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By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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October 29, 2023The Most Important Thing on the Exam of Life, Thirtieth Sunday (A), October 29, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
October 29, 2023
Ex 22:20-26, Ps 18:2-4.47.51, 1 Thess 1:5-10; Mt 22:34-40

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.29.23_CCM_Mass_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
By the time students get admitted to Columbia, whether by brilliance, long hours of study, or both, most have become superb in acing exams, writing papers and excelling in all other areas of evaluation. While standards, competition and workloads are generally higher here, making top marks more challenging, most continue to do well. Today, in the Gospel, Jesus speaks to us about what excellence in life really means. And as we prepare in the upcoming month of November to ponder prayerfully the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and the definitive self-exclusion from God we call hell — Jesus our Savior, like the greatest teacher of all time he is, wants to prepare us to ace the one test that really matters, the final exam of human life. He tells us ahead of time what’s going to be on this open book examination and hopes to inspire us now to prepare for it better than even we prepare for the most antagonistic doctoral defenses. So let’s given him our full attention.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus was himself being tested by the chief priests and elders of the people in the Temple area. They were plotting against him because of his having cleansed the Temple after he had triumphantly entered the holy city of Jerusalem. After he sought to summon them to conversion by the parables of the Two Sons, the Corrupt Tenants, and the Wedding Banquet, which we’ve heard over the last month, they plotted to trap him in speech, first by the Pharisees’ and Herodians’ asking him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, then by the Sadducees’ asking him about the resurrection through a story of a woman who had successively married seven brothers, and today by a scribe’s asking him which commandment is the greatest.
Because we’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times to the young scholar’s question, we can think that it is basically a query fit for a second-grade catechism test. In fact, in context, it was far more like a 100 mile-per-hour curve ball that started directed at a batter’s head. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest and most important was something that the scholars of the law had found challenging for centuries. Jesus’ answer came from what God had inspired Moses to teach the Jewish people after God had rescued them from Pharaoh. From that point forward, faithful Jews have recited it every day: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord, our God, is Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus changes a little what he had had Moses say 13 centuries before. He uses heart, soul and “mind,” stressing, it seems, that the scholar and his other interrogators needed to learn how to love with their mind, rather than use it for evil, as they were doing right then trying to entrap him. He also uses the second person singular, to stress that he was speaking not just in general to a theoretical question, but summoning the very scholar of the law who asked him the question not just to know the answer but live it. Notice that Jesus didn’t say that the most important commandment was to believe in God. The most important thing was to let that faith in God overflow into action. He makes plain that loving God with all we are and have is not just the most crucial thing we need to do in life but the way by which we most grow in the image of God who is love. Jesus’ reply emphasizes that it’s not enough to love God a little, or with half, most of, or even almost all of our mind, heart, soul and strength. God gives us himself, he gives us his grace, precisely so that we can love him with as close as possible to 100 percent of all we are and have. He gives us his own love to make it possible for us to love like him, to sacrifice for himlike he sacrificed for us.
Through Moses, God had commanded faithful Jews to ground their whole life on this command. We read in the Book of Deuteronomy, God said, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9). Even though they recited these words when they awoke and went to bed, even though they made leather pouch called a phylactery to contain these words as an emblem on their forehead, another leather box called a tefillim with the same words to wrap around their non-dominant forearm, and a tube called a mezuzah with the words that they would install next to their front door frame, they still hadn’t fully realized its supremacy and its relevance to the very situations like they had in the temple area with Jesus, the God-man standing and speaking in front of them.
Jesus didn’t, however, stop there. He cared too much about his interlocutors. He knew that if he spoke just about the love of God, many, including his interrogators, would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us can be tempted to think we love God by the simple fact that we don’t hate him, or acknowledge him, or revere him and or have warm sentiments of grateful affection toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God. Since love means idem velle, idem nolle, wanting the same things and rejecting the same things, Jesus wanted to help them learn that to love God means to love what and whom he loves. This was obviously a particular issue for the young scholar who thought he loved God while he was at that very moment slyly trying to trip up Jesus.
So Jesus added something else, unsolicited and expected, a twist that the scholar of the law and those cheering him on needed to hear. Jesus said that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest and most important: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18 ). The clear index of how we love God, Jesus says, is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. This, too, has to be made concrete, because we can think we love our neighbor by the simple fact we’re not hating or harming our neighbor. Jesus calls us to love ourselves and then to love our neighbor as ourselves. That means to care for your neighbor the way we care for ourselves, to do to our neighbor what we do and would want done to ourselves, and to put all our mind, heart, soul and strength into it, just like we’re summoned to give God. Just as we care for ourselves and strive to stay healthy, fed and hydrated, and so much more, Jesus wants us to concern ourselves to the same degree with our neighbor’s wellbeing. During the Last Supper, however, Jesus would make the connection between our love for God and our neighbor even more explicit. He would say, not, “Love me as I have loved you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). No longer would authentic self-love be the standard for the way we care for our neighbor, and not even would our love for God be the metric, but Jesus’ love for us would be the benchmark. We see this illustrated powerfully after the Resurrection. When Jesus asked Simon Peter three times whether he loved him and three times Simon said he did, Jesus told him, “Feed my sheep,” “Feed my lambs,” and “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for the Lord would be shown in the way that he loved all those whom God has entrusted to his care. In St. Luke’s version of Jesus’ response to a similar question by a scribe, when the lawyer, to justify himself, followed up by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?,” the one whom we’re supposed to love as ourselves, Jesus gave the Parable of the Good Samaritan, stressing that everyone is in our neighborhood, that we’re called to cross the street to care for others in their need, to sacrifice our mind, heart, soul and strength, and our time, money, and convenience to care for others like a loving mother cares for a sick child. And St. John the Apostle, who was present when Jesus spoke the words of today’s Gospel, drew the obvious conclusion for the members of the early Church when he wrote, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20-21).
So Jesus calls us to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and as Jesus loves us and our neighbor. When people look at you, or me, or any other member of the Catholic Church, they should see — they have a right to see — someone who has given 100 percent of his heart, 100 percent of her soul, 100 percent of the mind and strength to God and is seeking to love others as God loves us and them. They should see a disciple and apostle who never thinks that he or she can love God or others “enough,” but rather someone who is so smitten with the love of God who loved us first that he or she becomes inflamed with that love for God and others.
What does that mean practically? If we’re truly loving God with all our heart, we will have a great hunger to spend time with him in prayer, for those in love always seek to spend time with the one loved. It means we’ll be faithful to him out of love, in things big and small, just like spouses and best friends are faithful to each other. If we’re loving him with all our mind, we’ll be using the gift of our intelligence to get to know him, his word, and his teaching better, so that we can understand him and help others better to come to know him. If we’re loving him with all of our soul, then we’ll be seeking to keep that soul full of the love of him and clean, having regular recourse to the Sacrament of Confession whereby he’ll forgive us for any infidelity that sullies the soul. If we’re loving him with all our strength, then we’ll be making the effort to put him first, to prioritize him over other priorities, to be willing to make even hard sacrifices for him who laid down his life to sav ours. And if we’re genuinely loving our neighbor, then we will be seeking to treat our neighbor with the same concrete actions of love with which Jesus would treat our neighbor and with which we would want to treat Jesus. These are, indeed, high standards, but Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own. He fills us with his love and sends us the Holy Spirit to make this standard possible. But we’ve got to want it, we’ve got to will it, we’ve got to make the effort to respond to that help to live up to what he summons us.
There’s one other part of Jesus’ response that we shouldn’t miss, because it’s super important for us to know about the Christian moral life in general. It’s a sentence I have found to be one of the most helpful in the entire Gospel when I teach moral theology to young and old alike: Jesus says, “On these two commandments,” of love of God and love of neighbor, “hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, all 613 commands that God revealed in the Old Testament can be summed up in the love of God and love of others. This is so different from the way many, especially young people, often look at the commandments. Many can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. They can think that God and the Church fundamentally give us a litany of “thou shalt nots,” rather than a list of the ways we are able to grow in love. We see this confusion often with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality or the fifth commandment prohibiting the taking of innocent human life. Some that they violate these commandments precisely out of love, saying love is the justification for their sexual sins and even abortion. But the commandments are all expressions of love for God and others and to violate them is to violate love. We can do a quick gloss on the Decalogue to show the point. How can we ever claim to love God if we’re worshiping idols or abusing his name? How can we claim to love him if we don’t come to worship him on the day he calls his own? How can we love our parents if we dishonor them? How can we love others if we hate or kill them — or attack people at kibbutzes and parties, or bomb their housing complexes to rubble, or attack them in bowling alleys and bars, as we’ve seen lately in the news? How can we love our spouse — present or future — if we are unfaithful? How can we truly love another if we use the person for our sexual pleasure and risk their eternal salvation? How can we love someone if we’re stealing from them, or lying to or about them? How can we really love someone if we’re envious rather than happy about the good things and relationships they have in their lives? The law of God is one that precisely trains us how to love. Every violation of God’s commandments is a violation of love of God or love of neighbor. Therefore, whenever God tells us “Thou shalt not…,” the prohibition is to help us to preserve love. It is like a signpost keeping us on the pathway of true love. God out of love gave us not only each of the ten commandments, but also the rest of his moral teaching, like the Beatitudes and the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. And Jesus makes keeping them a criterion for genuine love of him. That’s why during the Last Supper he told us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15) and later “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (Jn 15:17).
And so are we going to excel, as Christians, in love of God and of others? St. John asked the first Christians, “If anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. … He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” This is something that Moses pointed out in today’s first reading that the Israelites were not doing. They were oppressing resident aliens, abusing widows and orphans, charging exorbitant interest rates on loans or demanding indispensable pawns in exchange. Doubtless those who were doing so had what they thought were justifications. But God said that their behavior couldn’t be justified. It needed to change. We need to be on guard against the same type of hardening of heart, because that lack of charity can grow into activities and even atrocities that eventually dominate the evening news.
We’ve seen lately when the world lives by a different set of standards than those to which Our Lord is calling us in today’s Gospel. Three weeks ago yesterday, Hamas terrorists left Gaza and killed 1,400 people, kidnapping 220 others. Rather than loving their neighbor, they brutally murdered vast multitudes in kibbutzes, families in their homes and young people in parties. And yet many, as we saw yesterday in Brooklyn, or even a couple of weeks ago on campus, many have been cheering on and justifying this sacrilege against God and against those made in his image, such that Jews in Crown Heights on the sabbath were told not to go outside lest they suffer violence from mobs. Since Hamas’ strike, Israel has been bombing Gaza, attacks that have intensified over the last couple of days, leveling so many buildings in the city and killing over 7,000 people, while many look the other way, claiming that the end of eliminating terrorists like Hamas justifies even the immoral means of killing thousands of non-combatants. Loving God and neighbor can never justify mass murder of our neighbor as collateral damage. In Lewiston, Maine, this week, home to one of New England’s most beautiful Churches, a gunman went into a bowling alley and restaurant and took the lives of 18 of his neighbors, and shot and injured another 13.
