I have done for you, you also should do (Jn 13:15). We’re not called, necessarily, to imitate Jesus in caring for those with Hansen’s disease, because, thanks be to God and to the gift of modern medicine, leprosy has been mostly eradicated in the U.S. — with fewer than 200 cases per year — and in most of the world, where there are fewer than 200,000, located in 14 countries, with half still in India. Most of us — as far as I know — are not gifted with the Lord’s divine power to work stupendous miracles of healing, so we’re not called to imitate Christ the thaumaturgos. But what Christ is calling us to do is to love the outcasts with the same love that he does, the love which would make him go to the Cross again for them if he needed to.
                      • While thanks be to God there are fewer men and women with Hansen’s disease, there are still many outcasts. There are bodily lepers, whom the world considers ugly or unattractive, or whose illnesses are too long-lasting that few want to care for them or even to have society care for them at the end of life. There are psychological lepers, with mental illness or disabilities, whom some just relegate to institutions or allow them to live derelict on the streets. There are moral lepers, like drug addicts, prostitutes, death-row inmates, and those who have committed very public and embarrassing sins, who are shunned to the sidelines as practically irredeemable. There are economic lepers, like the homeless, the very poor, or those of a particular social class, who live ostracized from society and the things most of the rest of society take for granted. There are racial lepers, like gypsies and others, who, because of skin color or lineage are sent to the margins. There is a new class of “cancelled” lepers, who because of unpopular opinions or mistakes have been permanently excluded from enlightened society or even the possibility of employment. There are unborn lepers, who, because they’re unwanted by, or inconvenient to, parents, are left unprotected and able to be legally slaughtered. And there are many emotional lepers, who, because of their own psyche or others’ actions, feel complete alone and abandoned. All of these are among the ones Jesus wants us to reach out and heal through our very human touch, to bring back from the margins into communion.
                      • We see in the lives of the saints that very often their path to deep sanctity occurred when they cared for an outcast. One day St. Francis of Assisi was a carefree young man riding his horse outside of Assisi preparing to seek glory as a soldier in battle. He saw a leper on a path begging for alms. Francis’ horse jerked out of repugnance. Francis, himself, was filled with horror and disgust. Francis looked at the leper for what seemed like an eternity, but then dismounted, went to the man and took his emaciated, cold and inert hand and placed within it a coin. Then he lifted that hand up to his lips and kissed the wounded flesh of the abject man. As the leper withdrew his hand, Francis raised his head to look at him in the eyes, but the man was no longer there. Neither was the old Francis. Everything had changed. From that point forward he, and eventually the Franciscans around him, would visit the leper community two miles outside of Assisi to care for those present and he would seek to love everyone with the love with which they sought to love Christ in the disguise of a leper.
                      • In the life of St. Martin of Tours, a similar thing occurred. He was a Roman soldier approaching the gate of Amiens, France, on a frigid day. It was there that he met a homeless man, practically naked, shivering in the cold. Martin had no money to give him and so was just going to gallop on. But, moved by conscience, he got off his horse, took out his sword and cut his Roman cape in half, giving half of it to the poor man. When Martin went to sleep later that evening, Christ appeared to him in a dream wearing the other half of his cape and saying, “Martin has clothed me in his garment.” It was what led to his become Saint Martin of Tours.
                      • Likewise for us, the path to our sanctity begins with our loving those whom the world finds unlovable. As we learn from the examples of Saints Martin and Francis, Saints Vincent de Paul and Teresa of Calcutta, Saints Damien of Molokai and Marianne Cope, every time we care for an outcast, we are caring for Christ. The Lord himself told us that everything we do or fail to do to “one of the least of [his] brothers and sisters” we do, or fail to do, to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Christ takes on the disguise of the pariah and the amount of love we show the castaway is the amount of love we have for him. It’s easy to love those who are lovable, Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount. “Even pagans do as much” (Mt 5:46). But it’s hard to love those who are seemingly unlovable, and that’s the standard Jesus gives us. Like a leper, he himself became full of disgusting, open bodily wounds, was cast out of the city and left abandoned with other outcasts on crosses. As Isaiah wrote about him 700 years earlier, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely, he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. … The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is 53:2-6).” If we would draw near to Christ, he waits for us on a modern Calvary in the disguise of contemporary outcasts.
                      • Today’s Gospel is a powerful one to have on this World Day of the Sick, the traditional Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes, in which the whole Church is called to pray for those who are sick and to seek to care for them, just as les malades are lovingly cared for in Lourdes. We see at that beautiful Marian sanctuary that the Lord himself often wills the cure of so many who approach him in faith through his Mother’s intercession, and today we bring to the Lord all those who are sick and have asked us to pray for them.
