Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of Holy Week

April 3, 2023

Is 42:1-7, Ps 27, Jn 12:1-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.3.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we enter more deeply into this holiest week of the year, the Church gives us an important frame of how we’re supposed to see what God is doing this week from his perspective and how we’re supposed to respond. We see this in the two different anointings of Jesus that the readings describe today. They show us how Christ was anointed as Messiah precisely to restore us to our relationship with God and others and how we, too, filled with the gift received, will naturally want to show how lavish is our gratitude.

* The first anointing we see is the one God the Father does of his Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s spoken of today in the first reading from the Prophet Isaiah. (This reading is the first of the four “Suffering Servant Songs” found in Isaiah, which are the most explicit prophecies of what Jesus himself would suffer and accomplish for us this week out of merciful love. Today we ponder the first of the four, from Isaiah 42. Tomorrow, we tackle the second, from Isaiah 49. Wednesday we’ll discuss the third, from Isaiah 50. And finally on Good Friday, we’ll have the fourth and most moving of all, from Isaiah 52-53.) Today we see what God himself says and does. “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I have put my Spirit,” he tells us through the Prophet. The Father has anointed the Son, as we see occur at Jesus’ baptism, when the Holy Spirit comes down upon him like a dove. Earlier in Isaiah, with words that were fulfilled in Jesus, Isaiah says, “The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:1).

* Today a job description that flows from that anointing is given to us, a description Jesus will fulfill to the letter this week: “He shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street. A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench, until he establishes justice on the earth.” We know that several times during his publicly ministry Jesus shouted out against the hypocrisy of the Scribes and the Pharisees. We know that he overturned money changers’ tables and drove out animals from the temple area with a whip. But this week, he didn’t cry out as he was carrying his Cross through the streets. This week he didn’t exert any force sufficient to break a frail reed. He was doing this to establish justice on the earth — a right relationship between us and God — taking all the sin upon himself so that he could take that poison away from us and have us life.

* As he was doing this, he was not alone. God the Father and the Holy Spirit were with him, guiding him, every step along the way of the Cross. “I, the Lord, have called you for the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand.” And he foretold that he would guide him to this fulfillment from his earliest days in Mary’s womb: “I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.” Jesus would become the light and salvation — as we prayed in the Psalm —  not just of the Jews, but of the nations, whom he would lead from confinement and dark dungeons into the light of life. He would not just seal a Covenant between God and man but become that new and et...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Palm Sunday, Year A

April 2, 2023

Mt 21:1-11, Is 50:4-7, Ps 22, Phil 2:6-11, Mt 26:14-27:66

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.2.23_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* We have now begun the week the Church calls “holy.” It’s holy, first, because of all Jesus Christ did during these days, from the triumphal entry into his city that we marked at the beginning of this Mass, to his teaching in the Temple, to the Last Supper, to his prayer in Gethsemane, to his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and death on Good Friday we heard in the Passion account, to his rest in the tomb and his glorious resurrection on the third day. It’s also called holy because it’s meant to make us holy, if we live this week the right way, if we enter into the mysteries we celebrate, if we internalize what Jesus won for us, if we cooperate with him in his saving work. Holy Week is supposed to be our most faith-filled week of the year, but that requires our choosing with determination to make it the most faith-filled week of the year.

* Right before the passage of today’s second reading from the Letter to the Philippians in which we focus on how Christ emptied himself to take on human nature, St. Paul tells us to have in us the same mind that was in Christ Jesus, who humbled himself to the point of death on the Cross. Holy Week is meant to help us enter into the mind and heart of Jesus. Today in the Gospel at the beginning of Mass and in the Passion we just recited, we see five different ways we’re called to put on the mind of Christ and respond to him with faith this week so that through these sacred mysteries he may fulfill his desire to save and sanctify us.

* The first thing we learn is how to welcome Jesus. There was great expectation as to whether Jesus was coming to the feast. Many thought he wouldn’t because they had heard the rumors that the chief priests and the Sanhedrin were trying to arrest Jesus and have him executed. But Jesus came anyway. And we see how the people responded. St. Matthew tells us, “The very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and strewed them on the road. The crowds preceding him and those following, [especially the young people,] kept crying out, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” There was tremendous excitement. People came out of their homes. They laid down their garments on the path, something they would do only for a king. They saw him riding on a donkey, just as David had Solomon do when he made him his successor (1 Kings 1:33, 38). They recognized that this was the fulfillment of Zechariah’s messianic prophecy, “Say to daughter Zion, ‘Behold your King comes to you, meek and riding on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’” Their attitude shows us the type of exhilaration we should have to welcome Jesus this Holy Week. We should be running out to greet him. We should be praising him with our words, with our gestures like waving palms, with our clothes, and with our whole mind, heart, soul and strength. Our life should change as we seek to welcome Jesus as he during this week seeks to rescue us from sin and death and make eternal life possible.