This morning, when I celebrated Mass for the Missionaries of Charity in the Bronx, I reminded the Sisters of Saint Teresa of Calcutta what their foundress prophetically had said. “Today, if we have no peace,” she said, “it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other — that man, that woman, that child, is my brother or sister. If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we should still need tanks and generals?” She said that we need to confront the evil at its source. “The biggest disease today,” she said elsewhere, “is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside, the victim of exploitation, corruption, poverty, and disease.” After the diagnosis, she gave the prescription: “If we really want to conquer the world, we will not be able to do it with bombs or with other weapons of destruction. Let us conquer the world with our love. Let us interweave our lives with bonds of sacrifice and love, and it will be possible for us to conquer the world.”
That’s Jesus’ way. That’s the way of the saints, whom we will be celebrating in a particular way on All Saints Day this Wednesday, which is a holy day of obligation. By our Baptism, we’re all called to be not just good people, but saints. Sanctity is the perfection of love. The saints are those who strive with the help of God’s grace to love God with all they’ve got and to love their neighbor concretely in deeds. In the twilight of life, Saint John of the Cross once wrote, we will be judged by love, on how we’ve prioritized God and how we’ve cared for him in the distressing disguise of someone hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need. St. Paul wrote that even if we have the faith to move mountains or be martyred but don’t have loved, we are just making noise. In today’s second reading, taken from his First Letter to the Thessalonians, he stresses, “You became imitators of us and of the Lord.” We are called to follow Christ and the saints in the perfection of love, to make resolutions to prioritize the love of God and to commit to loving our neighbor the way God loves us, starting with the most proximate neighbors, those we live and interact with on a daily basis, but extending even to those who have made themselves our enemies. The question for us is: Do we believe in Jesus enough to follow this way of love, as St. Paul did, as St. Teresa of Calcutta did?
The way we’re strengthened to love God and our neighbor this way is at Mass. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his beautiful 2006 encyclical on the love of God and neighbor, “In sacramental communion, I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants. … Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. … Love of God and love of neighbor are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. … Eucharistic communion includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist that does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.” As I like to emphasize, when Jesus through the priest at Mass says the words, “Do this in memory of me!,” the “this” is not just the celebration of the rite of the New Passover, which is the Mass; it’s also his call to break our bodies, to shed our sweat and blood, out of love for others. We can have no greater love for our neighbor than to give of ourselves out of love for them in life and in death. All the law and the prophets hang on this two-fold commandment of love, and therefore the Eucharist, which helps us to put both into practice, is the synthesis of everything Jesus has taught. Living this reality is the means to respond to all the violence and lack of love for God and others that plagues our world. Living a truly Eucharistic life is the path toward holiness, happiness and heaven. It’s also the way for us to pass the final exam of life and come to experience forever the eternal communion of love, with God and others, that is the communion of saints. May Jesus whom we’re about to receive so change us in holy communion that others, in meeting us, may readily see those who, with all their mind, heart, soul and strength, are striving to make our lives a commentary on Jesus’ two-fold command of love, as witnesses to Jesus who seeks to love God the Father and others through, with and in us.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Ex 22:20-26
Thus says the LORD:
“You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.
You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.
If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry.
My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword;
then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.
“If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people,
you shall not act like an extortioner toward him
by demanding interest from him.
If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body.
What else has he to sleep in?
If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51
R. (2) I love you, Lord, my strength.
I love you, O LORD, my strength,
O LORD, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer.
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
My God, my rock of refuge,
my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold!
Praised be the LORD, I exclaim,
and I am safe from my enemies.
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
The LORD lives and blessed be my rock!
Extolled be God my savior.
You who gave great victories to your king
and showed kindness to your anointed.
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
Reading 2
1 Thes 1:5c-10
Brothers and sisters:
You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake.
And you became imitators of us and of the Lord,
receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit,
so that you became a model for all the believers
in Macedonia and in Achaia.
For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth
not only in Macedonia and in Achaia,
but in every place your faith in God has gone forth,
so that we have no need to say anything.
For they themselves openly declare about us
what sort of reception we had among you,
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.
Alleluia
Jn 14:23
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, says the Lord,
and my Father will love him and we will come to him.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mt 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him,
“You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
The post The Most Important Thing on the Exam of Life, Thirtieth Sunday (A), October 29, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
33 min
October 29, 2023The Most Important Thing We Have To Do, Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), October 29, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
October 29, 2023
Ex 22:20-26, Ps 18:2-4.47.51, 1 Thess 1:5-10; Mt 22:34-40

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.29.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Our world seems to be convulsing with hatred, violence and destruction. Three weeks ago yesterday, Hamas terrorists left Gaza and killed 1,400 people kidnapping 220 others. And yet many, yesterday in Brooklyn, a couple of weeks ago at Columbia, and in many other places have been cheering the violence on, claiming such attacks on the innocent are justified. Since Hamas’ strike, Israel has been bombing Gaza, attacks that have intensified over the last couple of days, leveling many buildings in the city and killing over 7,000, while many look the other way, claiming that the end of eliminating terrorists like Hamas justifies even the immoral means of killing thousands of non-combatants. In Ukraine, the war continues. In Lewiston, Maine, this week, site of one of New England’s most beautiful Churches, a gunman went into a bowling alley and restaurant and took the lives of 18, injuring another 13.
Against this type of darkness and evil, St. Teresa of Calcutta spoke prophetic words. “Today, if we have no peace,” she said, “it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other — that man, that woman, that child, is my brother or sister. If everyone could see the image of God in his neighbor, do you think we should still need tanks and generals?” She said that we need to confront the evil at its source. “The biggest disease today,” she said elsewhere, “is not leprosy or cancer or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for, deserted by everybody. The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbor who lives at the roadside, the victim of exploitation, corruption, poverty, and disease.” After the diagnosis, she gave the prescription: “If we really want to conquer the world, we will not be able to do it with bombs or with other weapons of destruction. Let us conquer the world with our love. Let us interweave our lives with bonds of sacrifice and love, and it will be possible for us to conquer the world.”
Her words show the crucial relevance of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel. Jesus was being tested by the chief priests and elders of the people in the Temple area. They were plotting against him because of his having cleansed the Temple. After he sought to summon them to conversion by the parables of the Two Sons, the Corrupt Tenants, and the Wedding Banquet, they plotted to trap him in speech, first by the Pharisees’ and Herodians’ asking him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, then by the Sadducees’ asking him about the woman who had married seven brothers, and today by a Scribe’s asking him which commandment is the greatest.
Because we’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times, we can think that it was a question fit for a catechism test for second graders. In fact, in context, it was far more like a doctoral dissertation interrogation. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest and most important was something that the scholars of the law had found challenging for centuries. Jesus’ answer came from what God had inspired Moses to teach the Jewish people after God had rescued them from Pharaoh. From that point forward, faithful Jews have recited it every day: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus changes a little what he had had Moses say 13 centuries before. He uses heart, soul and mind, stressing, it seems, to love God with their mind, rather than use one’s mind, as they were doing right then, to conspire to try to entrap him. He also uses the second person singular, to stress that the particular scholar of the law who asked him the question needed not just to know the answer but to live the answer. Jesus makes clear in his response that loving God with all we are and have is not just the most crucial thing we need to do in life but the way by which we most grow in the image of God who is love by opening ourselves up to his love. The command stresses that it’s not enough to love God a little, or with half, most of, or even almost all of our mind, heart, soul and strength. God gives us himself, he gives us his grace, precisely so that we can love him with as close as possible to 100 percent of all we are and have. He gives us his own love to make it possible for us to love like him, to sacrifice for God with agape like he sacrificed for us.
Through Moses, God had commanded faithful Jews to ground their whole life on this command. “Keep these words,” he said, “that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9). Even though they recited these words when they awoke and went to bed, even though they made a phylactery to hang them down from their hair and put it into a small leather box so that it would be an emblem on their forehead, another wrapped around their non-dominant forearm, and installed them in a mezuzah next to their front door frame, they still hadn’t realized its supremacy and its relevance to situations like they were in with Jesus, the God-man in front of them.
But then Jesus added something else, unsolicited, a twist the scholar of the law didn’t expect. Jesus knew that if he stopped merely with the love of God, many, including his interrogators, would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us think we love God by the simple fact that we don’t hate him, but rather acknowledge him, revere him and have sentiments of grateful affection toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God, because to love him means to love what and whom he loves. And this was particularly an issue for his interlocutor who thought he loved God while he was at that very moment slyly trying to trip up Jesus. So Jesus volunteered that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18 ). The clear index of how we love God, Jesus says, is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. To say love your neighbor as yourself means to care for your neighbor the way you care for yourself, to do to your neighbor what you do to yourself, and to put all your mind, heart, soul and strength into it, just like we’re summoned to give God. During the Last Supper, Jesus would make the connection between our love for God and our neighbor even clearer. There he would say, not, “Love me as I have loved you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). No longer would our love for ourselvesbe the standard for the love of our neighbor, not even would our love for God be the standard, but his love for us would be the metric. When Jesus asked Simon Peter three times after the resurrection whether he loved him and three times Simon said he did, Jesus told him, “Feed my sheep,” “Feed my lambs,” and “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for the Lord would be shown in the way that he loved all those whom God has entrusted to his care. In St. Luke’s version of Jesus’ response to a similar question by a scribe, when the lawyer, to justify himself, followed up by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” whom we’re supposed to love as ourselves, Jesus gave the Parable of the Good Samaritan, stressing that everyone is in our neighborhood, that we’re called to cross the street to care for others in their need, to sacrifice our mind, heart, soul and strength, and our time, money, and convenience to care for others like a loving mother cares for a sick child. And St. John the Apostle, who was present when Jesus spoke the words of Sunday’s Gospel, made the lesson clear for the members of the early Church when he said, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20-21).
So Jesus calls us to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. When people look at you, or me, or any other member of the Catholic Church, they should see — they have a right to see — someone who has given 100 percent of his heart, 100 percent of her soul, 100 percent of the mind to God and is seeking to love others as God loves us and them. They should see someone acting in the person of Christ, as Christ himself would act. They should see a true Missionary of Charity. They should see a disciple and apostle who never thinks that he or she can love God or others “enough,” but rather someone who is so smitten with the love of God who loved us first that he or she becomes inflamed with that love for God and others.
The thing many miss about Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s question is what Jesus says after giving us this two-fold directive of love. By it, he makes love for God and for others very practical and gives us the prism by which to understand not only everything he reveals to us and but also how he calls us, in practice, to love in a manner worthy of our Christian identity. I have found this sentence to be one of the most helpful phrases in the whole Gospel when I teach moral theology to young and old alike: “On these two commandments,” Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, all 613 commands that God revealed in the Old Testament can be summed up in the love of God and love of neighbor. This is so different from the way many often look at the commandments. Many can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. Some claim, especially with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality or the fifth commandment on abortion, that they violate them precisely out of love. But we need to ask ourselves — to do a quick gloss on the Decalogue — how can we ever claim to love God if we’re worshiping idols or misusing his name? How can we claim to love him if we don’t come to worship him on the day he calls his own? How can we love our parents if we dishonor them? How can we love others if we hate or kill them — or attack people at kibbutzes and parties, or bomb their housing complexes to rubble, or attack them in bowling alleys and bars? How could we love our spouse if we are unfaithful? How can we truly love another if we use the person for our sexual pleasure and risk their eternal salvation? How can we love someone if we’re stealing from them, or lying to or about them? How can we really love someone if we’re envious rather than happy about the good things and relationships they have in their lives? The law of God is one that trains us precisely how to love. Every violation of God’s commandments is a violation of love of God or love of neighbor. Therefore, whenever God tells us “Thou shalt not…,” the prohibition is to help us to preserve love. It is like a signpost keeping us on the pathway of true love. God out of love gave us each commandment. That’s why Jesus during the Last Supper could tell us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15) and later “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (Jn 15:17).