                      • Today’s Gospel is also a beautiful one to have three days before we begin the Holy Season of Lent. During Lent, each of us is called to approach Jesus with faith, with all our sins that are eating away our soul like Hansen’s disease destroys our flesh and bones, and say, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Jesus wants to say to each of us in return, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Lent is a time of such cleansing. The practice of prayer helps us to overcome the leprosy of egocentrism to put God first. The practice of almsgiving helps us to conquer the leprosy of selfishness and put others ahead of ourselves. The practice of fasting helps us to triumph against the leprosy of pleasure-seeking, of making our bellies our god, so that we can learn how to hunger for what God hungers. It’s a period of purification. Each of us needs to be humble enough and smart enough to recognize our state and come to God so that he, moved with compassion, can stretch out his hand and touch us.
                      • This Gospel also provides perspective on today’s celebration of World Marriage Sunday, annually the second Sunday of February, close to St. Valentine’s Day, when we’re encouraged to focus our attention on the blessing of marriage as the mutual committed love of husband and wife and to thank married couples for all the sacrifices they make to build loving families that are the building block of society and the cells of the Mystical Body of Christ the Church. While we celebrate the gift of marriage and thank God for it, it’s also a day to take note of the various threats to marriage. The same evil one who tried to sabotage the marriage of Adam and Eve at the beginning goes after every marriage. And there are various ways marriages, and those in marriages, can become leprotic. The great leprosy is lust, which turns love from mutual self-giving to reciprocal utilitarianism and harmonious hedonisms. Many with the vocations to marriage never make it because their heart has been eaten away by porn and various sexual sins. Others within marriage give in to sins against fidelity like adultery, or against indissolubility like easy divorce, or against fruitfulness like contraception. Even the very notion of marriage can be eaten away by culture and the courts, making marriage a husbandless, wifeless, or intentionally childless institution. In the context of all of these soul-eating bacteria, this weekend we go before Jesus the Divine Bridegroom and beg, “If you wish, you can make us clean, … you can purify our eyes and hearts and homes and marriages.” Jesus wants to give us the gift of chastity, of purity of heart, of reverence for his image and others, so that human love may be truly loving.
                      • We see in today’s Gospel scene that Jesus doesn’t just say magic words to the leper, heal him, and then let him do whatever he pleased. Like with every healing, he wanted to lead him to greater faith. For that, he needed the leper’s grateful and trusting cooperation. Yet we see what happened in the Gospel. As soon as the leper got what he wanted, he started to do his own thing. Jesus told him sternly that, except for going to a levitical priest to fulfill the requirements of the Mosaic law to be reintegrated into society, “See that you tell no one anything.” Jesus well knew that if news of the miracle became widespread, everyone would be coming to him first as a free medical doctor and secondly as the long-awaited Messiah whom they would interpret in political terms, as someone who would boot the Romans and reinstitute a Davidic temporal kingdom. Jesus wanted to avoid those misconceptions because he had come not as a new political candidate or as a new Hippocrates but as a Savior. The former leper’s response to Jesus’ stern warning, however, was to ignore it totally. St. Mark says, “The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. Jesus remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere,” exactly validating Jesus’ concerns that underlined his warning and command. While the man was cured of the leprosy of his skin and body parts, he wasn’t cured of the leprosy of a partially hardened heart. He likely thought he had justification for doing so: after all, Jesus had given him the greatest gift of his life and what would it hurt, he probably convinced himself, publicly to praise him for it and become, though the process, a celebrity himself?
                      • The leprosy of a partially hardened heart — a heart that hears the Lord’s voice but responds selectively, according to our own desires, needs, and categories — can affect anyone, including us. We may listen attentively and put into practice Jesus’ words about praying always but harden our heart to his words about confessing our sins to those whom he has sent with the power to forgive and retain sins in his name. We may seek to enflesh his words about crossing the road to help someone in need when we feel like it but harden our hearts to Jesus’ word about welcoming strangers like immigrants as we would welcome him. We may faithfully keep the commandment to honor our parents but violate his command to forgive our siblings 70 times 7 times. If God speaks to us a word we want to hear, then we’ll do it eagerly; but if the Lord challenges us to do something we don’t want to do, often we’ll ignore God’s voice and listen to our own. Therefore, a real litmus test for us to see whether, out of the gratitude we have for having been cured by Jesus or never having been sick in the first place, is how we respond to what he commands us today at the end of Mass. He won’t tell us, like he commanded the healed leper, “See that you tell no one anything.” Rather, he will reiterate the great commission and instruct us, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” He wants us to pass on the Gospel with far greater enthusiasm that fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers are going to be cheering their lungs out during tonight’s Super Bowl. Jesus wants us to share with others the same healing Gospel he gives us, the same truth that will set us free, the same words of eternal life that will help us rise from sin and death. He will reach out his hand to touch us and cleanse us — but he wants us not to let go of his hand, but to journey with him in holiness each day, as we seek to do everything, eating, drinking and beyond, for God’s glory. To imitate Saint Paul, Saint Francis, Saint Martin, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Saint Vincent, Saint Damien and Saint Marianne, as they imitated Christ, so that others after us may imitate us in our faithfully going to Christ to be made clean and then going out to announce the Gospel with our words and the way we respond to Christ in disguise who says to us, “I was ill and your cared for me.”

