Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint John Henry Newman

October 9, 2023

Jon 1:1-2:1-2.11, Jon 2:3-5.8, Lk 10:25-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.9.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the readings we see two great dynamisms, two fundamental polarities in life. The first we see in Jonah in the first reading. When God reveals his will to him, he seeks to flee from the presence of the Lord. He boards a boat heading to Tarshish, which was basically in western Spain, as far west as Jonah would have known of the geography of the time. But such fleeing from the Lord is never a private action. It always impacts those around us, as Jonah’s sinful polarity was risking the life of the fellow mariners.

* We see that same polarity in the first two figures in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel. The priest and the levite were fleeing from the love of God and love of neighbor, were fleeing from the type of charity to which God was calling them at the moment. Only the Samaritan, someone whom Jews thought were perpetually in flight from God by worshipping God on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem, heard God’s call and responded. If Jesus gave the parable today, it would be as if a man had been mugged, abused, and dropped in a sewer waiting to die and the Pope and Missionaries of Charity, hearing the groaning, crossed the road so that they wouldn’t get involved, but then a drug dealer and pimp, or a member of Al Qaeda, or someone convicted of a heinous crime, or someone else many of the people in the world think a despicable loser drew near to care for him, nurse him back to health and sacrifice money for his future care.

* What leads to the transition from fleeing from the Lord to that of drawing near? The answer is found in the responsory to the first reading, which is in fact part of the second chapter of Jonah that was excised from the first reading so that we could make Jonah’s prayer our own. Prayer, real contact with God, transforms us from those who flee the Lord to those who serve and love and the Lord, especially in others. God himself transforms us to set us on his path.

* Today in the Gospel, Jesus describes that path for us. A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe what he thinks the answer is from his study of the law. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus gave elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized that the struggle for this scribe would be to practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere inquisitiveness, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Explanatory Mass Notes

October 8, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.8.23_CCM_Explanatory_Mass_1.mp3

 

To download a PDF of the notes that guided the explanatory Mass, please click below: 

CCM Explanatory Mass Notes

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

October 8, 2023

Is 5:1-7, Ps 80, Phil 4:6-9, Mt 21:33-43

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.8.23_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* The powerful words Jesus says in today’s Gospel parable have both a very important historicalmeaning as well as a crucial actual For us to understand its present significance, though, we first need to grasp the immediate context in which Jesus was saying it as well as the theological background that Jesus’ original listeners would have taken for granted.

* Jesus proclaimed these words in the temple area of Jerusalem. He had already entered the gates of the city on Palm Sunday and had cleansed the temple area of the money changers and animal sellers who were exploiting and pilfering the poor who had come to sacrifice to God. He had cursed and dessicated a barren fig tree. That’s when the chief priests and elders of the people came to him to ask him by what authority he was doing what he was doing. Jesus knew that they had come in bad faith and so he told them in response that he would ask them one question, and if they answered his, he would answer theirs. “Where was John’s baptism from, … heavenly or human origin?,” he queried. It wasn’t a trick question or an academic one. John the Baptist’s work, we remember, was a work of conversion. If he were preaching and baptizing by heavenly origin, by divine mandate, then the chief priests and the elders, the scribes and the Pharisees, should have been converting just like the multitudes were. But those who were opposing Jesus, St. Matthew tells us, grasped that if they admitted that John came from God, then everyone would recognize that they were hypocrites for not getting baptized and changing their lives. If they said John’s baptism was from human origin, however, they grasped that the people would turn on them, because the people knew that John wasn’t acting on his own authority. So, with cowardly insincerity, they replied, “We do not know.” So Jesus told them that neither would he answer directly their question about the authority under which he was acting. Instead he gave them two parables: the one we had in last Sunday’s about the two sons, one of whom initially refused to work in the vineyard but then went and the other who said he would but never did, pointing out that the prostitutes and tax collectors were converting at John’s word but that the chief priests and the elders, despite mouthing their amens to God, did not. The second parable is what Jesus gives us today in the Parable of the Vineyard and how the tenant farmers or steward respond to the gift of the vineyard, of the Vine Grower, of the servants — like John the Baptist — and of the Son. It’s a parable that in the immediate context is meant by Jesus to provoke conversion.