So if we’re truly loving God with all we are and have, we’ll have a deep dedication to prayer, to wanting to spend time with him, just like we love spending time with those we love. We’ll have a great enthusiasm and hunger for being with him at the Mass. We’ll love him with our mind and engage in sacred study, so that we can begin to think as he does rather than as human beings do. We’ll try to love him with all our soul and regularly cleanse the soul of anything unfit for God through devout confessions. Similarly, we’ll have a great love for our neighbor. If God loves our neighbors so much that he died on the Cross to save them, how can we withhold love. As St. John asked the first Christians, “But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. … He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” This is something that Moses pointed out in today’s first reading that the Israelites were not doing. They were oppressing resident aliens, abusing widows and orphans, charging exorbitant interest rates on loans or demanding indispensable pawns in exchange. Doubtless those Jews who were doing it had what they thought were justifications. But God said that their behavior couldn’t be justified. It needed to change. We need to be on guard to the same type of hardening of heart, because that lack of charity can grow into activities that eventually make the evening news and many others can begin to justify.
Pope Benedict, in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, wrote about the positive connection between love of God and neighbor and showed us the way to grow in the most important thing we’re called to do. The deceased Holy Father wrote, “Love of neighbor … consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with [the love of] God, an encounter that has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. … Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave. Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbor that the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. … Only my readiness to encounter my neighbor and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbor can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints—consider the example of [Saint] Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbor from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbor are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a ‘commandment’ imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely bestowed experience of love from within, a love that by its very nature must then be shared with others.”
I’d like to make two quick applications from Jesus’ words today. The first is to All Saints Day, which we’ll celebrate this Wednesday. By our Baptism, we’re all called to be not just good people, but saints. Sanctity is the perfection of love. The saints are those who strive with the help of God’s grace to love God with all they’ve got and to love their neighbor concretely in deeds. In the twilight of life, Saint John of the Cross once wrote, we will be judged by love, on how we’ve prioritized God and how we’ve cared for him in the distressing disguise of someone hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need. St. Paul wrote that even if we have the faith to move mountains or be martyred but don’t have loved, we are just making noise. In today’s second reading, taken from his First Letter to the Thessalonians, he stresses, “You became imitators of us and of the Lord.” We are called to follow Christ and the saints in the perfection of love, to make resolutions to prioritize the love of God and to commit to loving our neighbor the way God loves us, starting with the most proximate neighbors, those we live and interact with on a daily basis.
The second application is to the Synod on Synodality, the first phase of which concludes today in the Vatican. The ultimate criterion by which to evaluate the Synod is how it will help those in the Church to learn how to love God and love neighbor in accordance with the truth about God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Listening, accompanying, walking with others in a synodal way cannot be left simply as an exercise in community building, but must be directed toward genuine love for God and others as Christ loves. Some Synod delegates have argued in favor of changing Church teaching and practice with regard to the Sacrament of Holy Orders, worthiness for Holy Communion, sexual morality and other areas. But it’s hard to see how any such proposals would be consistent with loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and loving our neighbor in truth. Jesus showed us real love by dying to take away our sins. We wouldn’t be loving others as he has loved us if, instead of helping others to repent and believe, we essentially blessed and enabled their sins. The fierce two-fold love to which Jesus calls us in the Gospel is the goal of the Church and, therefore, must be the goal of the Synod. As the first phase of the Synod concludes this Sunday, we pray that this will be the fruits.
This two-fold commandment of love finds its highest expression in the Eucharist. Pope Benedict mentioned this when he said, “In sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants. … Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. … Love of God and love of neighbor are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. … Eucharistic communion includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist that does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.”
When Jesus through the priest at Mass says the words, “Do this in memory of me!,” the “this” is not just the celebration of the rite of the New Passover, which is the Mass; it’s also his call to break our bodies, to shed our sweat and blood, out of love for others. We can have no greater love for our neighbor than to give of ourselves out of love for them in life and in death. All the law and the prophets hang on this two-fold commandment of love, and therefore the Eucharist, which helps us to put both into practice, is the synthesis of everything Jesus has taught. Living this reality is the means to respond to all the violence and lack of love for God and others that plagues our world.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Ex 22:20-26
Thus says the LORD:
“You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.
You shall not wrong any widow or orphan.
If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me,
I will surely hear their cry.
My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword;
then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans.
“If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people,
you shall not act like an extortioner toward him
by demanding interest from him.
If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body.
What else has he to sleep in?
If he cries out to me, I will hear him; for I am compassionate.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51
R. (2) I love you, Lord, my strength.
I love you, O LORD, my strength,
O LORD, my rock, my fortress, my deliverer.
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
My God, my rock of refuge,
my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold!
Praised be the LORD, I exclaim,
and I am safe from my enemies.
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
The LORD lives and blessed be my rock!
Extolled be God my savior.
You who gave great victories to your king
and showed kindness to your anointed.
R. I love you, Lord, my strength.
Reading 2
1 Thes 1:5c-10
Brothers and sisters:
You know what sort of people we were among you for your sake.
And you became imitators of us and of the Lord,
receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit,
so that you became a model for all the believers
in Macedonia and in Achaia.
For from you the word of the Lord has sounded forth
not only in Macedonia and in Achaia,
but in every place your faith in God has gone forth,
so that we have no need to say anything.
For they themselves openly declare about us
what sort of reception we had among you,
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.
Alleluia
Jn 14:23
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, says the Lord,
and my Father will love him and we will come to him.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mt 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him,
“You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
The post The Most Important Thing We Have To Do, Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), October 29, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
25 min
October 28, 2023Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 28, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
October 28, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.28.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will speak to us about the single most important thing we need to do in life. If we do everything else but don’t do this, we will not have lived life well. If we do this but don’t get to everything else, we will still have passed the test of life with flying colors.
The consequential conversation happens after the Scribes and Pharisees co-conspired to test Jesus by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?.” We’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times that we can think that the question was a soft ball, but it was really a 100 mph slider. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest and most important was something that the scholars of the law had found challenging for centuries. Jesus’ answer came from what God had inspired Moses to teach the Jewish people after God had rescued them from Pharaoh. From that point forward, faithful Jews have recited it every day: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus changes it a little. He uses heart, soul and mind, stressing, it seems, to love God with their mind, rather than use their mind to conspire, among things, to try to entrap him. He also uses the second person singular, to stress that the particular scholar of the law who asked him the question needed not just to know the answer but to live the answer. Jesus makes clear in his response that loving God with all we are and have is not just the most crucial thing we need to do in life but the way by which we most grow in the image of God who is love by opening ourselves up to his love. The command makes clear that it’s not enough to love God only with some, half, most of, or even almost all of our mind, heart, soul and strength. God gives us himself, he gives us his grace, precisely so that we can love him with as close as possible to 100 percent of all we are and have. He gives us his own love to make it possible for us to love like him, to sacrifice for God with agape like he sacrificed for us.
But then Jesus added something else, unsolicited, a twist the scholar of the law didn’t expect. Jesus knew that if he stopped merely with the love of God, many people would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us think we love God by the simple fact that we acknowledge him, revere him and have feelings of affection and gratitude toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God, because to love him means to love what and whom he loves. And this was particularly an issue for his interlocutor who thought he loved God while he was trying to trip up Jesus, the one in front of him. Jesus volunteered that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18 ). The clear index of how we love God is how we love our neighbor loved by God and made in his image. To say love your neighbor as yourself means to care for your neighbor the way you care for yourself, to do to your neighbor what you do to yourself, and to put your mind, heart, soul and strength into it, just like you would the love of God. During the Last Supper, Jesus would make the connection between our love for God and our neighbor even clearer. There he said, not, “Love me as I have loved you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34; Jn 15:12). No longer would our love for ourselves be the standard for the love of our neighbor, but his love for us would be the standard. When he asked Simon Peter three times after the resurrection whether he loved him and three times Simon said he did, Jesus told him, “Feed my sheep,” “Feed my lambs,” and “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for the Lord would be shown in the way that he loved all those whom God has entrusted to his care. In St. Luke’s version of Jesus’ response to a similar question by a scribe, when the lawyer, to justify himself, followed up by asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?,” the neighbor we’re supposed to love as ourselves, Jesus gave the Parable of the Good Samaritan, stressing that everyone is in our neighborhood, that we’re called to cross the street to care for others in their need, to sacrifice our mind, heart, soul and strength, and our money, time and convenience to care for others like a loving mother cares for a sick child. And St. John, who was present when Jesus spoke the words of Sunday’s Gospel, made the lesson clear for the members of the early Church when he said, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20-21).
The thing many miss about Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s question is what Jesus says after giving us this two-fold directive of love. By it, he makes love for God and for others very practical and gives us the prism by which to understand not only everything he reveals to us and but also how he calls us, in practice, to love in a manner worthy of the calling we have received. I have found this sentence to be one of the most helpful phrases in the whole Gospel when I teach moral theology to young and old alike: “On these two commandments,” Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, all 613 commands that God revealed in the Old Testament can be summed up in the love of God and love of neighbor. This is so different from the way many often look at the commandments. We can view them as restrictive and stifling, rather than liberating. Some can claim, especially with regard to the sixth and ninth commandments concerning human sexuality and the fifth commandment on abortion, that they violate them precisely out of love. But we need to ask ourselves — to do a quick gloss on the Decalogue — how can we ever claim to love God if we’re worshiping idols or misusing his name? How can we claim to love him if we don’t come to worship him on the day he calls his own? How can we love our parents if we dishonor them? How can we love others if we hate or kill them? How could we love our spouse if we are unfaithful? How can we truly love another if we use the person for our sexual pleasure and risk their eternal salvation? How can we love someone if we’re stealing from them, or lying to or about them? How can we really love someone if we’re envious rather than happy about the good things and relationships they have in their lives? The law of God is a law that trains us how to love. Every violation of his commandments is a violation of love of God or love of neighbor. Therefore, whenever God tells us “Thou shalt not…,” the prohibition is to help us to preserve love. It is like a signpost keeping us on the pathway of true love. God out of love gave us each commandment. That’s why Jesus during the Last Supper could tell us, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15) and later “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (Jn 15:17).