* If we’re looking for an even deeper image of how we’re supposed to welcome Jesus and live this Holy Week we can turn to the donkey that Jesus used to enter into the Holy City. Jesus had sent two disciples ahead of him, saying, “Go into the village opposite you and immediately you will find an ass tethered, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them here to me.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Palm Sunday, Year A

April 2, 2023

Mt 21:1-11, Is 50:4-7, Ps 22, Phil 2:6-11, Mt 26:14-27:66

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.2.23_Palm_Sunday_Homily_MCs_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* We have now begun the week the Church calls “holy.” It’s holy, first, because of all Jesus Christ did during these days, from the triumphal entry into his city, to his teaching in the Temple, to the Last Supper, to his prayer in Gethsemane, to his arrest, torture, crucifixion, preaching and death on Good Friday, to his rest in the tomb and his glorious resurrection on the third day. It’s also called holy because it’s meant to make us holy, if we live this week the right way, if we enter into the mysteries we celebrate, if we internalize all Jesus won for us during these most holy of days and enter into a conversation with Jesus not just with thoughts or words but with our whole life. Holy Week is supposed to be our most faith-filled week of the year, but that requires our choosingto make it the most faith-filled week of the year.

* This year Holy Week is taking place within the first year of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival that the Bishops of the United States have summoned, and so what I’d like to do is briefly to look at today’s readings with the Eucharist in mind, since the happenings of Holy Week aren’t just events that happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem but realities that are actualized in our interactions with the same Lord Jesus present with us in the Holy Eucharist. So let’s look at seven ways that the dialogues that Jesus initiated 2000 years ago are meant to continue today in our conversation with him in the Holy Eucharist.

* The first interaction we can ponder is Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, which is the Gospel that we hear at the very beginning of the Palm Sunday liturgy. As Saint Matthew will tell us, Jesus told two disciples to go into the village, find a donkey tethered to a colt, and bring them to him, saying, “The Master has need of them.” This was to fulfil the prophecy of Zechariah in which the King and Savior would enter Jerusalem humble and riding on the foal of a beast of burden. Just as Jesus the Master had need of a donkey, so he has need of us. As the great Palm Sunday hymn “All Glory Laud and Honor” proclaims, “May you be the Holy Rider and we your little colt, so that the venerated City of God may embrace us together with you.” Jesus wants us to be as docile, diligent and steady as a donkey. In the Eucharist, he longs for us to receive him, not having him sit on our back but within us, and help him carry out his saving work. He longs for us to be present with him faithfully in prayer.

* We see the second interaction likewise in that initial Gospel. The large crowd spread its cloaks on the road together with palm branches as they cried out to Jesus, “Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” It’s not by coincidence that the Church makes those words our own in the heart of the Mass, right before the Eucharistic Prayer, in the Sanctus, in which we begin with the words Isaiah heard in his heavenly vision, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of his glory,” and then add what the crowds said as Jesus entered the city. Hosanna means “Save now” or “Deliver us promptly” and we say that to Jesus who comes in the name of God the Father to give us that salvation and deliverance. Every Mass we’re called to relive, in other words, the joy of the crowds on Palm Sunday, as Jesus enters not the Holy City of Jerusalem, but our holy parish Church and then,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Gary Women’s Conference

Bishop Noll Institute, Hammond, Indiana

April 1, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.1.23_Transmitting_Our_Eucharistic_Faith_1.mp3

 

To download a PDF of the slides for today’s talk, please click below: 

Transmitting Our Eucharistic Faith, Amazement, Love and Life to the Young

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Diocese of Gary Women’s Conference

Bishop Noll Institute, Hammond, Indiana

April 1, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.1.23_Great_Female_Eucharistic_Saints_1.mp3

 

To download a PDF of the slides for today’s talk, please click below: 

Great Female Eucharistic Saints- Catholic Women as Catalysts for the Church’s Eucharistic Revival

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph Church, Hammond, Indiana

Diocese of Gary Diocesan Eucharistic Holy Hour

March 31, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of the presentation, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.31.23_Gary_Indiana_Holy_Hour_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Palm Sunday A, Vigil

April 1, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.1.23_Landry_ConCon_10_min_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation that Jesus wants to have with us tomorrow on Palm Sunday and throughout this upcoming week that the Church calls “holy.” It’s holy, first, because of all Jesus Christ did during these days, from the triumphal entry into his city, to his teaching in the Temple, to the Last Supper, to his prayer in Gethsemane, to his arrest, torture, crucifixion, preaching and death on Good Friday, to his rest in the tomb and his glorious resurrection on the third day. It’s also called holy because it’s meant to make us holy, if we live this week the right way, if we enter into the mysteries we celebrate, if we internalize all Jesus won for us during these most holy of days and enter into a conversation with Jesus not just with thoughts or words but with our whole life. Holy Week is supposed to be our most faith-filled week of the year, but that requires our choosing to make it the most faith-filled week of the year.