* Now to the theological background. With the image of the vineyard, Jesus was summarizing God’s relations with the Jewish people. As God himself said through the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his cherished plant.” In the largest sense, the vineyard is ultimately all of God’s people, all of the children he has created, and we are meant to work and cultivate that vineyard. We know that at the beginning of time, God made everything “good” by God and entrusted the “vineyard” of the whole world to the human person, so that in developing these gifts we might participate in God’s work of creation and thereby also share in our own development. God gave us the command to “fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion ov...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Paul Roman Catholic Church, Clifton, New Jersey

Nuptial Mass for Logan Amster and Jennifer Katherine Monsalve

October 7, 2023

Gen 2:18-24, Lk 1:46-55, Eph 5:2.21-33, Jn 15:9-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.723_Logan_Amster_and_Jennifer_Monsalve_Wedding_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

A week after Jennifer and Logan got engaged, they asked to get together with me so that we could speak about the process and length of marriage preparation and about a wedding date. They had a very strong hope that they would be able to get married on October 7, the annual feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. At first I thought it was just a sign of their devotion to Mary and the fact that this year, October 7 fell on a Saturday in autumn. But over the course of marriage preparation, I discovered that it had much greater meaning. They essentially first got to know each other praying the Rosary at the outdoor Marian Grotto at the University of Mary in North Dakota in mid-2020, while both of them were on an intense thirty-day Ignatian retreat, two of 24 retreatants supported by six spiritual directors. Jennifer would head to the Grotto to pray the Rosary before she would go to lunch; Logan would head there to pray the Rosary right after lunch. But they were generally there at the same time, the only time of day their schedules would overlap, praying to Our Lady for their future, so that they might discern what God was asking of them in life and receive through our Lady’s prayers the grace, like her, to say yes to whatever God might ask. Jennifer told me that six months before she had met Logan, she had asked her grandmother to pray with her “por un San José de carne y hueso que reza y baila,” for a St. Joseph of flesh and bones who would know how to pray and to dance. Little did she know as she was praying to God in the small Marian enclosure that that prayerful dancer in the image of St. Joseph was right beside her. Little did Logan know as he was asking for light about what God wanted of him for his life that the woman praying in the same Warford Grotto would become part of God’s answer to his petitions.

About a year later, after Logan discerned that he was not being called to serve the Lord as a priest, he reached out to Jennifer to see if she might want to go out on a date. That first date led to several others and, over time, to the realization that God was calling them together to the Sacrament of Matrimony. And as Logan began to plot when and where to ask Jennifer to marry him, he chose what he thought would be a most fitting spot. He invited Jennifer to go with him to pray a Eucharistic Holy Hour not just at any Church but at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit (New Jersey), where for 104 years the Dominican nuns have prayed a perpetual Rosary for the needs and intentions of the world. After time together adoring the Lord in the beautiful adoration chapel, Logan led Jennifer to the Statue of Our Lady of Fatima on the grounds. In Fatima, Our Lady had taught the three shepherd children how to pray the Rosary correctly and urged them to do so for peace in the world and the conversion of sinners. In her final apparition to them in 1917, the Mother of God referred to herself as “the Lady of the Rosary” and stated, “I desire … that people continue to recite the Rosary every day.” Before that statue of Our Lady of Fatima, on the grounds of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary, Logan dropped to a knee and asked Jennifer to marry him — and Jennifer, after an explosion of joyful tears, composed herself enough to say, “Of course, yes!”

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

October 7, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.7.23_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 give us another parable about a vineyard, this time one that is leased out to tenants who, rather than paying their rent, beat and kill the servants sent to collect it and even kill the owner’s son when he comes to speak to them. What Jesus says has both a very important historical meaning as well as a crucial actual meaning. For us to understand its present significance, though, we first need to grasp the historical lessons Jesus was teaching his original listeners.

* With the image of the vineyard, Jesus was summarizing God’s relations with the Jewish people. As God himself said through the prophet Isaiah in this Sunday’s first reading: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.” The vineyard is ultimately all of God’s people, all of the children he has created. And we are meant to work and cultivate that vineyard.