I’d like to make two quick applications from Jesus’ consequential conversation with us in the Gospel. The first is to All Saints Day, which we’ll celebrate this Wednesday. By our Baptism, we’re all called to be not just good people, but saints. Sanctity is the perfection of love. The saints are those who strive with the help of God’s grace to love God with all they’ve got and to love their neighbor concretely in deeds. In the twilight of life, Saint John of the Cross once wrote, we will be judged by love, on how we’ve prioritized God and how we’ve cared for him in the distressing disguise of someone hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need. St. Paul wrote that even if we have the faith to move mountains or be martyred but don’t have loved, we are just making noise. As we focus on God’s will for us, our sanctification, this week, it’s a time to make real resolutions to prioritize the love of God with all our heart in prayer and the sacraments, with all our mind in sacred study, with all our soul by a good confession, with all our strength by making sacrifices for him. It’s a time, likewise, to commit ourselves to loving our neighbor the way God loves us, starting with the most proximate neighbors, our family members.
The second application is to the Synod on Synodality, the first phase of which is concluding in the Vatican on Sunday. The ultimate criterion by which to evaluate the Synod is how it will help those in the Church to learn how to love God and love neighbor in accordance with the truth about God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Listening, accompanying, walking with others in a synodal way cannot be left simply as an exercise in community building, but must be directed toward genuine love for God and others as Christ loves. Some Synod delegates have argued in favor of changing Church teaching and practice with regard to the Sacrament of Holy Orders, about worthiness for Holy Communion, or about sexual morality. But it’s hard to see how any of these proposals would be consistent with loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, or loving our neighbor if we would look the other way if they live in a way diametrically opposed to the Gospel. Jesus showed us real love by dying to take away our sins. We wouldn’t be loving others as he has loved us if, instead of helping others to repent and believe, we essentially blessed and enabled their sins. The fierce two-fold love to which Jesus calls us in the Gospel is the goal of the Church and, therefore, must be the goal of the Synod. As the first phase of the Synod concludes this Sunday, we pray that this will be the fruits.
As we prepare for Sunday Mass, let’s ask God for the grace to love him in the Eucharist with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and to help us through communion to learn how to love our neighbor by that same Eucharistic standard. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Mt 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, and one of them,
a scholar of the law tested him by asking,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him,
“You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
The post Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 28, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
October 27, 2023The Signs of the Times and the Christian Plea Bargain, 29th Friday (I), October 27, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
October 27, 2023
Rom 7:18-25, Ps 119, Lk 12:54-59

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.27.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today Jesus speaks about our reading the signs of the times spiritually as well and meticulously as we do meteorologically, to know that all of Christian life is a journey to meet the “Magistrate” and to have us reconcile with God and with others, and do reparation and restitution, as we’re heading toward the court. He urges us to settle, to plea bargain, to plead guilty, before we get to the court and receive the verdict. As St. John Chrysostom would say, now is the time of mercy; later is the time of justice.
Learning how to read the signs of the times is important to see what we need to do with regard to the experience of concupiscence St. Paul describes in today’s first reading. He says, “I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.” Despite the fact that he “take[s] delight in the law of God in my inner self,” he recognized “in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind.” Jesus had warned people of this battle between spirit and flesh, telling him that “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Peter, we know, was willing to die for the Lord, but when push came to shove, he denied even knowing him. St. Paul was himself recognizing this battle between weak flesh and willing spirit. He struggled with it so much that he prayed at the end, “Miserable one that I am? Who will deliver me from this mortal body?” It is a consoling fact for Christians in every age that even great apostles struggled against concupiscence, too.
Before we answer St. Paul’s question about deliverance from concupiscence, we need highlight two things we find in the passage that are key to the Christian moral life. The first is that knowing is not enough. Plato once taught that all that we need to do the good is to know the good. But that’s not true because, like SS. Peter and Paul, we do not do the good we want, but we do the evil we do not want. As much as we say, “Lord, teach me your statutes” and he responds with that instruction, it’s not enough; we also need to win the battle to do what he teaches, having our spirit of obedience triumph over the weakness that makes obedience at times so hard. The second thing we learn is that resolutions alone are enough. We need to set them and strengthen our will, but at the same time, it’s not enough for us to set them; keeping them requires this same triumph over spirit over flesh.
So we come back to the question: “Who will deliver me from this mortal body?” There are three basic answers, one we get from today’s Gospel, and two we’ll get tomorrow, as we enter into one of the most important chapters in the Bible, Romans 8, which was St. Paul’s answer to his interrogative. The first response is prayer. When Jesus told Peter in the Gospel that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, he gave him the medicine for that diagnosis: to pray, that he would not undergo the test. We need to recognize our weakness and similarly turn to the Lord for help. The second is the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised that whenever we ask the Father for anything, he sends the Holy Spirit: “If you who are evil know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” The Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask him for anything. It’s the Holy Spirit, as we’ll be hearing tomorrow and early next week, who helps us to lift up our hearts to the Lord, to set our minds on the things of the Lord, to discern the signs of the times and respond accordingly. The third thing we’ll also hear tomorrow: it’s to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and “put to death,” “mortify,” whatever in us is earthly, liberating ourselves by God’s grace precisely from that domination of concupiscence and the flesh. It’s hard work. It’s the work of a lifetime. But it’s possible by the Holy Spirit’s help!
Today at this Mass the Lord wants to work the great miracle of strengthening our flesh to live according to the Holy Spirit. He sends the Holy Spirit to overshadow us just like he overshadows this altar: the total change of bread and wine into God is a sign of the power of transformation that the Holy Spirit can work likewise within us. As we read the signs of the times, we grasp that not only we’re heading toward the Judge but toward the Sun of Justice, rising with his healing rays, whom we now prepare to receive, bringing interior radiation that can shrink and eliminate the cancer of concupiscence.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ROM 7:18-25A
Brothers and sisters:
I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh.
The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not.
For I do not do the good I want,
but I do the evil I do not want.
Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it,
but sin that dwells in me.
So, then, I discover the principle
that when I want to do right, evil is at hand.
For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self,
but I see in my members another principle
at war with the law of my mind,
taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.
Miserable one that I am!
Who will deliver me from this mortal body?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Responsorial Psalm PS 119:66, 68, 76, 77, 93, 94
R. (68b) Lord, teach me your statutes.
Teach me wisdom and knowledge,
for in your commands I trust.
R. Lord, teach me your statutes.
You are good and bountiful;
teach me your statutes.
R. Lord, teach me your statutes.
Let your kindness comfort me
according to your promise to your servants.
R. Lord, teach me your statutes.
Let your compassion come to me that I may live,
for your law is my delight.
R. Lord, teach me your statutes.
Never will I forget your precepts,
for through them you give me life.
R. Lord, teach me your statutes.
I am yours; save me,
for I have sought your precepts.
R. Lord, teach me your statutes.
Alleluia SEE MT 11:25
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth;
you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 12:54-59
Jesus said to the crowds,
“When you see a cloud rising in the west
you say immediately that it is going to rain–and so it does;
and when you notice that the wind is blowing from the south
you say that it is going to be hot–and so it is.
You hypocrites!
You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky;
why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
“Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?
If you are to go with your opponent before a magistrate,
make an effort to settle the matter on the way;
otherwise your opponent will turn you over to the judge,
and the judge hand you over to the constable,
and the constable throw you into prison.
I say to you, you will not be released
until you have paid the last penny.”
The post The Signs of the Times and the Christian Plea Bargain, 29th Friday (I), October 27, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
October 26, 2023Christ’s Desire To Light Us On Fire, 29th Thursday (I), October 26, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for Charity
October 26, 2023
Rom 6:19-23, Ps 1, Lk 12:49-53

To listen to an audio of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.26.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
“I have come to set the earth on fire,” Jesus tells us today, “and how I wish it were already blazing!” Over the last couple of days, Jesus has described for us how he wants us to have our lamps lit for him; how he wants our loins girt to work with him for and in his kingdom and to run to bring the Gospel to others; how he wants us to be like faithful and prudent stewards who know of their master’s imminent return and care for his menservants and maidservants with the gifts he has given us for that purpose. All of this is meant to be interpreted within what he tells us today: that he ardently desires this and wants us to respond to these summons with similar fire. He wants his fire to be in us and our fire to be all-consuming. He wants us to share the fire of his love. The ignition for that world-wide bonfire he has come to set happened on Golgotha, when we were able to witness the Love of God crucified. That’s the reference to “baptism” that Jesus longed to undergo, the baptism of blood on Calvary. There’s no greater witness to his fire.
But he says that that fire comes with suffering. There were and are many who have responded to his ardent love with coldness or tepidity. There were and are many who have rejected his love. And when we’re inflamed with the same divine fire, we will experience those reactions, too. That’s why Jesus immediately after talking about the fire he seeks to set in us so that we may have our lamps perpetually lit and loins girt as faithful and prudent stewards describes the division that fire will cause. He says that he’s come not to bring “peace,” understood as a life without conflict, but “division,” and even our families would be divided. This was not because Christ is a divider — as he said during the Last Supper and we ponder each Mass: he came to give us peace and leave us his peace, the fruit of a right relationship with God — but when someone opts for Christ, others who want to be first get jealous and angry, and that’s what divides. This was true in the early Church. Often when Jews converted to Christianity, they were disowned by their family. Still today when a Muslim converts to Christianity in various fundamentalist Muslim countries, or a Hindu converts in certain fundamentalist areas in India, a contract is put out on them, most often by the members of his or her own family. Still, too, in many families, when one person becomes on fire for the faith, the tepid members of the family can begin to resist, mock and even persecute, the “holier-than-you-goodie-two-shoes” in their midst. When one person who has caught the flame of faith wants to respond to Love with the gift of his or her life as a priest, religious or consecrated person, often other family members put up strong opposition. This is what Jesus is describing. The key for all of us is that we see that our choice for Christ must come first, above our other choices, above our other loves, even if we should have to suffer as a result of it. Jesus, after all, has made that choice for us.
The other readings show some of the consequences of living our faith with the fire of love for God and others. The first Psalm describes the one on fire with love for God as one someone 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.” In other words, he chooses his friends with care to protect and augment his flame, he delights in Sacred Scripture because the Lord’s word is a lamp for his steps, he delights in the Commandments which are expressions of love for God and others, he delights in the Lord and perseveringly and faithfully prays about what God has revealed day and night. The Psalm goes on to say, “He is like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade.” He plants himself, in other words, in Christ, the living water, and that’s the source of continued fruitfulness no matter the season. This is contrasted with the fool, the wicked, who are “like chaff which the wind drives away,” whose way “vanishes.” The this-worldly passions that burn him up leave him unsubstantial, like dead chaff blown away in the breeze.
St. Paul similarly describes some of the practical consequences of being inflamed by Christ in the first reading. Building on what he taught us yesterday in his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that the fire of Christ is meant to change the fundamental orientation of our life. Prior to Christ, we “presented the parts of [our] bodies as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness for lawlessness,” but once Christ has come we “now present them as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.” We go from being slaves to sin to consecrated lovers of God, yoked to his holiness, in one consuming flame. The first path leads to death. The second leads to “eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” St. Paul is saying throughout this sixth chapter of his letter to the Romans that we have to make a choice to become slaves, committed life-long servants of Christ, seeking his will not ours, his kingdom, not ours, his glory, not ours. Many Christians only go half-way in their discipleship. They don’t respond to God’s love with a total commitment. God wants to give us his fire so that we may make and keep such a commitment in response to his.