                        •  

                        The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                        Reading I
                        Lv 13:1-2, 44-46

                        The LORD said to Moses and Aaron,

                        “If someone has on his skin a scab or pustule or blotch
                        which appears to be the sore of leprosy,
                        he shall be brought to Aaron, the priest,
                        or to one of the priests among his descendants.
                        If the man is leprous and unclean,
                        the priest shall declare him unclean
                        by reason of the sore on his head.

                        “The one who bears the sore of leprosy

                        shall keep his garments rent and his head bare,
                        and shall muffle his beard;
                        he shall cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’
                        As long as the sore is on him he shall declare himself unclean,
                        since he is in fact unclean.
                        He shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp.”

                        Responsorial Psalm
                        Ps 32:1-2, 5, 11

                        R. (7) I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.

                        Blessed is he whose fault is taken away,
                        whose sin is covered.
                        Blessed the man to whom the LORD imputes not guilt,
                        in whose spirit there is no guile.
                        R. I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.
                        Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
                        my guilt I covered not.
                        I said, “I confess my faults to the LORD,”
                        and you took away the guilt of my sin.
                        R. I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.
                        Be glad in the LORD and rejoice, you just;
                        exult, all you upright of heart.
                        R. I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.

                        Reading II
                        1 Cor 10:31—11:1

                        Brothers and sisters,

                        Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do,
                        do everything for the glory of God.
                        Avoid giving offense, whether to the Jews or Greeks or
                        the church of God,
                        just as I try to please everyone in every way,
                        not seeking my own benefit but that of the many,
                        that they may be saved.
                        Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.

                        Alleluia
                        Lk 7:16

                        R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                        A great prophet has arisen in our midst,
                        God has visited his people.
                        R. Alleluia, alleluia.

                        Gospel
                        Mk 1:40-45

                        A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said,

                        “If you wish, you can make me clean.”
                        Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand,
                        touched him, and said to him,
                        “I do will it. Be made clean.”
                        The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.
                        Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once.

                        He said to him, “See that you tell no one anything,

                        but go, show yourself to the priest
                        and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed;
                        that will be proof for them.”

                        The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter.

                        He spread the report abroad
                        so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly.
                        He remained outside in deserted places,
                        and people kept coming to him from everywhere.

                        The post Imitating Christ and the Saints in Loving Even Outcasts, Sixth Sunday (B), February 11, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                        22 min
                      • The Five Stages to Growing in Faith, Columbia Catholic Ministry Retreat, February 10, 2024

                        Fr. Roger J. Landry and FOCUS Missionaries

                        The Five Stages to Growing in Faith
                        Spring Semester 2024 Columbia Catholic Ministry Retreat
                        Notre Damę Church, Manhattan and the Thomas Merton Institute
                        February 10, 2024

                         

                        The first conference by FOCUS Missionary Anne Bloomer on Encountering Jesus Christ was unfortunately not recorded.