* But God gave the house of Israel more than just this stewardship over the great natural endowment of creation, as he had given to other nations. He also made them stewards of a greater gift, the Covenant he had established with the human race.  Through Isaiah, we see how much personal care God took in preparing the vineyard of Israel. He “dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” God himself, in other words, had done all of the hard work building the “infrastructure” of the vineyard, clearing it so that it could bear fruit, putting a watchtower in it to guard for animals coming to eat the fruit, establishing a wine press so that the fruit could immediately produce joy. He gave the “house of Israel” the relatively light task of maintaining that vineyard and bearing fruit from that Covenant. But what happened? God tells us through Isaiah that “he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It had the appearance of growth, the outward show of fruit, but the fruit was worth nothing. “Fruit” is always to be interpreted as acts of love, justice, goodness, and faith. This is not what God found. He found, rather, bloodshed. So the owner of the vineyard — God the Father, as Jesus tells us in Gospel parable — sent his servants the prophets to remind them of the need to produce good fruit from all God’s gifts and to teach them by word and example how to do so. But their reaction was to beat and kill the messengers. So God the Father sent others, “more than the first, and they treated them in the same way.” This is precisely what happened to God’s prophets; almost all of whom were killed. Jesus, in fact, would later lament over the holy city, Jerusalem, because it was the site of the execution of so many prophets: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Mt 23:37).

* Jesus tells us that after all of those unjust deaths his Father the landowner sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But rather than respond with gratitude to yet one more chance, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance,” and Jesus says, “they seized him,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Bruno and Bl. Marie Rose Durocher

October 6, 2023

Bar 1:15-22, Ps 79, Lk 10:13-16

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.6.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* During the last two weeks, we have focused on the lessons to learn from the exile, with the help of Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah and today and tomorrow Baruch. Baruch summarizes those lessons, that the exile occurred because “we… have sinned in the Lord’s sight and disobeyed him. We have neither heeded the voice of the Lord, our God, nor followed the precepts which the Lord set before us. … We have been disobedient … and only too ready to disregard his voice. … We did not heed the voice of the Lord …  in all the words of the prophets whom he sent us, but each one of us went off after the devices of his own wicked heart, served other gods, and did evil in the sight of the Lord, our God.” This contrition over what led to the exile was reinforced whenever the Jewish people prayed in today’s Psalm, “Remember not against us the iniquities of the past; may your compassion quickly come to us, for we are brought very low. … Deliver us and pardon our sins for your name’s sake.” So when the Jews returned to Jerusalem, as we saw yesterday with Nehemiah, they wanted to give renewed, assiduous attention to hearing the Lord’s voice, to studying and living by his word, lest history recapitulate.

* In the Gospel we see that it did. Even though the towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum had heard Jesus’ preaching and witnessed his miracles, they did not act on his call to repent and believe. And so he mercifully upbraided them saying that if he had spoken and worked miracles like he had done among them in the infamously debauched Philistine towns of Tyre and Sidon, or in the notoriously inhospitable and licentious Sodom, they would have repented like Nineveh. And yet, as Jesus said in St. Matthew’s version of the scene, there’s a greater than Jonah and than Solomon among them, and they hadn’t repented. St. Luke places these words of Jesus at the end of his instruction to the 72 disciples whom he was sending out to announce that kingdom, to prepare them for the reality that some would turn a deaf ear to the incredibly good news they were proclaiming, but in rejecting them, their auditors would be rejecting Jesus and ultimately God the Father. All of this was a means to make real the words of the Alleluia verse from Psalm 95: if today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” They were hearing God’s voice, and feeling his touch, and seeing him with their own eyes. And that’s supposed to be a consequential encounter! Today we hear so many voices, from politicians, to news men, to talk show hosts, to neighbors, teachers, celebrities and more. But are we listening to God? Are we hearing his speaking to us with words to be done? Are we building our life on the rock of his word? Are we helping others to do the same?

* Today the Church celebrates two different holy ones who did this. St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, whose whole life is built on listening to God’s word in perpetual silence, and Bl. Marie Rose Durocher, the foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, who not only persevered in hearing and acting on God’s voice in her whole life but sought to help generations of children to learn to do the same in French Canada. The Carthusians are the strictest male religious order in the Church, whose whole lives prioritize prayer, listening to God and doing his will as the one thing necessary...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thursday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Feast of the Dedication of St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska

October 5, 2023

Neh 8:1-12, Ps 19, Lk 10:1-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.5.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Throughout the last ten days at daily Mass, we have been focusing in the first reading on the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem, the rebuilding of the City of Jerusalem, and the rebuilding on God’s people after the exile. That rebuilding is a prophetic ot (an action that is itself a prophecy) of the rebuilding of Christ, the True Temple, in the resurrection, the building and rebuilding of our lives on Christ, and the building and rebuilding of the Church as a whole called to be a Temple of God. Yesterday we had a chance to focus on that rebuilding in a particular way through the life of St. Francis of Assisi, chosen by the Lord to rebuild his Church falling into ruins, and he did so first through his own conversion and then in helping others to convert and become living stones in the holy edifice of the Church built on Christ the cornerstone. As Pope Francis has been stressing throughout his pontificate, the rebuilding of the Church will come through a new evangelization and that new evangelization is a proclamation of the mercy of God.