In a poem, St. Ephrem writes from the perspective of Jesus, “Take, eat, entertaining no doubt of faith, because this is My Body, and whoever eats it in belief eats in it Fire and Spirit.’” To enter into Communion with the Lord is to consume “Fire” and “Spirit,” a fire and a Holy Spirit that can transform our entire life. We can also recall St. Catherine of Siena, whose most famous line, one that St. John Paul II often quoted in his talks to young people, was “Se sarete quello che dovete essere, metterete fuoco in tutta Italia, non tanto costì.” “If you are who you should be, you will set not only Italy but the whole world ablaze.” Christ has come to set the world on fire. He was come to set us on fire. How are we going to cooperate with how that loving Flame wants to transforms us today?

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ROM 6:19-23
Brothers and sisters:
I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your nature.
For just as you presented the parts of your bodies as slaves to impurity
and to lawlessness for lawlessness,
so now present them as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness.
But what profit did you get then
from the things of which you are now ashamed?
For the end of those things is death.
But now that you have been freed from sin and have become slaves of God,
the benefit that you have leads to sanctification,
and its end is eternal life.
For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 1:1-2, 3, 4 AND 6
R. (Ps 40:5) 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 12:49-53
Jesus said to his disciples:
“I have come to set the earth on fire,
and how I wish it were already blazing!
There is a baptism with which I must be baptized,
and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.
From now on a household of five will be divided,
three against two and two against three;
a father will be divided against his son
and a son against his father,
a mother against her daughter
and a daughter against her mother,
a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
The post Christ’s Desire To Light Us On Fire, 29th Thursday (I), October 26, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
October 25, 2023Faithful and Prudent Weapons of Righteousness, 29th Wednesday (I), October 25, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for Chastity
October 25, 2023
Rom 6:12-18, Ps 124, Lk 12:39-48

To listen to an audio of today’s homily, please click here:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.25.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Peter today asks Jesus, “Is this parable meant for us or for everyone?” There was the implication that the apostles or others might think they were exempt from the lessons. Sometimes we can think ourselves excused from really paying attention to what the Lord is asking, as if the Lord’s call to conversion is primarily directed to others. But the Lord is always speaking for us and for others, and we need to listen to everything as words to be done, so that we can become what he describes later in this passage, faithful and prudent stewards investing his word and passing this way of life on to others.
To understand today’s Gospel better, we can begin with yesterday’s, when Jesus spoke to us of the two essential Christian dispositions and actions: to be vigilant with lamps lit for his perpetual coming and to have our loins girt, ready to work and to be sent out by him to finish the job he started of the salvation of the world. Today he reemphasizes these two points in the Gospel when he speaks about the qualities of a faithful and prudent steward. About lamps lit, he tells us to “be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” The Lord is, as Martha of Bethany said before Jesus raised her brother from the dead, constantly “coming into the world.” The unfaithful disciple says, “My master is delayed in coming,” and the devil is constantly trying to get us to think that the Master is delayed, that he’s not already here. But he is here and the good and faithful steward acts as if he were aware of this continual divine accompaniment. About loins girt, Jesus says that the faithful and prudent steward “distribute[s] the food at the proper time.” God has fed us, he’s enriched us, and he wants us to love others with those gifts. The devil, after he’s seduced us to think that our life is meant to be lived apart from the Master, gets us instead to “beat the men servants and the maidservants,” “to get drunk,” in short to sin. Rather than serving others and caring for their needs, both spiritual and material, he tries to get us to hurt them. He’s also trying to get us to forget that we’re really stewards called to account.
St. Paul picks up these themes in the first reading. He talks about two types of slavery: slavery to sin, what he calls presenting our “bodies to sin as weapons of wickedness”; and consecration to God whereby we present ourselves to God “as raised from the dead to life and the parts of your bodies as weapons for righteousness.” I love this phrase. Our bodies, which are sacraments of who we are body-and-soul, are meant to glorify God (1 Cor 6:20), to be given to God and in God to others. So often, however, we allow our bodies to be slaves to sin, as we give ourselves to sinfulness. We see this when people get drunk. We see it when people are addicted to pleasure or sex or power or their egos. By Jesus’ action, he has set us free from this slavery. We can’t be passive, however, to this gift: Jesus, risen from the dead, has brought us fully alive through baptism; he wants us in return to present our bodies to him as risen from the dead, living a new life.
St. Paul helps us to see that our lives are meant to be weapons. Our thoughts, words and actions can be “weapons of wickedness,” making ours and others’ lives worse or miserable; or we can use them as “weapons of righteousness,” lifting people up. In Psalm 36, which we prayed this morning in Morning Prayer, we pondered the evil one who sits on his bed at night plotting the defeat of goodness. We’re called to plot the triumph of goodness, to seek to use our lives, together with and in response to God’s action, to build up his kingdom. Our charity is not supposed to be “spontaneous,” even though random acts of kindness are good. It ought to be planned. It should be “plotted.” Our life is a weapon that we can and should use for good. It’s important for us to be practical about creating havoc for the devil each day, by thinking God’s thoughts, by lavishing true compliments and praise to others, by serving them with love in our deeds and helping them to feel the tender caress of God. God wants us to be a weapon in this way.
The devil, moreover, if he can’t get us to serve in his army, is at least going to tempt us to think that all we’re playing with is a cap gun, that we don’t have much to offer. Jesus addresses that temptation at the end of the parable when he says, not, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and little will be demanded of the person entrusted with little.” Rather he says, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” We’ve all been entrusted with lavish gifts, filled to overflowing. Others may have more than we think we have, but we’ve still been blessed with much. Others may be multibillionaires, but we’re still millionaires. And God wants us to spend what he’s given us! Jesus and St. Paul are both telling us we have a lot to offer.
As we prepare this Mass to meet Christ who is constantly coming, we know that he has offered us his body, blood, soul and divinity as a weapon to make us righteous against all the works of the devil. This is the fruit of the Tree of Life that is the Cross. Christ wants us to meet him by presenting our bodies as risen from the dead and as a weapon for him to use to destroy the kingdom of darkness and bring about his kingdom of light. Later on in the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul will tell us, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1-2). That’s exactly what we seek to do at Mass. Pope Benedict once said to the young people of the world that what happens in the Mass can be compared to a nuclear explosion — and that idea is not hyperbole but even still short of the mark, because what happens at Mass has far more energy even than all the nuclear bombs on the planet. But we can stick with the image. What happens here is a nuclear detonation. The Lord seeks to fill us with his energy, and then he sends us out, with loins girt, as faithful and prudent stewards, as weapons of righteousness, to blow up the world! Let’s get strengthened and get started.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ROM 6:12-18
Brothers and sisters:
Sin must not reign over your mortal bodies
so that you obey their desires.
And do not present the parts of your bodies to sin
as weapons for wickedness,
but present yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life
and the parts of your bodies to God
as weapons for righteousness.
For sin is not to have any power over you,
since you are not under the law but under grace.
What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law
but under grace?
Of course not!
Do you not know that if you present yourselves
to someone as obedient slaves,
you are slaves of the one you obey,
either of sin, which leads to death,
or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
But thanks be to God that, although you were once slaves of sin,
you have become obedient from the heart
to the pattern of teaching to which you were entrusted.
Freed from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 124:1B-3, 4-6, 7-8
R. (8a) Our help is in the name of the Lord.
Had not the LORD been with us,
let Israel say, had not the LORD been with us–
When men rose up against us,
then would they have swallowed us alive;
When their fury was inflamed against us.
R. Our help is in the name of the Lord.
Then would the waters have overwhelmed us;
The torrent would have swept over us;
over us then would have swept the raging waters.
Blessed be the LORD, who did not leave us
a prey to their teeth.
R. Our help is in the name of the Lord.
We were rescued like a bird
from the fowlers’ snare;
Broken was the snare,
and we were freed.
Our help is in the name of the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
R. Our help is in the name of the Lord.
Gospel
LK 12:39-48
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Be sure of this:
if the master of the house had known the hour
when the thief was coming,
he would not have let his house be broken into.
You also must be prepared,
for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”
Then Peter said,
“Lord, is this parable meant for us or for everyone?”
And the Lord replied,
“Who, then, is the faithful and prudent steward
whom the master will put in charge of his servants
to distribute the food allowance at the proper time?
Blessed is that servant whom his master on arrival finds doing so.
Truly, I say to you, he will put him
in charge of all his property.
But if that servant says to himself,
‘My master is delayed in coming,’
and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants,
to eat and drink and get drunk,
then that servant’s master will come
on an unexpected day and at an unknown hour
and will punish the servant severely
and assign him a place with the unfaithful.
That servant who knew his master’s will
but did not make preparations nor act in accord with his will
shall be beaten severely;
and the servant who was ignorant of his master’s will
but acted in a way deserving of a severe beating
shall be beaten only lightly.
Much will be required of the person entrusted with much,
and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.”
The post Faithful and Prudent Weapons of Righteousness, 29th Wednesday (I), October 25, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
October 24, 2023God’s Superabounding Mercy, 29th Tuesday (I), October 24, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Anthony Mary Claret
October 24, 2023
Rom 5:12.15.17-21, Ps 40, Lk 12:35-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.24.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Eight days into this 24 day feast on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans we have every second year, we get to an important clarification by St. Paul with regard to justification. Normally we can look at sin and forgiveness as more or less “loss and restoration,” that we squander our relationship with God and then get it back, and sometimes we think we get it back in somewhat a lesser stage, wounded; if we were to put it in monetary terms for illustration, we have $100, we go bankrupt, and then God graciously restores us, but because of our wounds we really now only have $70. But St. Paul stresses something different today. He describes that God’s response to our sin will far surpass the depth of that sin, and not only our sin but the sins of the whole world. St. Paul stresses this superabundance: “If by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.” “For if, by the transgression of the one, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.” “Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through justification for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We can’t focus on that “how much more” enough if we’re really going to understand how God responds to us. Jesus alludes to this very clearly in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger son who never really understood the Father’s love (just like the older son didn’t either), when he realizes he hit rock bottom and remembers that even the slaves in his father’s household were treated well, wants to come back and be treated like a slave (it’s the “lesser,” the “70” I mention above). But then the Father not only treats him as a beloved son by investing him with sandals that slaves never had but gives him things that far surpass what he had before: he puts a signet ring on his finger signifying he had power of attorney and trust, he kills the fattened calf for him (making the other brother jealous) and covered his pig-dung-infested clothes with the finest robe he had. This is a sign of his superabundance!
