Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chapel of the Catholic Information Center, Washington, DC

Mass for the Attendees of the Leonine Forum Summit

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Year A

June 11, 2023

Deut 8:2-3.14-16, Ps 147, 1 Cor 10:16-17, Jn 6:51-58

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.11.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today as we conclude the inaugural Leonine Forum Summit, we are blessed to do so with the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. The Eucharistic Jesus, and the Mass that brings the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity to our altars, is meant to be the source and summit, root and center of the Christian life, and therefore the celebration of the Mass is meant to be the summit of this Summit and the starting point for all that the Leonine Forum is and does. Jesus’ self-giving Eucharistic love is the source and driving force of the Christian love of neighbor, of the social Gospel, that has developed in Catholic Social Teaching that Leonine Fellows learn and the charitable service they’re inspired to pay forward. Friendship with and communion in the Eucharistic Lord are the wellsprings of friendship and community that the Forum nourishes. The worship we give to the Lord Jesus at our monthly Masses and Days of Recollection is the origin of the worship we give him in Eucharistic adoration and all forms of prayer and the font of the reverence that we give to the least of our brethren in whom we see the dignity of Jesus’ image and likeness. And so it’s fitting that we finish this Summit as we began, here at Mass, faithfully listening to the Word of God, stoking our hunger for the Word made flesh, celebrating with praise, thanksgiving, adoration, and petitions the wondrous gift of our Risen Lord, and being strengthened by him on the inside to take Him as salt, light and leaven to the world he redeemed.

* The Eucharistic Jesus is the fulfillment of the heavenly manna with which, as Moses reminded the Israelites in today’s first reading, God fed them in the desert for 40 years, as a reminder that the human person does not live on bread alone. It’s the fulfillment of the finest wheat about which David sung in today’s Psalm. It is the participation in the very Body and Blood of Christ about which St. Paul marveled in today’s epistle. It is Jesus’ very flesh given for the life of the world, the true food and true drink that makes it possible to live because of Jesus not just here in this world but eternally. That’s why the Church, with the inspired words of St. Thomas Aquinas written for the first Corpus Christi celebration 759 years ago, tells us, “Praise, O Zion, your salvation, praise with hymns of exaltation, Christ, your king and shepherd true.” That’s why he urges us, “Full and clear ring out your chanting, joy nor sweetest grace be wanting, from your heart let praises burst.” And that’s why he tells us, in Latin, quantum potes, tantum aude, “Dare to do all you can” in bringing him all the love and praise we know, because, he indicates, everything we muster will come up short of the praise Christ in this Sacrament of Love deserves.

* If every year on the celebration of Corpus Christi, the Angelic Doctor and the Church as a whole dares us to pull out all the stops, this year that summons is given to us in bolded letters, because it is taking place at the beginning of the second year of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States. The first year was dedicated to priming Church leaders — clergy, catechists, Catholic school teachers, diocesan staffs, and parish leaders through men’s, women’s and youth conferences — for this second year,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord, Vigil

June 10, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.10.23_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 on the Solemnity of his Body and Blood, popularly known as Corpus Christi.

* In the Gospel for the feast, Jesus’ disciples as well as critics grumble after he tells them that he is the living bread that came down from heaven and whoever eats that bread, his flesh for the life of the world, will live forever. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” they mumble aloud. And Jesus doubles down, saying, “Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you. … Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”

* In response, the critics would ultimately say, “This teaching is hard, who can endure it,” and many of Jesus’ disciples — who had listened to so many of his life-changing words, who had witnessed so many of his stupendous miracles, including the multiplication of five loaves and two fish to feed more than 5,000 people — left. They were right in saying that Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist was very hard. To them it sounded like cannibalism. Jews couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure and Jesus was telling them they needed to drink his blood. Sometimes I think the reason why some Catholics, like some of our fellow Christians, don’t find this teaching hard is because they think Jesus is only talking symbolically. He’s not. He stresses his flesh is real food and his blood real drink.

* We need to approach this difficult reality with faith. After many of the disciples had left, Jesus turned to the 12 and asked if they wanted to leave. That’s when same Peter who had stepped forward in Caesarea Philippi to say that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of the Living God, courageously stuck his neck out and said, “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the holy one of God.” What he was essentially saying was, “Jesus, we don’t have the foggiest idea as to how you will give us your flesh to eat and blood to drink but what we do know is that we believe in you, and because of that faith, we believe in what you say. So if you say that we must eat your flesh and drink your blood to have life, just show us how!” And Jesus would during the next Passover, when during the Last Supper in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, he would totally change the bread and wine of the Passover celebration into his Body and Blood and say, “Take and eat. … Take and drink.” St. Thomas Aquinas described the Eucharistic faith of St. Peter and of the Church when he wrote in his famous Corpus Christi hymn, Adoro Te Devote, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing is truer than the word of truth.”

