Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame, Manhattan

Our Lady of Sorrows

September 15, 2023

Heb 5:7-9, Ps 31, Jn 19:25-27

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which is a day to focus on the Lord’s victory. Unlike on Good Friday when we ponder his sufferings upon the Cross, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross not only celebrates the rediscovery of the Cross after it was stolen in the early Church but the rediscovery, in a sense, of the meaning of Jesus’ triumph on the Cross as something in which we should glory rather than be sad or ashamed.

* Today, the day after celebrating Jesus’ victory on the Cross, however, we ponder his mother weeping and sorrowful. It’s a bit of a jarring juxtaposition, one that ought to get us to ask why we would contemplate her in this way. [Starting from 1423 in Germany, there was a commemoration of Mary’s sufferings and sorrows on the Friday after the third Sunday of Easter. In 1600, the feast became popular in France and was set to be celebrated the Friday of Passiontide before Palm Sunday. Pope Benedict XIII extended it to the universal Church in 1727. In 1668, however, a separate feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary was established, at the request of the Servites for the Third Sunday of September. In 1814, Pope Pius VII extended it to the universal Church and in 1913, Pope St. Pius X fixed it on September 15, the day after the Exaltation of the Cross.] The fundamental reason why we ponder Mary’s sorrows the day after the Exaltation is because her tears are not over her Son’s victory but over the sins of all of us that led to his sufferings and how many of us who have not yet entered into his victory. It’s not over what her Divine offspring accomplished on Calvary, but how many of us allow his gifts to go in vain, how many of us fail to make up in our flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church (Col 1:24).

* The Church has long pondered the suffering and joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary as she accompanied her Son and shared in his redeeming work. There has for centuries been devotion to her “Seven Sorrows”: The prophecy of Simeon, when he announced not only that Jesus would be a sign of contradiction pointing to the ruin and resurrection of many but that her own heart would be pierced with a sword; the flight into Egypt after Herod’s henchmen were trying to assassinate her and God’s little boy; the loss of Jesus for three days at the age of 12; meeting Jesus on the Way to Calvary; seeing Jesus suffer and die on the Cross; receiving Jesus’ body into her arms at the foot of the Cross; and placing Jesus’ body in the tomb.

* Today is a day on which we ponder what it must have felt like to have her heart and soul pierced in these ways. We acknowledge Mary’s role as a co-redeemer through her echoing her son’s prayers, supplications, loud cries, tears, reverence and obedience, which the Letter to the Hebrews highlights. As we prayed in the Stabat Mater Sequence before the Gospel, “Is there one who would not weep, ‘whelmed in miseries so deep, Christ’s dear Mother to behold?” But our meditation is not supposed to stop there. By God’s grace it’s meant to lead us to compassion, to suffering with Mary. We pray in that Sequence words we should take seriously: “O sweet Mother! font of love, touch my spirit from above, make my heart with yours accord. Make me feel as you have felt; make my soul to glow and melt with the love of Christ, my Lord. Holy Mother, pierce me through, in my heart each wound renew of my Savior crucified.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Toledo Diocesan Pastoral Conference

“Participants and Catalysts of the Eucharistic Revival”

September 14, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.14.23_Adoration_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Toledo Diocesan Pastoral Conference

“Participants and Catalysts of the Eucharistic Revival”

September 14, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.14.23_Eucharistic_Apostolate_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Toledo Diocesan Pastoral Conference

“Participants and Catalysts of the Eucharistic Revival”

September 14, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.14.23_Source_and_Summit_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Toledo Diocesan Pastoral Conference

“Participants and Catalysts of the Eucharistic Revival”

September 14, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.14.23_Eucharistic_Charity_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. John Chrysostom

September 13, 2023

Col 3:1-11, Ps 145, Lk 6:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.13.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily:

* Throughout this week, as mentioned on Monday, we have a chance to prepare for tomorrow’s feast of the Triumph of the Cross and ponder the cruciform life  Christians are called to live, yoked to the crucified Christ. The Cross is the new tree of life, the way of the Cross is the path that leads to happiness, holiness and heaven. God has given it to us as a means by which to share in Christ’s redemption, but he requires that we freely embrace and venerate it. It’s a choice to overcome worldly standards and embrace Christ’s. It’s a summons to metanoia, conversion, literally a revolution in our way of looking at things. Today’s readings and memorial of St. John Chrysostom teach us how this is done.