At the Easter Vigil we sing of this “how much more” with words that at first glance might seem to border even on blasphemy. The deacon or priest, in the Easter Proclamation that could be called in a sense “The Gospel of Easter” or simply the Easter Kerygma, chants, “O happy Fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” The theology behind calling any sin — Adam’s or ours — “blessed” is described in the prayer said at the Easter Vigil, on Christmas Day, and during the Offertory of the Mass when a drop of water is added to wine when we pray, “O God, who wonderfully created human nature and still more wonderfully redeemed it.” Human nature, created wonderfully by God, is left in an even more marvelous state after sin because of Christ’s work of redemption. The phrase, “O Felix Culpa,” “O Happy Fault,” is normally attributed to St. Augustine, though it’s a paraphrase. The converted saintly bishop of Hippo actually said, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” And it’s likely that he was influenced not only by his experience of the multitude of seemingly happy sins of his youth that eventually brought him such a great Redeemer and led him to write about it in his famous Confessions, but by the preaching of the saintly bishop who had helped bring him to conversion in Milan. St. Ambrose would often from different angles stress this theme, something that may have helped St. Augustine realize that God wanted to transform the manure of his past into fertilizer for new growth. “The Lord knew that Adam would fall and then be redeemed by Christ,” St. Ambrose declared. “Happy ruin, which has such a beautiful reparation!” (Commentary on Psalm 39:20). Elsewhere he said, “We who have sinned more have gained more, because your grace [of mercy, Lord] makes us more blessed than our absence of fault does” (Commentary on Ps 37:47). And in one of the Prefaces of the Ambrosian Liturgical rite, the priest sings to God, “You bent down over our wounds and healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our afflictions, a mercy greater than our fault. In this way even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, served to elevate us to the divine life” (Sunday XVI per annum). So strong is this line of thought penetrating the Exultet, that later we sing, “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed.” Were it not for Christ’s redemption, it would have been better for us never to have been born, just as it was for Judas. This is what St. Paul is talking about in today’s first reading, and this should give us hope. We’re living in a day in which sin abounds and therefore the death to which sin leads is all around us. But St. Paul tells us that it’s precisely at this time where God’s grace and life overflows all the more.
In the Gospel today, we see not just this superabundant response of God but also how to receive it. In the Gospel, Jesus, speaking about his second coming but also about the way we’re supposed to await and receive him each day, says that if he finds us with loins girt and lamps lit, he will proceed to seat us at table and wait on us. The Master waits on the servant, the Creator humbles himself in love before his creature. This is what he did during the Last Supper and something he promises to do at the Eternal Wedding banquet. His response is so much greater than our receptivity! But he calls us to two things. First, to have our lamps lit like prudent virgins for his coming (Mt 25:1-13): we’re called to pray, to await him, to long for him, even in the second or third watch of the night. Second, he wants our loins girt, our tunics tucked into our belts as the ancients would to work or to run. This is an indication that he wants to find us working in his vineyard and running to spread the faith and help others to await him and collaborate with him with lamps lit and loins girt.
Someone who did just this was the spiritual hero we celebrate today. St. Anthony Mary Claret was born in Cataluña in 1807. I once happened upon his birthplace walking while teaching in the Pyrenees back in 1993. I entered the village and saw the Church and when I drew close, it had an inscription outside the Church saying this Church was where Saint Anthony Mary Claret was baptized. I prayed at the font where he received God’s superabundant mercy. I pondered the meaning of his life and, as a 23 year old, through his intercession, my life. And since I’ve always had a special connection to him. He was so passionate about spreading the faith, helping others to pray and receive the Lord’s superabundant mercy that he was named a missionary Archbishop of Santiago in Cuba, where he worked so hard for such a long time to help the Cubans grow in faith. He founded the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate to help him in this work. He was recalled to Spain by the Queen to be her chaplain and he used his office, through the power of the queen, to do a tremendous amount of good in changing the culture of the court, trying to eliminate the silly and suggestive talk, immorality, impurity and greed, and bring people the change of life God’s mercy is meant to effectuate. In response to his vigilance and work, Christ responded superabundantly, calling so many to be “Missionary Sons of the Immaculate” and spiritual sons of St. Anthony. They were filled with heroism, much like he was, having responded valiantly from an assassination attempt in 1856 in Cubas. So many Claretian seminarians and priests gave their lives for God and for their brothers and sisters during the Spanish civil war that on the Claretian website, they call themselves a “Martyrial Congregation.” In 1992, there was the beatification of 51 of his sons as martyrs from Barbastro; in 2005 the beatification of Fr. Andres Sola who was killed in Mexico; in 2013, there was the beatification of 23 Claretian brothers from Tarragona. And in 2017, another 109 martyrs from the Spanish Civil War were beatified. What a reward God has given to St. Anthony Mary to have so many saintly sons — 184 and counting. And God who can never be outdone in generosity has taken these his martyrs to the eternal banquet where he now, according to his promise, serves them with love.
Today we have come here with lamps lit and loins girt and the Lord is going to have us here around his table where not only will he serve us but feed us with himself. He has wondrously created us and even more wondrously redeemed us and the Eucharist is the daily witness to his superabundant merciful love. The whole rest of the day is an opportunity to allow the superabundant gift of God we receive here to overflow, heading out to do his work and announce his Gospel of overflowing mercy with the zeal with which the St. Anthony Mary Claret and his sons announced and enfleshed it and which Christ wills us to emulate.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ROM 5:12, 15B, 17-19, 20B-21
Brothers and sisters:
Through one man sin entered the world,
and through sin, death,
and thus death came to all men, inasmuch as all sinned.
If by that one person’s transgression the many died,
how much more did the grace of God
and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ
overflow for the many.
For if, by the transgression of the one,
death came to reign through that one,
how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace
and the gift of justification
come to reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.
In conclusion, just as through one transgression
condemnation came upon all,
so, through one righteous act
acquittal and life came to all.
For just as through the disobedience of one man
the many were made sinners,
so, through the obedience of the one
the many will be made righteous.
Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more,
so that, as sin reigned in death,
grace also might reign through justification
for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Responsorial Psalm PS 40:7-8A, 8B-9, 10, 17
R. (8a and 9a) Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
Sacrifice or oblation you wished not,
but ears open to obedience you gave me.
Burnt offerings or sin offerings you sought not;
then said I, “Behold I come.”
R. Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
“In the written scroll it is prescribed for me,
To do your will, O my God, is my delight,
and your law is within my heart!”
R. Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
I announced your justice in the vast assembly;
I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.
R. Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
May all who seek you
exult and be glad in you,
And may those who love your salvation
say ever, “The LORD be glorified.”
R. Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
Alleluia LK 21:36
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Be vigilant at all times and pray
that you may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 12:35-38
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
And should he come in the second or third watch
and find them prepared in this way,
blessed are those servants.”
The post God’s Superabounding Mercy, 29th Tuesday (I), October 24, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
28 min
October 23, 2023Growing Rich in What Matters to God, 29th Monday (I), October 23, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. John of Capistrano
October 23, 2023
Rom 4:20-25, Lk 1:69-75, Lk 12:13-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.23.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the Gospel, there is a huge contrast between two types of riches, two types of inheritance, two types of legacy, one very often sought by those who are spiritually worldly, the other counseled by Jesus, one ultimately a patrimony of monopoly money, the second an endowment of God. It’s important for us to enter into this scene which is as relevant today as it was what someone in the crowd shouted the question to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”
Over my priestly life, I have been stunned by how many people have made appointments to come to see me to get advice as to how to persuade a sibling or a cousin more fairly to allocate a last will and testament, or to ask what to do to sell the paternal home for full market value and evict one of the brothers and sisters still living there because that sibling can’t afford to pay the siblings the value of the house, or disputes over jewelry and the like. Similar disputes have taken place in my extended family when nieces of great uncles have become executors of wills and then sought to consume all of the deceased uncle’s property and not allocate it according to his intentions, basically inviting the other cousins to sue in probate court if they don’t like it. I’ve seen families divided, sometimes for decades, because of such inheritance disputes. They think they have a “just cause” — and often they do — but fail to recognize that the deepest motivation is not justice but acquisitiveness, because they wouldn’t be exerting the same effort and energy to remedy such an injustice for anyone else. Whenever anyone comes to see me about such things, I remind them immediately of the scene in today’s Gospel. Jesus’ response to the man’s request for Jesus to command his brother to give him his share of the inheritance is, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance, and the desire to come to him or to the Church to settle such disputes can often reveal that someone is instrumentalizing God and the Church out of a desire for material gain. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10). Jesus would show in the Parable of the Prodigal Son just how destructive the love of money can be: the essential sin of the younger son begins with a hunger for an inheritance that leads one to treat his father as if he were already dead. All sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members and even God.
Jesus gave an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins: “Take care to guard against all greed,” Jesus says, “for … one’s life does not consist of possessions.” He tells a parable about the rich fool who was blessed with a bountiful harvest who instead of sharing any of his good fortune with those who were hungry, after the harvest of grain had filled up the barns he already had, decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones in an unbelievable building project of selfishness. The man egocentrically said to himself, “As for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years.” He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. And that led to other excesses as he convinced himself to “rest, eat, drink and be merry!” Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts these words into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus then draws the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.” We’re living in a culture of the grain bin. We obsess about storing treasures or even junk up for ourselves, constantly building new storage facilities to house the stuff that can no longer fit in our homes, rather than giving the stuff we don’t need away to those who do need it. Perhaps the most ubiquitous grain bins of all are financial portfolios, which many obsess about seeing grow, while often few think nearly as much if at all about how to share their blessings with others, especially those in desperate need. The culture of accumulation is the flip side, the reverse excess, of what Pope Francis calls the culture of waste; both fail to grasp the proper way to relate to material goods as stewards and to use them — all of them — for the love of God and of others.
To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls and wants to help us to become rich in what matters to God. In the passage right after today’s section, which unfortunately is not included, Jesus tells us: “Sell your belonging and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” Is our heart in the things of God or the things of this world? Will we retain our goods as millstones or give them away to help us grow in the image and likeness of the divine Giver and become capable of fitting through the eye of the needle into the eternal house of the Father?
Today it behooves us to ask how we become rich what matters to God. We’ll focus on two different ways.
The first is by becoming rich in faith. In the first reading, St. Paul speaks to us of Abraham’s faith. Even though Abraham was very wealthy, with flocks and lands, he was willing to uproot himself from Ur of the Chaldeans to follow the Lord wherever he led him. The foundation of his life was God, not what he owned. He was “empowered by faith,” St. Paul tells us, “and gave glory to God.” He gave glory when he trusted, even for 25 years, that he would eventually become a father and the father of many nations. He gave glory when he believed in God enough to sacrifice the son of that promise, Isaac, believing God could raise him from the dead. And St. Paul says that our faith has every reason to be even greater than Abraham’s. He writes, “But it was not for him alone that it was written that it was credited to him; it was also for us, to whom it will be credited, who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over for our transgressions and was raised for our justification.” Jesus’ incarnation, the enfleshment of God’s love, and the triumph even over sin and death is an even greater grounds for us to believe than Abraham had. All the great miracles of the past 2000 years, the lives of the saints, the gift of the sacraments and so many graces, are all grounds of faith. The Lord has enriched us with this great cloud of witnesses and he wants us to enrich that witness still. Are we storing up this treasure? Are we seeking to invest the gift of faith we’ve inherited with the same passion with which those who love money seek to make their portfolio and possessions grow?
The second means is by charity. St. Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr, showed us that the true treasure in the Church consists of God’s loved ones, his people, even and especially the poor and forgotten. One human soul is worth more than all of the wealth in the world. To become rich in what matters to God is not even to do a lot of good deeds, but to help him save the world one person at a time.