* Today as the Archdiocese of New York celebrates the Feast of the Dedication of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, we can focus on how the Lord continuously seeks to rebuild us and use us to help rebuild others. The first reading from the Book of Nehemiah focuses on what we could call receiving and rejoicing in the Word of God with faith. The Gospel ponders how all of us are called to enflesh and to share that word of God with others, how we’re called to continue in the new evangelization what was begun in the first evangelization. And today’s memorial of St. Faustina helps us to see that, just like the returning exiles wept over their sins and sought to base their whole life from that point forward on the Word of God, so we are called to open ourselves today to the ocean of God’s mercy, to recognize our need for it, come to receive it, share it with others, and help them receive, rejoice in and proclaim that same gift.

* Today in the Book of Nehemiah we see Scripture’s ideal presentation of what Lectio Divina, the prayerful reading of Sacred Scripture, is supposed to be. Many of us are familiar with the particularly Benedictine approach to Lectio Divina, which Pope Benedict described in his 2010 Apostolic Exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church (Verbum Domini). It involves lectio (reading to determine the meaning of the passage), meditatio (asking what it’s saying to me), oratio (what we say back to God in prayer crying out for his help to live the word), contemplatio (imaging ourselves living together with this word, becoming “one-temple” with it), and actio (putting the word into practice). In the first reading today, however, we see Scripture’s presentation of Lectio Divina, and it involves — as Cardinal Giancarlo Ravasi preached at the conclusion of his meditations in the Lenten Retreat to Pope Benedict and the members of the Vatican Curia right before Pope Benedict resigned in February 2013 — seven “stars” or practices that we should all try to emulate as we respond to God’s word. Ezra the Priest led the post-exilic Israelites in a day of recollection from dawn to midday on the-then recently rediscovered scrolls of the Torah.

* The first aspect was reading. Ezra and the scribes read plainly from God’s wor...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi

October 4, 2023

Neh 2:1-8, Ps 137, Lk 9:57-62

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.4.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday, Jesus “fixed his face toward Jerusalem,” toward Golgotha, toward the fulfillment of his Messianic mission. Everything for the rest of St. Luke’s Gospel needs to be interpreted within that context. And as he was heading there, he met three different people, two of whom volunteered to follow him and one whom Jesus directly called. But to all of them, Jesus described what following him would mean. What he taught them is crucial for each of us to know in order for us to follow Christ faithfully and help others to become his true disciples.

* In the first vocation story, a man runs up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus had come into the world to make disciples and many would refuse to follow him, so we would have expected for him to respond with joy. Instead he replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus wanted him to know the cost of discipleship, especially at a time in which messianic expectations had hyped up the Jews to think that the Messiah would kick out the Romans and set up a political administration in which there would be plenty of patronage. Jesus wanted him to know that to follow him wherever he went meant to follow someone who was basically homeless, to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed,  that you wouldn’t even have what foxes and birds take for granted. We, too, need to ponder the radical nature of God’s call. Are we willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes? If he asks us, like he asked Abraham, to leave our own native place at 75 and go to a place he would eventually show us, would we follow him, or would we value our home, our bed, our old habits more than we do the Lord?

* The second scene involves a man to whom Jesus said, “Follow me!” But this man replied, “Lord, let me go first to bury my father.” When we hear this, we can presume that the person’s dad had just died and he just wanted to go home for the funeral and then return immediately. The text doesn’t say that, however. What’s much more likely was that the man’s father was very much alive and might live for decades still. What the man was likely communicating was, “Jesus, I’d like to follow you, but my father comes first. As soon as I’ve fulfilled all of my obligations to him, then I’ll be free to come and follow.” Jesus’ reply was strong: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” As Jesus would say a little later at the raising of Lazarus, he is the Resurrection and the Life and everyone who lives and believes in him will never die, even if he dies (Jn 11:25-26). For us to become alive in the most important sense of all, we need to be in a living relationship to him. If we’re not following him, if we’re not allowing his life to reign within us, we’re dead, even if all our corporeal vital signs are health. He was calling this man to come fully alive and seeking to give him a participation in the Resurrection. He was giving him a choice between life and death, living and dying even while breathing, and encouraging him to let those who are “dead,” who don’t have this relationship, bury their confrères. Most often Jesus doesn’t call us to make a strict break between him and our family members. He calls us, after all, to honor our father and mother. He calls the family to be an image of the Church and the commu...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Mother Theodore Guerin