* The difficulty of Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist is what led to the first Corpus Christi. A priest named Fr. Peter of Prague had lost his faith in the Real Presence of Jesus, but he hadn’t yet lost his faith in God and, hence, decided to give God the opportunity to give him that faith by doing something quite drastic. In 1263, he decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to pray at the tomb of his patron, St. Peter, for the gift of renewed faith in the Eucharist.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Portland, Oregon

Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Ephrem, Deacon and Doctor

June 9, 2023

Tob 11:5-17, Ps 146, Mk 12:35-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.9.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* The Book of Tobit on which we’ve been meditating all week is about God’s healing. The quiet hero of the book is the Archangel Raphael, whose name means “The Healing [of Medicine] of God.” We see in the book how God heals both Sarah, as we saw yesterday, and Tobit as we see today. God heals them after some suffering, to perfect them who were already good and virtuous. That’s an important point. They were both “just,” and were permitted by God to suffer in order to help them both advance in faith. God already had set up his medicine for them in the facts of the case: he had had Tobit earn and bury money in Media so that, after Tobit couldn’t go himself, Tobiah could, he could get bitten by the fish with the healing properties, he could meet Sarah and become an instrument of the healing of her and later of her father. We see the particularly “galling” way Tobit was healed in today’s Gospel, by his son’s smearing his cataracted eyes with gall from a fish who had bit him, the same fish that had supplied the heart and liver that was burned to heal Sarah and Tobias from the wiles of the pagan god of lust in this allegory. There’s a clear sacramental allusion in this healing by something a little gross, much like Jesus would later heal someone of blindness by wiping saliva on his eyes. As soon as Tobit was cured, he rejoiced that he could see his son. He could in fact see much more clearly than he did before he was blinded by bird droppings four years earlier. His vision had been enriched by faith. The Lord, indeed, as we prayed in the Psalm, gives sight to the blind!

* We see Jesus seeking to do a similar healing in the Gospel. He was trying to help the scribes and those around him in the Temple see what God the Father had revealed to St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi, that the Messiah would also be God. That’s what was happening in Jesus’ question: David who traditionally is understood to be the one who composed Psalm 110 that Jesus quotes, called the Messiah — who would be his descendent according to the flesh — “Lord.” That’s precisely who Jesus was, not merely David’s descendent according to the flesh, but also his Lord and Creator. Jesus was opening the eyes of the minds of his contemporaries to a much deeper understanding of who the Messiah is, to help them to be able to embrace better what was coming within a few days in his Passion.

* Someone who had received the gift of vision from the Lord and who helped his contemporaries to see not just the truth of God but the beauty of God and of the faith is the great fourth century Deacon and Doctor of the Church, St. Ephrem, from Syria. He was a prolific teacher in an age of rampant heresies against the divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit. At the request of his bishop, he opened up a school in Nisibis to teach the faith aright and inoculate people against false teachings. But he also was an incredible poet and songwriter, putting the truths of the faith into more than 3,000 songs so that Christians could learn and pass on the faith through music. He was called the “Harp of the Holy Spirit” because not only did he teach clearly about the Holy Spirit but taught through the Holy Spirit who led him to some of the deepest insights about the truths of our faith in the history of the Church. He expressed them not just in dry theological treatises but in poetry and in liturgical and ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 8, 2023

Tob 6:10-11,7:1.9-17, 8:4-9, Ps 128, Mk 12:28-34

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.8.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Over the last three days all of the major groups of Jewish society had come to Jesus to test him, and even trap him, with tough questions. On Tuesday, the strict Pharisees and lax Herodians conspired to try to trip Jesus up on the question of whether it was lawful to pay the census tax. Yesterday, the Sadducees came to try to get him on the question of the Resurrection of the dead. Today the last of the major groups, the Scribes, came up to him to ask him which was the greatest of all the commandments. After Jesus’ answer today, St. Mark tells us, “No one dared to ask him any more questions.”

* We’ve heard the answer to today’s question so many times that its difficulty is not always obvious. There were 613 commandments in the Old Covenant. To ask which of them was the greatest was required not only great familiarity with all of Sacred Scripture — something that the scribes and very few others had — but also great synthesis to discover what in the Old Covenant had the greatest weight of all. It was also a very risky question, because an answer might be taken to imply that 612 things that God himself had commanded were not as important as something else. We see throughout the Gospels that the Scribes, Pharisees and many others didn’t have a great sense of the hierarchy of truths, about prioritizing what was most important of all. They often focused far more on how they’d wash their hands, pots and jugs than how to love their neighbor, straining out gnats, to use Jesus’ image, while swallowing camels. Jesus, however, answered the question about the most important thing we need to do and then offered a second, which is allied to it, in such a way that the scribe who had asked the question was truly impressed. For us, today, we need to ponder Jesus’ response and what that means in our life in general, and about our approach to him in the Holy Eucharist in particular.

* The first and the greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” It was to love the Lord not only with part of ourselves, but all of ourselves. So often we can think everything is fine if, basically, we love the Lord with “most” of our heart, with “some of our mind,” with a “little of our strength,” and with the “majority of our soul.” But Jesus wants everything. And deserves everything. When God first gave this commandment to the Israelites through Moses in Deuteronomy 6, he added, “Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today. Drill them into your children. Speak of them at home and abroad, whether you are busy or at rest. Bind them at your wrist as a sign and let them be as a pendant on your forehead. Write them on the doorposts of your houses and on your gates.” Many Jews still today take these commands seriously. They pray them with their children several times a day. They wear tefillin and phylacteries containing this passage on their head and on their wrists. They have Mezuzahs with the passage at their doors, and even Jewish hotels have them at the entrance to each room. While Jesus himself never requires such external signs, he wanted us interiorly to have love for God in our heart, in our mind, in our arms,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 8, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.8.23_Eucharistic_Pastoral_Plan_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 8, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.8.23_Priestly_Eucharistic_Apostolate_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 7, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.7.23_Priestly_Eucharist_Preaching_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 7, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.7.23_Priestly_Eucharistic_Charity_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 6, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.6.23_Mystagogical_Ars_Celebrandi_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon

Mount Angel Archabbey, Mount Angel, OR

Imitate What You Celebrate: Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival

June 6, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.6.23_Eucharistic_Adoration_and_Reparation_1.mp3