Today we have a great example of someone who was rich in what matters to God in both of these ways. St. John of Capistrano (1386-1456) was a brilliant young man who became mayor of his town at 26. He loved being in charge. But he had a major conversion, recognized his vanity, and discerned that the Lord was calling him to be a Franciscan despite his marriage and personal weaknesses. The day he presented himself to the Franciscans, he mounted a donkey, sat backward toward the tail, put a paper on his back listing all his sins, and then let the donkey be led to the Franciscan monastery as the people of the town, especially the kids, pelted him with filth and epithets. Once accepted, the Franciscan who was put in charge of him knew how difficult it would be to get him to obey the Holy Spirit after he was used to being in control, so he was brutal with him; eventually, however, with the help of prayer, the Holy Spirit and lots of mortification, God strengthened him to become an instrument of so much good within the Franciscan order, in Italy and even in various countries where he was sent to reconcile. He became an extraordinary preacher bringing vast multitudes to conversion and inspiring them to seek what really matters. He was such an effective preacher that he was sent to Hungary to inspire people to raise up and defend the treasure of the faith against the invading Muslim Turks. He eventually was a leading voice at the Council of Ferrara-Florence seeking to bring the Church back to unity, so that the Church Christ founded, east and west, might collaborate to invest what God had given. He was great in faith and in charity and the Church still remembers him more than five and a half centuries after his death. Similarly, when people ask us to share the inheritance with them, it should be the inheritance of our faith and love!
As we prepare to receive Jesus, the pearl of great price that renders vain all the world’s currency, we ask the Lord to empower us in faith so that we might build up not grain bins here on earth but the Father’s house in heaven, being enriched by him so much that we enrich others and bring everyone to rejoice in the eternal wealth of glory.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 Rom 4:20-25
Brothers and sisters:
Abraham did not doubt God’s promise in unbelief;
rather, he was empowered by faith and gave glory to God
and was fully convinced that what God had promised
he was also able to do.
That is why it was credited to him as righteousness.
But it was not for him alone that it was written
that it was credited to him;
it was also for us, to whom it will be credited,
who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead,
who was handed over for our transgressions
and was raised for our justification.
Responsorial Psalm Luke 1:69-70, 71-72, 73-75
R. (see 68) Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people.
He has come to his people and set them free.
He has raised up for us a mighty savior,
born of the house of his servant David.
R. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people.
Through his holy prophets he promised of old
that he would save us from our enemies,
from the hands of all who hate us.
He promised to show mercy to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant.
R. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people.
This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham:
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight all the days of our life.
R. Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people.
Alleluia Mt 5:3
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are the poor in spirit;
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel Lk 12:13-21
Someone in the crowd said to Jesus,
“Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”
He replied to him,
“Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”
Then he said to the crowd,
“Take care to guard against all greed,
for though one may be rich,
one’s life does not consist of possessions.”Then he told them a parable.
“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
But God said to him,
‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself
but is not rich in what matters to God.”
The post Growing Rich in What Matters to God, 29th Monday (I), October 23, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
October 21, 2023Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 21, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
October 21, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, something that has to do with how we as disciples of Jesus order our whole life as citizens not only of our country but of the heavenly Jerusalem.
In this Sunday’s Gospel, two groups that were archenemies conspired in an unholy alliance to try to trap Jesus. Both the Herodians and the Pharisees were trying to get Jesus out of the way, because both felt threatened by him. Like a 60-minutes journalist trying to ask a gotcha question to expose and embarrass an interviewee, they decided to ask him a question about which they themselves were constantly in disagreement — whether it was lawful to pay taxes to or support in any way the Roman empire. The Herodians were laxist sycophants, and, regardless of how they personally felt about a foreign power’s ruling over them, decided that if you couldn’t beat the Romans, you should join them. They cooperated with the Romans in almost everything, including taxes. The Pharisees, like most of the Jewish people, deeply resented being dominated by a foreign power, and found utterly repulsive the thought of giving a tribute to a foreign ruler who fancied himself a god. Both groups thought their long-standing disagreement was a perfect catch-22 by which to nail the carpenter from Nazareth.
So they approached Jesus and manifested their mendacity and hypocrisy by a barrage of empty flattery: “Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man, teach the way of God with accordance to the truth, show deference to no one, and don’t play favorites.” Then came the question: “Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” It was the perfect query, they thought, because no matter how Jesus answered it, they had him. If he failed to respond, he would lose authority by ducking one of the most controversial and radioactive political questions of the day. If he said “yes,” they could turn the crowds against him as a sympathizer of the tyrannical and hated Romans and of the emperor whom they hated being forced to recognize at all. If he said “no,” then they could turn him over to Pontius Pilate as a renegade revolutionary inciting lawlessness among the people.
But Jesus would not be trapped, and he showed yet again here how he always brings good out of evil. In answer to their hypocrisy, Jesus pointed the path to true human integrity. In response to their deceitfulness, Jesus gave us a truth to live by, one that is as relevant today as it ever was.
After he had asked to see the coin used for the tax and they brought him one. This showed, first, that all of them used the money when it served their purposes! It also was a manifestation of the way the chief priests were funded through the Roman tax system, which levied a two denarius tax on every Jewish ex-pat throughout the Roman empire, delivering a massive annual sum for the upkeep of the Temple. On its face, the question was hypocritical. Taking the coin into his hand, Jesus asked, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” When they responded, “Caesar’s,” he gave them and us the principle that extends far beyond than the days of Rome. “Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.” Most of Jesus’ original listeners thought that you couldn’t serve two leaders, God and Caesar; either you gave to God, they thought, or gave to Caesar. Jesus said it was not necessarily “either… or” but could be and should be “both… and.” To pay taxes or to participate in the social order was not de facto an act of idolatry. We have responsibilities in the social order (what we might call the horizontal plane); we also have responsibilities toward God (the vertical plane). The two should go together. One of our responsibilities toward God is to love our neighbor; and one of the greatest services to our neighbor is the service of the truth that flows from faith in God.
This Sunday, we don’t come to entrap Jesus in his speech, but to learn from him the truth that will set us free. And as we ask him the same question about the allegiance we owe to the social order — to our country, our society, our cities and communities — he turns to us and asks us something. He doesn’t request to see a dollar bill, but rather says to us, “Look in the mirror!” “Whose image do we see?” He wants us to recognize that we are made in the image and likeness of God. And then he wants to say, “Then give to God the things that are God’s.” All that we are, all that we have, all our time, our talents, our money, our resources, our health comes from God, are part of our being in his image, and we’re called by him in justice, in wisdom and in love, to give back to God the things that are his. Jesus in the Gospel helps us to remember to whom we really belong. The greatest confusion of our age is not political, or gender-based or racial. It’s when we forget our identity, when we fail to remember that we’re chips off the divine Block, that we’ve been formed like God to become like him by participating in his life.
I’d like to make a couple of applications of this wondrous mystery from today’s Gospel. The first regards our level of giving to God. The context of taxes in today’s Gospel is helpful. Most of us hate paying taxes and do everything we can to pay less — we save receipts, we take deductions, we vote for politicians who promise lower rates, we move savings to off-shore havens, and those who run corporations often lobby legislators for loopholes. Sometimes we try similar strategies with God, whom we don’t want to tax the time, money, talents, he’s given us, because, as we saw two weeks ago in the Parable of the Corrupt Tenants in the Vineyard, we prefer to be owners rather than stewards. Many of us do what we can to get out of our spiritual commitments. We ask how far can we go without sinning. We can do the minimum in terms of our prayers. We donate something, but often do not make a genuine sacrifice. We can even shop for Churches or Masses that are less demanding on our time. Today Jesus is calling us to a different way of living. He says to us, “Give to God the things that are God’s,” and “Give to the civil order what the civil order is owed.” The gift that Jesus is asking of us is ourselves, and our supreme task in life is to make our lives fit to offer to him and with him for others. We’re all in a 100 percent tax bracket, called to give everything… with love!
The second application is what ought to happen when conflicts arise between the two orders of responsibility Jesus describes, to God and to the social order. The concern of the Scribes and Pharisees hasn’t disappeared. The best principle, I think, comes from the example and last words of one of the great saints in the history of civilization, Saint Thomas More. When King Henry VIII, whom he had served faithfully as chancellor or second-in-charge, had required all British subjects to swear an oath saying Henry (and not Jesus Christ or Jesus’ vicar on earth, the Pope) was supreme head of the Church in England and another basically swearing under God that Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon was null, his supposed marriage to Anne Boleyn was valid and that his rightful heir would be his and Anne’s offspring, Thomas More refused. Almost all of the Christians in England took the oaths. Almost every bishop in England, other than St. John Fisher, capitulated. Thomas resigned the chancellorship, his family was reduced to poverty, and those who were trying to kiss up to the king sought ways to harm Thomas. Eventually, the king’s loyalists trumped up charges against him to get him thrown into the infamous prison of the Tower of London. They tried to harass, molest and starve Thomas into submission, but he never relented. Finally, they framed him and got him sentenced to death. As he stood on the platform where he would be beheaded, he was asked whether he had any last words. His valedictory, right before he had his head chopped off, was “I have always been the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”
Those words, each of us is called to make his own. All of us are called to be the good servants of our nation, of our communities, of our cities, but God’s good servants first and above all. Should there be a conflict between what we owe to God and what civil leaders claim we owe to them, God must win. And the greatest service we can give to society and to her rulers is to serve God faithfully, because by this we bring to them the truth, which is the only foundation on which society can be firmly grounded.
This service, this duty, is becoming more urgent, because the supposed conflicts between what we owe to God and what others claim we owe to society are growing. There are two main fonts of these conflicts. On the one hand, there are various politically-correct and “woke” attacks on the Christian faith, mainly because faithful Christians won’t go along with the spirit of the age, whether that means allowing the killing of unborn children, or the redefinition of marriage or of what it means to be a human person, or other legal and conceptual assaults. The second is coming from those who want politics to be the defining reality of life and to reduce and concentrate people’s religious energies to the next election or referendum, putting political party or ideology above the truths of faith and morals, whether that means giving a total pass to gross character flaws in candidates or allowing them to denigrate others, refuse them dignity, and feel justified in not embracing them as we would embrace Christ. If we recognize that we are made in God’s image and likeness, then we must recognize that others are, too, and, we can’t allow those on either the left or the right to dehumanize people in the womb, at the border, on the death bed, or at any other point of human life for political gain. We Christians are called to be salt, light and leaven for our society, lifting it up, and this requires courage, sometimes even martyrdom.
This weekend God asks us to look in the mirror anew and see in whose image we are made. Then he calls us to act in accordance with that dignity. Like SS. Thomas More and John Fisher, may God give us the help and audacity he knows we need always to render to Him the things that are His so that we may be able to say at every moment of our life — and at the moment of our death — that we have always been good citizens of our great land who have sought to make it better, but we’ve always been God’s good servants first.

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Mt 22:15-21
The Pharisees went off
and plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech.
They sent their disciples to him, with the Herodians, saying,
“Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man
and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.
And you are not concerned with anyone’s opinion,
for you do not regard a person’s status.
Tell us, then, what is your opinion:
Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?”
Knowing their malice, Jesus said,
“Why are you testing me, you hypocrites?
Show me the coin that pays the census tax.”
Then they handed him the Roman coin.