October 3, 2023

Zec 8:20-23, Ps 87, Lk 9:51-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.3.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today we come to the fulcrum of the Gospel of St. Luke, when he tells us that Jesus “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” Literally in the Greek it means that he “fixed his face on Jerusalem” and began the journey of ascent to the place where he would offer his life on the Cross for us all and complete his salvific mission. It would be there that Jesus would ultimately fulfill the prophecies announced by Zechariah after the exile. It would be to Jesus, the true temple destroyed and rebuilt in three days, to Jesus on the Cross, that people from different cities would say, “Come, let us go to implore the favor of the Lord,” “I, too, will go to seek the Lord, and “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” It would there, on Calvary, that the refrain for the Responsorial Psalm today, “God is with us,” would take on new, salvific meaning.

* But before he would do that, he was going to try to include the Samaritans in that saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” Because, however, Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above receiving their Savior! And when the Boangerges brothers — the Sons of Thunder, John and James — sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John.

* The failure of both the Samaritans and the Boangerges brothers to focus on Jesus teaches us a valuable lessons: many times we can put our own grievances, our own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. We can take our eyes off of Jesus and off of where Jesus has set his eyes. We can put conditions on God’s saving work, like the Samaritans tried: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. He tells us, for example, in St. Matthew’s Gospel that whenever we refuse to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, care to the sick, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked and visits to the imprisoned, we fail to welcome him in need (Mt 25:31-46), and yet we continue to dissociate our care for the homeless, the hungry, the immigrant, the prisoner from Jesus himself. We also see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten, scourged and murdered. Still today many do not want to embrace Jesus’ determined vision about the way he wishes to be with us, united with us on the path of sacrificial love we call the way of the Cross. They seek Christ without the Cross,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Memorial of the Guardian Angels

October 2, 2023

Ex 23:20-23, Ps 90, Mt 18:1-5.10

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.2.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* What an incredible gift it is that God has sent an angel before us, as we read in the Book of Exodus, to guard us on the way and bring us to the place he has prepared! At the beginning of Mass we prayed that God who is pleased to send his holy Angels to guard us, may hear our supplication that we may “always be defended by their protection and rejoice eternally in their company.” It’s to that eternal, celestial company to which God has sent them to guide us.

* The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels. … In her liturgy, the Church joins with the angels to adore the thrice-holy God. She invokes their assistance. … From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. ‘Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life’ (St. Basil the Great). Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God” (CCC 334-336).

* The reality we have to confront, however, is that many of us are oblivious in day-to-day life to the presence of our guardian angels. This is a larger problem of scientism, or the rationalistic, materialistic understanding that the only thing we can know we can observe with our senses or with scientific instruments. And so many of us go about our life without an awareness of the supernatural realm, of angels on the one hand, of the devil and his fallen angels on the other. While we theoretically believe they exist or at least could exist, we live as if they don’t. Today’s feast is an opportunity for us to open up to the truth that reality is much broader than we ordinarily think and begin to live it better in all its practical circumstances.

* Today God tells the Israelites about the angel sent to guard them: “Be attentive to him and heed his voice. Do not rebel against him. … If you heed his voice and carry out all I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes.” God calls us to acknowledge that he has sent his angel in front of us, to be attentive to him, to heed his voice, and to carry out all he tells us through him. But how we do that? None of us wants to disobey what God commands us through them, but how can we follow someone we cannot see, how can we heed someone whose voice doesn’t register on a decibel meter, how can we can we observe commands that are not communicated in ways that up until this point at least we haven’t been able to perceive?

* The first thing we need to be is to be aware of our guardian angel’s presence. To acknowledge him. To recognize we’re not alone. Even if we can’t perceive him with our five senses, to recognize that he is nevertheless there as the biggest supporter we’ve ever had, seeking to help us.

* Second we need trustingly to ask for his help. Today we can ponder how to do that with regard to certain fundamental aspects of our life.

* First, with regard to our prayer. We can pray to our guardian angel. There’s a great prayer that many of us learned as children that we should pray with fervor. It’s based on what we ponder in Sacred Scripture today: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to Whom His love commits me here, ever this day be at my side to light and guard to rule and guide. Amen.” We can also rely on his prayers for us before God’s throne,