* St. Paul in his Letter to the Colossians is helping those in Colossae to set their hearts and minds on the things of God rather than the values the pagans seek or the Gnostics teach. He’s charting out for them the path to make up what is lacking in their flesh of Christ’s sufferings, to experience the mystery of Christ in them, to walk in him, to be firmly rooted, built upon, and firm in faith in Christ, abounding in gratitude. Today he advances the argument. He says, with words we hear every Easter Sunday morning, “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” We have been raised with Christ through baptism and that reality must be consequential in what we think about, what we choose, what we do. Our heart should be where our treasure is, and if our treasure is in God, then our heart should be seeking to hallow his name, to enter and advance his kingdom, to do his will. St. Paul reminds the first Christians in Colossae of what happened in baptism as they took off their clothes, were baptized, and then vested with a white garment symbolic of Christ’s virtues: “You have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.” They have put on the mind of Christ and are called to seek him. This is the path to life, to living “hidden with Christ,” to having Christ be “all in all,” even if the world doesn’t recognize. But that path involves the Cross. It involves death to the old Adam in us, to the way they “once conducted” themselves. That’s why he says that in saying yes to God we’re saying no to other gods and must make that no firm. “Put to death, then,” he says, “the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry. You must put them all away: anger, fury, malice, slander, and obscene language, … lying.” This is the choice a Christian makes. To die with Christ so as to live with him risen from the dead.

* To seek the things that are above, to ponder them and live them, is to treasure what Christ treasures, to yearn for his wisdom and to live by it. In today’s Gospel, Jesus reveals to us what is truly valuable — and it’s contradictory to worldly standards. He gives us in the Sermon on the Plain a different version of the Beatitudes, which are a snap shot of Jesus’ face and values. Jesus tells us we’re blessed when, like him, we’re spiritually poor and find in God our true wealth; when we hunger, recognizing that material hunger helps to make us more dependent on and grateful for God’s provi...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

The Holy Name of Mary

September 12, 2023

Col 2:6-15, Ps 145, Lk 6:12-19

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.12.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today the Church celebrate the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, a name we invoke every day when we cry out, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners!” The feast originated in Spain in 1513, but it was extended to the whole Church in 1683 by Pope Innocent XI to mark the great victory of King Jan Sobieski of Poland in the Battle of Vienna on September 11 of that year, a victory that most historians believed kept Europe Christian against the invading Muslim Turks. When we turn to Mary and invoke her holy name in the battles we’re fighting, we recall the fact that God wants us to be able to have an I-Thou relationship with her, that she seeks to help us the same way she helped the Church in Vienna, in Lepanto, in Cana and so many other places.

* Just like God called Mary by name through the Archangel Gabriel, so he calls us by name. Our name, too, is meant to become holy, to be preceded by the word  and reality “saint.” Today we ponder our calling by name in the Gospel. We notice in the calling of the apostles that our vocation, like theirs, is a direct result of the prayer of the Lord Jesus. We see him at the beginning of the Gospel go up a mountain and spend all night in prayer to his Father. Jesus seems to have been praying in discernment about whom he should choose as his apostles and praying in intercession for those whom he was about to choose. We should never forget that Jesus likewise prays for us. He’s ascended into heaven in order to intercede for us “night and day.” For that reason, we should never really be afraid of living up to the vocation that God has given us, because just as much as Jesus prayed for the apostles, and prayed for Peter in particular that his faith may not fail but that after his conversion he would strengthen his brothers (Lk 22), he prayed to the Father for all those who would hear the Gospel through the work of the Apostles (Jn 17), and prays for us still.

* From among his disciples, he selected twelve apostles. It says he “called [them] to himself” and “named [them] Apostles,” another way of saying what St. Mark describes: “he called them to be with him and so that they might be sent out” (Mk 3:14). We come here face-to-face with the mystery of divine election. God calls us all to him, but among all of us he chooses some for more intensely intimate cooperation with him. Out of all people he created, he chose the Jews; out of all the Jews, some became his disciples; out of all those disciples, 12 became apostles; out of all 12, he chose three (Peter, James and John) to be with him in many of the most pivotal moments of his public life (healing the daughter of Jairus, the Transfiguration, and the Agony in the Garden); and out of the three, he chose one, Peter, on whom to build his Church. Likewise we can say that Jesus calls all 8 billion alive today to come to the knowledge of the truth, but only 2.5 out of 8 is Christian and only half of them are Catholic. These facts don’t make us better than anyone else, but we are certainly fortunate! To whom more is given, Jesus said elsewhere, more is to be expected. And just as the apostles responded to Jesus’ invitation and left other things to be with him and made themselves available to be sent out on mission, so he summons us.