                        To listen to the second conference by FOCUS Missionary Liam Coulter on Conversion, please click below: 

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Coulter_Conversion_1.mp3

                         

                        To listen to the homily by Father Landry on the retreat within the context of the Fifth Saturday in Ordinary Time, Year II, please click below:

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Homily_1.mp3

                         

                        To listen to the third conference by FOCUS Missionary Dan Tully on Discipleship, please click below: 

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Tully_Discipleship_1.mp3

                         

                        To listen to the fourth conference by FOCUS Missionary Grace Klein on Communion, please click below: 

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Klein_Communion_1.mp3

                         

                        To listen to the final conference by Fr. Roger Landry on Mission, please click below: 

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Landry_Mission_1.mp3

                        The post The Five Stages to Growing in Faith, Columbia Catholic Ministry Retreat, February 10, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                        47 min
                      • Jesus’ Helping Us To Grow In Our Communion With Him and Others, Fifth Saturday (II), February 10, 2024

                        Fr. Roger J. Landry

                        Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
                        Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
                        Memorial of St. Scholastica
                        Campus Retreat on The Five Stages to Grow in Faith
                        February 10, 2024
                        1 Kings 12:26-32.13:33-34, Ps 106, Mk 8:1-10

                         

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

                        https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Homily_1.mp3

                         

                        The following points were attempted in the homily: 