He said to them, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?”
They replied, “Caesar’s.”
At that he said to them,
“Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar
and to God what belongs to God.”
The post Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 21, 2023 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
October 19, 2023Fullness of Redemption, 28th Thursday (I), October 19, 2023
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues and Companions
October 19, 2023
Rom 3:21-30, Ps 130, Lk 11:47-54

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.19.23_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today Jesus has very sharp words about those Pharisees who for all their conspicuous religious practices turn out to be murderers on the inside: in imitation of the way their ancestors killed the prophets, they would conspire to have Jesus himself killed. Their essential defect in the understanding of their relationship with God was a focus on their own external actions in fulfillment of the law of the Covenant rather than on God’s actions and whether they were branches attached to God the Vine, whether they were in fact loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor to the extreme or whether they were opposing God and hating or slaying their neighbor. They had become, as Pope Francis has said many times throughout his pontificate, ideologues, those who were living by “moral principles” or by the “law” but were no longer truly living in a relationship with God. Jesus said they had thrown away the key of knowledge — the real, living relationship with God himself, a God who changes us — and had both failed to enter the kingdom themselves but were preventing others from entering.
St. Paul used to be a Pharisee and lived by a principle that one became right with God — justified — precisely through one’s own deeds. Through and after his conversion, however, he grasped, as he writes today, that we are, first, “justified freely by [God’s] grace” (which means by God’s action, unmerited by us) and, second, through the way we respond to it, “by faith, apart from works of the law.” He writes about the proper ground of justification by grace through faith working through love today because it was an issue for the Church in Rome, where there were many “Judaized Christians,” baptized believers influenced by a Pharisaical mentality that said in order to be a good Christian, one first needed to be a good Jew, and to be a good Jew meant to keep the Mosaic law in its entirety. The emphasis in justification in their conception was on fidelity to the Mosaic law; St. Paul was stressing, rather, that it’s faith in God — not just a belief that he exists but a trust in Him to whom we commit our entire lives — that saves both Greek and Jew, uncircumcised and circumcised. That doesn’t mean our deeds aren’t important. God’s grace received with faith is supposed to be transformative and performative: it’s supposed to change us and that change can’t help but be seen in the way we behave, as we strive and struggle to live more and more according to God’s grace with faith. St. James says, “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:26) and St. Paul would write in his letter to the Galatians that the goal is “faith working through love”: our faith is supposed to overflow in charity toward God and neighbor. That’s why we can say that, while we’re not saved by our deeds, we are judged by our deeds — see Mt 25:31-46 and the way we respond to the poor, the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the imprisoned — because the way we treat our neighbor is an indication of the type of faith we have and whether we’ve responded in faith to the grace of God. If we have truly received God’s self-gift with faith, if we have been changed by his love, we want to love him back and to love others as he loves them. We need to see first God’s gift and then respond with active, living faith.
A great example of those who lived this way we have in the North American Martyrs. Conscious of the gift they had received from God, they responded in faith working through love, leading them to tremendous deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice to bring the faith to those who hadn’t yet heard God’s saving news. The eight Jesuits whom we call the North American Martyrs — Jesuit Saints René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, John de Lalande, Anthony Daniel, John de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Noel Chabanel — in the early 1600s, zealously brought the Gospel to New France, which encompassed most of eastern Canada as well as some of the areas of upstate New York. Practically speaking, their mission was to bring Jesus Christ to the native Americans — the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Iroquois — who by the time the Jesuits arrived in 1625 had already earned a reputation for resisting missionaries and making them martyrs. St. Jean de Brébeuf was one of the first Jesuits to arrive in 1625 at the age of 31. Earlier, he had been rendered an invalid by tuberculosis, but having recovered his strength, he wanted to use the health he had to pass on the treasure of the faith. As soon as he arrived, he began to study the difficult Huron language. Over the course of three years of hard work, living alone among the Indians, with much suffering and constant danger, he did not gain a single convert. When England took over Canada in 1629, he was summoned back to France. It would have been easy for him to say he had paid his dues and spend the rest of his life at the Jesuit institutions of Europe, but when France re-obtained title to the Canadian colonies four years later, he was on the first boat back. For 16 more years he labored about the Hurons, with his perilous adventures covered in detail in The Jesuit Relations. He would drag his canoe and bags over mountains and valleys for miles, going from location to location, wherever the Hurons were. His apostolate began to bear fruit, especially with the young. In 1649, the Iroquois attacked the village where he was stationed and he was sentenced to death. His death is about as gruesome as that of any missionary ever recorded. He was stripped naked and beaten with clubs on every part of their body. Then they cut off his hands, applied white-hot tomakawks to his armpits and groin, and fastened searing sword blades around his neck. Next, they covered him with bark soaked in pitch and resin and lit him on fire. During all of this, as the eyewitness account records in The Jesuit Relations, he continued to encourage and exhort the Christian converts around him to remain faithful. To stop his preaching, the savages then plugged up his mouth, tore off his lips, cut off his nose, and then, in mockery of baptism, put him in a tub of boiling water. They proceeded next to cut off his flesh, roast it and eat it in front of him. The final blow came when they sliced open his chest and ripped out his beating, valiant heart, so that they could drink his blood when it was still warm. This was the faith working through love that radiated through his life. The missionary life and death of Isaac Jogues is a similarly inspiring example of what that faith looks like. He arrived in New France in 1636 at the age of 29. His hard work among the Hurons bore fruit; in 1637, he rejoiced to baptize 200. In 1642, he was captured by the Mohawks when returning from a supply run and brought to modern day Auriesville, New York, where the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs is to this day. There, with St. Rene Goupil, captured with him, he was forced to run the gauntlet, was further beaten with clubs, and then had his hair, beard and nails torn away and forefingers bitten off. He was then made a slave. Eventually, he was rescued by the Dutch and brought to New York City, becoming the first recorded priest ever here. He was sent back to France, where he was greeted both with both pity and as a hero. Because he no longer had the fingers to hold the Sacred Host, he was technically incapable of celebrating Mass, until Pope Urban VIII gave him a special dispensation. “It would be unjust that a martyr for Christ,” Urban said, “should not drink the blood of Christ.” Despite all that he had suffered, however, when the opportunity came to return to New France in early 1644, he jumped at the chance. It didn’t take long for him to receive his imperishable wreath and cash in the great portfolio of faith he had amassed through so many deeds of faith. He was ambushed at a meal by the Mohawks, who tomahawked him as he was entering the cabin. They cut off his head and placed it on a pole facing the direction from which he had come, as a warning to other missionaries. But what the Mohawks were not planning on was that the blood of Jogues, Brébeuf and the six other North American martyrs would soften and fertilize the Indian soil to receive the Gospel. At the very place where Jogues, Goupil and Lalande were killed in Auriesville, ten years later Saint Kateri Tekakwitha would be born. Even though they didn’t experience many conversions during their missionary work, the North American Martyrs’ heroic deaths, perseverance in the faith, and zeal for the salvation of their torturers would become renown not just in the Christian world, but even among the sadistic executioners. When the next wave of courageous missionaries arrived, they would Christianize the tribes they encountered far more easily. The blood of the martyrs is indeed the seed of Christians. And we continue to grow in faith in the state that St. Isaac’s blood sanctified.
When we look at their martyrdoms, though, we can often focus so much on their actions, their faith, their heroism to the point of death. But that’s not the way they looked at it. They looked at it as a gift. This morning, in the lesson from the Office of Readings that the Church ponders on their feast, we pondered St. John de Brebeuf’s approach to martyrdom, which he looked at as a great grace. This is what he wrote in his diary: “For two days now I have experienced a great desire to be a martyr and to endure all the torments the martyrs suffered. Jesus, my Lord and Savior, what can I give you in return for all the favors you have first conferred on me? … I vow before your eternal Father and the Holy Spirit, before your most holy Mother and her most chaste spouse, before the angels, apostles and martyrs, before my blessed fathers Saint Ignatius and Saint Francis Xavier—in truth I vow to you, Jesus my Savior, that as far as I have the strength I will never fail to accept the grace of martyrdom, if some day you in your infinite mercy would offer it to me, your most unworthy servant. … On receiving the blow of death, I shall accept it from your hands with the fullest delight and joy of spirit. … May I die only for you, if you will grant me this grace, since you willingly died for me. Let me so live that you may grant me the gift of such a happy death. In this way, my God and Savior, I will take from your hand the cup of your sufferings and call on your name: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” He and they looked even at martyrdom as a grace, as a gift, to which they responded with faith overflowing through love.
Today as we come to Mass we have a chance to focus on God’s continuous work of sanctification that flows from justification. We see the same interplay between grace, faith and works. We begin by God’s grace: “Blessed are you, O Lord, God of all creation, for through your goodness we have this bread [wine] we offer you, fruit of the earth .” We receive it with faith working through love: “and work of human hands.” God’s self-gift in the Eucharist is, together with the grace of baptism, the greatest grace in life, and we come here saying our “Amen!,” and then seeking to receive from God’s generous and unmerited loving action the strength to make our whole life a commentary on the words of consecration, giving our body and blood out of love for God and others, imitating the faith-filled love of the North American Martyrs in whichever way God graciously will allow.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ROM 3:21-30
Brothers and sisters:
Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law,
though testified to by the law and the prophets,
the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ
for all who believe.
For there is no distinction;
all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.
They are justified freely by his grace
through the redemption in Christ Jesus,
whom God set forth as an expiation,
through faith, by his Blood, to prove his righteousness
because of the forgiveness of sins previously committed,
through the forbearance of God–
to prove his righteousness in the present time,
that he might be righteous
and justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
What occasion is there then for boasting? It is ruled out.
On what principle, that of works?
No, rather on the principle of faith.
For we consider that a person is justified by faith
apart from works of the law.
Does God belong to Jews alone?
Does he not belong to Gentiles, too?
Yes, also to Gentiles, for God is one
and will justify the circumcised on the basis of faith
and the uncircumcised through faith.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 130:1B-2, 3-4, 5-6AB
R. (7) With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;
LORD, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to my voice in supplication.
R. With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
If you, O LORD, mark iniquities,
Lord, who can stand?
But with you is forgiveness,
that you may be revered.
R. With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
I trust in the LORD;
my soul trusts in his word.
My soul waits for the LORD
more than sentinels wait for the dawn.
R. With the Lord there is mercy, and fullness of redemption.
Gospel
LK 11:47-54
The Lord said:
“Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets
whom your fathers killed.
Consequently, you bear witness and give consent
to the deeds of your ancestors,
for they killed them and you do the building.
Therefore, the wisdom of God said,
‘I will send to them prophets and Apostles;
some of them they will kill and persecute’
in order that this generation might be charged
with the blood of all the prophets
shed since the foundation of the world,
from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah
who died between the altar and the temple building.
Yes, I tell you, this generation will be charged with their blood!
Woe to you, scholars of the law!
You have taken away the key of knowledge.
You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.”
When Jesus left, the scribes and Pharisees
began to act with hostility toward him
and to interrogate him about many things,
for they were plotting to catch him at something he might say.
The post Fullness of Redemption, 28th Thursday (I), October 19, 2023 appeared first on 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.