* We also see in the Gospel is the way Jesus trained the twelve to carry on his mission: he taught the crowds,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the 23rd Week of Ordinary Time, Year I

22nd Anniversary of 9/11

September 11, 2023

Col 1:24-2:3, Ps 62, Lk 6:6-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.11.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in this homily:

* We begin today a very powerful week in the liturgy. On Thursday we will celebrate the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the day after Our Lady of Sorrows, on Wednesday, the memorial of St. John Chrysostom, who suffered much for preaching the truth out of season, and on Saturday we will commemorate the martyrs Saints Cyprian and Cornelius and remember the dry martyr Cardinal François Xavier Nguyen van Thuan. It’s a week during which we will ponder our “spes unica,” our only hope, which is Christ on the Cross and our summons to pick up our Cross every day and unite ourselves to him. It’s a week to help us to recall that the Cross is not so much a sign of pain but of the love that bears pain, a curse but a caress, a privilege not a punishment.

* In the Gospel we see Jesus suffering for doing good, for saving, for giving witness to the true meaning of the Sabbath. This would be a foretaste of Good Friday when the Sanhedrin, Pharisees, Scribes, Saduccees and Herodians all conspired to execute Jesus. The Scribes and Pharisees had totally misunderstood the meaning of the Sabbath, which was to restore us, to liberate us from self-imposed slavery. They thought that the prohibition against servile work meant that Jews couldn’t even morally do acts of love on the Sabbath. Jesus asked the rather absurd question as to whether God would be pleased or displeased if people did good on the Sabbath rather than evil, to save life rather than to destroy it. They didn’t answer, for obvious reasons. The truth is that the Pharisees, on the Sabbath, were precisely there trying to do evil, to entrap Jesus, to plot to destroy his life, but they thought that that was somehow acceptable while Jesus’ healing the withered hand of a man was somehow what God wanted to prevent. Nevertheless, Jesus was willing to embrace the Cross, the sufferings, in order to restore this man and to restore us all to health.

* Another who was willing to embrace the Cross was St. Paul, who would elsewhere eventually learn to boast in the Cross of the Lord through which the world was crucified to him and him to the world, the Cross he said was God’s “power and wisdom,” the Cross by which he was crucified by Christ so that the life he now lived in the flesh he lived by faith in the Son of God who loved him and gave his life for him. He embraced the Cross in his manifold sufferings — whippings, stonings, shipwrecks, persecution, anxiety for the Churches, imprisonment and eventually beheading. But despite all of this, he said, in words on which Christians should never cease to ponder, “I rejoice in my sufferings.” His sufferings filled him with joy. He rejoiced, he said, in them because he was making up what was lacking in his own flesh of the sufferings of Christ. This is a much misinterpreted passage because many translations aren’t accurate. Christ’s sufferings aren’t lacking, but our participation in them is. Our suffering, however, helps us to enter into Christ’s sufferings, and this is part of our own restoration. St. Paul was also rejoicing in his sufferings “for [the Colossians’] sake.” He knew that our sufferings, united to Christ’s, are co-redemptive, and so that, rather than any masochistic delight in pain, was the reason he was able to rejoice. This mystery of co-redeeming love, St. Paul said, is the great mystery hidden for centuries, “Christ in you,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Mass of the Holy Spirit for the Inauguration of the Academic Year

September 10, 2023

Ezek 33:7-9, Ps 95, Rom 13:8-10, Mt 18:15-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.10.23_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

 