                        • Today, as we enter more deeply into the theme of our retreat on the Five Stages to Growing in Faith, we see in the Gospel how the Lord Jesus seeks to help his disciples to grow in their communion with him. They had already encountered Jesus, experienced a conversion from their previous way of life, and begun to follow him, as he journeyed teaching, preaching, healing and exorcising throughout Galilee and Judea not to mention the pagan territories of Tyre, Sidon and the Decapolis. Today in the Gospel we see how he wishes to advance them in mercy, so that they might experience a true communion with others and a mission to take personal responsibility for their welfare. The crowds who were listening to Jesus for three days had nothing to eat. Jesus told his closest followers, “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat.” His heart was exploding with mercy for the people and he didn’t want to send them home hungry, lest, famished, they not make it. The disciples objected, “Where can anyone can get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place?” They were right. Many supermarkets today wouldn’t even have enough food to feed 4000 families. In the ancient middle east, there wouldn’t even have been enough bread. But Jesus didn’t want to allow his disciples to exempt them from responsibility. He wanted communion with him and, in him, with others. “How many loves do you have?,” he asked. They had only seven and a few fish. Jesus had the crowd sit down, he took the loaves and fish they had brought him, gave thanks, blessed them, broke them and gave them to the disciples to distribute. Every one ate until he or she was full. There were seven baskets left over, one for every original loaf. Jesus could have worked the miracle so that there would not be a crumb remaining, but he worked it so that the seven who had sacrificed a loaf would each receive a basket back, a reminder of Jesus’ promise to return to us a hundred fold. The lesson learned that day was about true merciful love of neighbor, true communion with their plight, and our mission to help Jesus care for them. We may not have have everything we need, but Jesus asks us, like he asked them, what we have, and wants us to give him back what he has bestowed on us so that he can multiply those gifts to care for a world that still hungers for bread, but hungers for far more than bread: that hungers for him and for the outpouring of his life, light and love. Just as Jesus helped his disciples then to grow in faith, so he seeks to help us. He wants us to look out at the world, beginning with our fellow students on campus and those around Morningside, with his mercy, and to make a commitment to use whatever gifts we have to promote a true encounter with him, so that having met him, they might be converted by and through his mercy, learn from him, enter into communion with him and us and be so transformed that they begin to have their hearts, too, moved with pity for others.
                        • While Jesus is calling us to such grown in faith, from encounter to mission, from meeting God to trying to bring others to God, there are others who are seeking to distance us from God. We see that in today’s first reading with the infernal figure of Jeroboam. Yesterday at daily Mass the Church had us ponder how Jeroboam, whom Solomon had in charge of his labor force, was met by the prophet Ahijah, who tore his new cloak into 12 pieces and told Jeroboam that ten of those pieces, representing the ten tribes of Israel, would be given to him when Solomon’s kingdom would be divided as a result of Solomon’s fostering of idolatry. Solomon, we remember, had been given at 18 — the age of a college freshman — the most “wise and understanding heart” of all time and had built the Temple of the Lord. But eventually, he gave in to lust, his heart was corrupted, and he started to build temples to the pagan gods of his 700 wives and 300 concubines. Rather than leading people to God, he had begun to lead people away from God, to break the first and the greatest commandment. Jeroboam had been chosen by the Lord to rule the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel precisely because of Solomon’s idolatry. And yet, as we see today, despite the Lord’s trust, promise and help, Jeroboam thought to himself, “The kingdom will return to David’s house” if the people he was ruling returned to worshipping at the Temple of Jerusalem. They would return not to God, he thought in his politically corrupted musings, but to Rehoboam, David’s grandson and Solomon’s son through an Ammonite wife. And because of his ego and his paranoid sense of self-preservation, Jeroboam led his people into idolatry just like God had condemned Solomon for doing. Jeroboam said, “If now this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem, the hearts of this people will return to their master, Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me.” So he decided to change their deity, their temple, their rites, and their priests. Instead of the one true God who had chosen him, he made golden calves. Instead of the Temple where God’s presence dwelt, he built two shrines, one in Dan at the northernmost part of the kingdom along the Jordan River above the Sea of Galilee, and one in Bethel, at the southernmost part of the kingdom a short distance north of Jerusalem. Instead of the feasts God set up, he established his own. And instead of the levites, the priests God had chosen, he allowed anyone who wanted to be a priest to be commissioned. And the people were led away by him from the true God and the temple, the feasts and the priests God himself had established.
                        • We might think that this is just a terrible thing that happened 920-930 years before Christ, but what Jeroboam did in drawing people away from God happens in every age. There are many rulers who have sought to suppress worship of the true God in order to advance their political objectives. Think of what happened to the Jews during the time of Antioches Epiphanes IV or the Christians during the 13 ferocious anti-Christian persecutions between 64-313 AD. Think about what happened to the Japanese Christians at the beginning of the 1600s or the Christians in communist countries last century and the Chinese, North Korean, and Cuban governments still today. There have been many Jeroboams over the course of history! But we also need to be aware of the more subtle ways that the same idolatry is promoted among us today. Pope Francis has said repeatedly that we are living now in a new age of the worship of the Golden Calf. “The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35),” he wrote in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, “has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.” So many in our culture have made money a god. The easiest way to prove that, as I often say, is that if I were giving away a million dollars this morning to everyone who came here to this retreat — or even just having a free raffle for one million dollars to one winner — we all know that this chapel, this entire part of the city, would be filled to overflowing. And yet we’re giving away God and far fewer come. There are more people in malls on Sundays than there are in houses of worship. Many Catholics choose to put in overtime on Sunday for time-and-a-half even if it means missing the worship of God. Likewise many have substituted worship at the true temple for false worship. One of the newest temples built by our culture’s false worship of mammon and celebrity are sports stadiums, where 75,000 can go on Sunday to worship athletes. I love sports and there’s nothing wrong with being a fan, but we have to admit candidly that many people have turned sports into a new religion and worship athletes on Sunday more than God, as we will see tomorrow, when more Catholics will watch the Super Bowl than come to adore God. Similarly, there has been a substitution of the true religious rites with different feasts, again for the most part driven by the worship of the golden calf. At Christmas time, many are led to prioritize trees, tinsel, mistletoes, fat white-bearded men and wrapping paper more over the One wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger. At Easter, many kids are thinking far more about bunnies, chocolate, plastic eggs and jelly beans than they do the Risen Lord Jesus. It’s not that Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies are necessarily idolatrous — they’re not — but when they substitute for true worship, they’re harmful, and many people have been led astray. And we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s also an attempt to change the priesthood God has established. Jeroboam allowed anyone who wanted to become a priest to become one, as if the vocations came from desire and not from God. Today there are many who are trying to change the priesthood, severing it from apostolic succession and the Sacrament of Holy Orders, altering priests’ being ordained in the person of Jesus the Bridegroom or priests’ conformity to Jesus’ chaste celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. At the same time, many in our culture have established a different type of priesthood altogether, turning instead to psychiatrists, or to self-help gurus as the ones with the capacity to lead us to happiness, holiness, and some form of heaven rather than those given by God. Today as we think about true or implicit Jeroboams, we should think about the larger point about whether we draw people toward aor away from the Lord.  There are many who outwardly are ordinary, good people, but who when a family member begins to prioritize God, to put God first, by praying more, or coming to Bible studies, or getting more involved in charitable work, resist, because they get jealous. There are also those who give ordinary scandal leading others away, those who put work ahead of God and show others that money is more important to worship, or those who have time for streaming services but not for prayer, or those who teach that we can pick and choose what commandments we want to follow. These are all those who follow in the line of Jeroboam. Today is an opportunity for us to examine the type of life we are indeed living and whether we are in fact leading people to God, helping people to remain where they are, or even leading them away from God by design or de facto by our actions.
                        • Today the Church celebrates someone who not just led many women to encounter God, to convert, become Jesus’ disciple, living in communion, and give their lives praying for the mission Christ entrusted to the Church, but someone who also led one of the greatest saints of all time to conversion and the importance of communion. Saint Scholastica, who died on this day in 542, has led centuries of Benedictine sisters — and through them, so many others — to God. But I’d like to focus on how she led her brother, Saint Benedictine — one of the greatest saints of all time, the founder of western monasticism, a patron of Europe — more deeply to God. Her brother St. Benedict would come to visit her only once a year even though she lived close by. He was so focused on his ora et labora, his prayer and work, that he really didn’t love his sister in deeds and allow God to lead each of them more to him through their spiritual friendship. It was never enough for St. Scholastica’s desire for communion. Once when Benedict wanted to cut his annual visit short, Scholastica turned to God for the communion to be continued. It’s one of the most beautiful stories in hagiography. I quote from Saint Gregory the Great’s account: “Scholastica, the sister of Saint Benedict, had been consecrated to God from her earliest years. She was accustomed to visiting with her brother once a year. He would come down to meet her at a place on the monastery property, not far outside the gate. One day she came as usual and her saintly brother went with some of his disciples; they spent the whole day praising God and talking of sacred things. As night fell they had supper together. Their spiritual conversation went on and the hour grew late. The holy nun said to her brother: ‘Please do not leave me tonight; let us go on until morning talking about the delights of the spiritual life.’ ‘Sister,’ he replied, ‘what are you saying? I simply cannot stay outside my cell.’ When she heard her brother refuse her request, the holy woman joined her hands on the table, laid her head on them and began to pray. As she raised her head from the table, there were such brilliant flashes of lightning, such great peals of thunder and such a heavy downpour of rain that neither Benedict nor his brethren could stir across the threshold of the place where they had been seated. Sadly he began to complain: ‘May God forgive you, sister. What have you done?’ ‘Well,’ she answered, ‘I asked you and you would not listen; so I asked my God and he did listen. So now go off, if you can, leave me and return to your monastery.’ Reluctant as he was to stay of his own will, he remained against his will. So it came about that they stayed awake the whole night, engrossed in their conversation about the spiritual life. It is not surprising that she was more effective than he, since as John says, God is love, it was absolutely right that she could do more, as she loved more. Three days later, Benedict was in his cell. Looking up to the sky, he saw his sister’s soul leave her body in the form of a dove, and fly up to the secret places of heaven. Rejoicing in her great glory, he thanked almighty God with hymns and words of praise. He then sent his brethren to bring her body to the monastery and lay it in the tomb he had prepared for himself.” We see in this lesson that Benedict just presumed what God would want, but he was mistaken. As Saint Gregory the Great, one of Benedict’s first generations of spiritual sons noticed, St. Scholastica loved God more and Saint Benedict needed to learn from her how to love God better. She led this great giant more profoundly to God. Like St. Scholastica, God wants each of us to offer our loaves and fish lovingly to the Lord and to show everyone else — including great saints, not to mention ordinary popes, bishops, priests, deacons, male religious and lay faithful — how to advance closer to God through loving God and really loving brothers and sisters.
                        • Today through St. Scholastica’s intercession, we ask God to give us the grace not just to grow from encounter through conversion to discipleship, but also to grow in loving communion and mission, to be distinguished, like she was, for lovingly leading other souls to God. In a particular way we ask for the gift of being able to lead them here at Mass, where the Son of God continues to look on us with compassion, to feed us, to incorporate us and our gifts into his self-giving, and to send us out to share his blessings with the Lord. At every Mass Jesus asks us what we have, takes it, changes it, multiplies it, and then sends us to share those gifts with others. The Mass is what the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish points to. In it we have the great multiplication of the “living bread come down from heaven,” that Jesus celebrated not close to the sea but in the Upper Room. The breaking of the unleavened bread in the Last Supper, and how Jesus miraculously transformed it into himself, is what the Church has been distributing ever since, a distribution that continues still today here. Likewise there’s meant to be a multiplication of fish. We’re that fish — caught by “fishers of men” before us with the same bait (Jesus) with whom they were caught by other fishers of men, tracing themselves back all the way to the time of the apostles — and Jesus wants to multiply us. He wants us to “increase and multiply” first by our uniting to him all that he’s previously given us, then by receiving from him in return himself, sending us out to give people the blessing of an encounter with him through us so that they may come to him too. As we prepare to enter into Holy Communion, let us ask Jesus to help us to enter into communion with his compassion on the crowds, enter into communion with each other, and live out to the full the apostolic dimension of the Eucharist.