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

* At the beginning of an academic year, it’s routine to celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit in which we ask God the Father together with, and in the name of Jesus, God the Son, to send us God the Holy Spirit, to guide us throughout the entire year. How much we need the Holy Spirit’s gifts of wisdom, knowledge, understanding and prudence in our academic work, so that we do not merely become smarter but enlightened by the light of God. How much we need the gift of courage in so many aspects of campus life. In an age in which so many marginalize God and there are so many offenses against those made in his image and likeness in speech, social media and behavior, how much we need the gifts of reverence and fear of the Lord. Since we are not normally able to celebrate Pentecost together because it generally falls after the end of the academic year, we start the academic year by asking the Holy Spirit to come down upon us like he did upon Mary and the first Christians in the Upper Room. We ask him to help teach us how to pray, since we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. We ask him to help us to understand Sacred Scripture better, since he inspired each of its Sacred Authors and also helps us to interpret it aright through the Church. We ask him to help us to recognize the particular gifts, charisms and manifestations of the Spirit he’s given each of us are for the common good and move us to use them as he intends. We ask him to help us to learn how to live according to the Spirit, which is a summary of the entire Christian moral life, rather than according to the flesh. And we ask him to give us a tongue of fire so that, like the first Christians, we may proclaim the Gospel on campus with ardent love for God and others. As we begin this new year, we ask for all of these gifts as well as for the help we need to live by them.

* In Trinitarian theology, the Holy Spirit is normally understood as the personal love between the Father and the Son. The Father and the Son have sent him to us so that he might bring us in to the internal life of our Trinitarian God. He seeks to fill us with the fire of his love so that we might love God in return and begin to love others as God has loved us. That’s what the essence of today’s readings is all about. The love that the Holy Spirit seeks to ignite.

* Paul tells us in today’s second reading: “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Basing himself on Jesus’ words that the law and the prophets all flow from the two-fold commandment to love God with all of our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mt 22:40), St. Paul describes how the second tablet of the Decalogue — honoring our father and mother, sacrificing for rather than killing others, loving rather than using others for sexual pleasure, giving rather than stealing, telling the truth rather than lying, and rejoicing at others’ blessings rather than coveting what they have — can all be summed up in the phrase, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is our duty. We owe it others. We owe it precisely God commanded us to love one another as Jesus himself has loved us. We owe it because Jesus told us that whatever we do to the least of our br...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

September 10, 2023

Ezek 33:7-9, Ps 95, Rom 13:8-10, Mt 18:15-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.10.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today St. Paul tells the Christians in Rome and all of us words that, on the 77th anniversary of Inspiration Day, underline the importance of the mission of the Missionaries of Charity: “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Basing himself on Jesus’ words that the law and the prophets all flow from the two-fold commandment to love God with all of our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mt 22:40), St. Paul describes how the second tablet of the Decalogue can all be summed up in the phrase, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is our duty. We owe it others. We owe it precisely God commanded us to love one another as Jesus himself has loved us. We owe it because Jesus told us that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him. And so today is a day in which we focus on Jesus’ infinite loving thirst for souls and how he wants us to satiate that thirst by thirsting as he thirsts, by fulfilling the law of love for those who in the world are most forgotten and abandoned. We ponder with gratitude our common call within our baptismal call, to fulfill all of God’s commandments through the perfection of charity.

* We see that path to love in today’s Gospel in the call to communion. Love unites and hence Jesus wants our communion to be the flourishing of divine and human love. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” he says, “there am I in the midst of them.” If we are living in love, we will be living in communion. Jesus would say during the Last Supper, “By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:35) and would pray that we would be one as the Persons of the Blessed Trinity are one, so that the world would know that God the Father sent the Son and loves us just as much as he loves the Son. And so Jesus wants us to gather in his name, to pray together his name, even making the extraordinary promise that if two of us gather in his name — meaning together with his Person — to pray for something, it will be granted by God the Father. He also wants us to live together in his name, to eat together in his name, to recreate together in his name, and to do everything, whether in word or deed, in loving communion with Jesus and each other.

* In the first part of today’s Gospel, however, Jesus makes clear that he’s calling us to something far more challenging that getting together at a campfire and singing kumbaya. He gives us one of the most challenging aspects of fraternal love, one many are tempted not to fulfill: namely, his teaching on fraternal correction. Jesus directs us: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault.” He instructs us to do so first one-on-one, out of respect for the person. But if that doesn’t work, he tells us not to give up, but out of love to return with a couple of others who have observed the same fault, in the hope that the collective concern might help the person get over his or her denial or stubbornness to change. If that doesn’t work, Jesus tells us to persevere and go to our superiors, to the leaders of the Church, to pray for the person and to intervene with greater authority. And if that, too, is unsuccessful, Jesus tells us to treat the person as we would a tax collector or sinner, which doesn’t mean to write the person off — after all,