                          •  

                          The readings for today’s Mass were: 

                          Reading 1
                          1 KGS 12:26-32; 13:33-34
                          Jeroboam thought to himself:
                          “The kingdom will return to David’s house.
                          If now this people go up to offer sacrifices
                          in the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem,
                          the hearts of this people will return to their master,
                          Rehoboam, king of Judah,
                          and they will kill me.”
                          After taking counsel, the king made two calves of gold
                          and said to the people:
                          “You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough.
                          Here is your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.”
                          And he put one in Bethel, the other in Dan.
                          This led to sin, because the people frequented those calves
                          in Bethel and in Dan.
                          He also built temples on the high places
                          and made priests from among the people who were not Levites.
                          Jeroboam established a feast in the eighth month
                          on the fifteenth day of the month
                          to duplicate in Bethel the pilgrimage feast of Judah,
                          with sacrifices to the calves he had made;
                          and he stationed in Bethel priests of the high places he had built.
                          Jeroboam did not give up his evil ways after this,
                          but again made priests for the high places
                          from among the common people.
                          Whoever desired it was consecrated
                          and became a priest of the high places.
                          This was a sin on the part of the house of Jeroboam
                          for which it was to be cut off and destroyed from the earth.
                          Responsorial Psalm
                          PS 106:6-7AB, 19-20, 21-22
                          R. (4a) Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
                          We have sinned, we and our fathers;
                          we have committed crimes; we have done wrong.
                          Our fathers in Egypt
                          considered not your wonders.
                          R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
                          They made a calf in Horeb
                          and adored a molten image;
                          They exchanged their glory
                          for the image of a grass-eating bullock.
                          R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
                          They forgot the God who had saved them,
                          who had done great deeds in Egypt,
                          Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham,
                          terrible things at the Red Sea.
                          R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
                          Gospel
                          MK 8:1-10
                          In those days when there again was a great crowd without anything to eat,
                          Jesus summoned the disciples and said,
                          “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd,
                          because they have been with me now for three days
                          and have nothing to eat.
                          If I send them away hungry to their homes,
                          they will collapse on the way,
                          and some of them have come a great distance.”
                          His disciples answered him, “Where can anyone get enough bread
                          to satisfy them here in this deserted place?”
                          Still he asked them, “How many loaves do you have?”
                          They replied, “Seven.”
                          He ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground.
                          Then, taking the seven loaves he gave thanks, broke them,
                          and gave them to his disciples to distribute,
                          and they distributed them to the crowd.
                          They also had a few fish.
                          He said the blessing over them
                          and ordered them distributed also.
                          They ate and were satisfied.
                          They picked up the fragments left over–seven baskets.
                          There were about four thousand people.
                          He dismissed the crowd and got into the boat with his disciples
                          and came to the region of Dalmanutha.

                          The post Jesus’ Helping Us To Grow In Our Communion With Him and Others, Fifth Saturday (II), February 10, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

                          32 min

                        About Catholic Preaching

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

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