* This year Holy Week is taking place within the first year of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival that the Bishops of the United States have summoned, and so what I’d like to do is look at the consequential conversation the Lord wants to have with us in the Gospels on Palm Sunday with the Eucharist in mind, since the happenings of Holy Week aren’t just events that happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem but realities that are actualized in our interactions with the same Lord Jesus present with us in the Holy Eucharist. So let’s look at a few ways that the dialogues that Jesus initiated 2000 years ago are meant to continue today in our conversation with him in the Holy Eucharist.

* The first interaction we can ponder is Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, which is the Gospel that we hear at the very beginning of the Palm Sunday liturgy. As Saint Matthew will tell us, Jesus told two disciples to go into the village, find a donkey tethered to a colt, and bring them to him, saying, “The Master has need of them.” This was to fulfil the prophecy of Zechariah in which the King and Savior would enter Jerusalem humble and riding on the foal of a beast of burden. Just as Jesus the Master had need of a donkey, so he has need of us. As the great Palm Sunday hymn “All Glory Laud and Honor” proclaims, “May you be the Holy Rider and we your little colt, so that the venerated City of God may embrace us together with you.” Jesus wants us to be as docile, diligent and steady as a donkey. In the Eucharist, he longs for us to receive him, not on our back but within us, and help him carry out his saving work. He longs for us to be present with him faithfully in prayer.

* We see the second interaction likewise in that initial Gospel. The large crowd spread its cloaks on the road together with palm branches as they cried out to Jesus, “Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” It’s not by coincidence that the Church makes those words our own in the heart of the Mass, right before the Eucharistic Prayer, in the Sanctus, in which we begin with the words Isaiah heard in his heavenly vision, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of his glory,” and then add what the crowds said as Jesus entered the city. Hosanna means “Save now” or “Deliver us promptly” and we say that to Jesus who comes in ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 30, 2023

Gen 17:3-9, Ps 105, Jn 8:51-59

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.30.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As Lent began, we were smudged with ashes as a priest said to us, in Jesus’ name and repeating his words, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The essential Lenten journey is geared toward helping us live by faith, by having us turn away from all of those ways of infidelity in which we have not lived in communion with God and assisting us — through prayer, fasting, almsgiving — to unite ourselves to God: our thoughts (prayer), our deepest desires (hungering through fasting for what God most hungers) and interrelation with others (charity through union with God’s love and providence). Today the Church has us focus again on the whole meaning of faith. Faith, as we spoke about yesterday, is not fundamentally believing in a series of truths; faith, rather, is a believing in Someone who gives witness to those truths. To grow in faith means first to grow in trust for the One in whom we believe and then, as a result of that trust, to adhere much more to what he says.

* That’s why today we focus on Abraham, our father in faith. Abraham shows us what a genuine trust in God means: that we believe in what he says, even when he asks us to do something hard, even when he challenges us beyond what we know. Every Second Sunday of Lent, we encounter Abraham and his adventure of faith to help us with the coordinates of Lent and Christian life. Lent is meant to be a journey of faith by imitating the acts of faith we see in Abraham. Jesus calls us to leave our own Ur of the Chaldeans, our own comfort zones, to travel to where he wants to lead us. He calls us to believe in all of his promises, even though they might seem impossible to believe, like Abraham’s not only becoming a dad but a father of many nations when he was childless past retirement age. He calls us to have the faith to be willing to sacrifice what we hold dearest, like Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac, the “son of the promise,” knowing that God would be able to raise him from the dead and can give life even to those sacrifices.

* When we don’t have that relationship of trust — a gift God will provide if we’re open — then we distrust what is said. We see that illustrated for us in today’s Gospel. Yesterday, Jesus spoke to those challenging him about their slavery to sin. They replied, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.” Jesus retorted, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who told you the truth I heard from God. Abraham did not do this.” To be a spiritual descendent of Abraham is to live by faith, to have our faith operative in deeds of love toward God and others. Rather than accepting Christ’s message in faith, however, the interlocutors were, in a way totally contrary to faith, plotting to kill the Messenger to extinguish his message. They thought that if Jesus were veering from their preconceived notions, then all his indisputable works couldn’t be coming from God but had to be coming from Beelzebul, the prince of demons. That’s what explains the beginning of today’s Gospel passage. When Jesus says, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death,” they responded, “Now we are sure that you are possessed.” In other words, they were 99 percent convinced prior that we was possessed, but now they had no doubt. They listed various holy persons who kept the word of God and nevertheless died,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 29, 2023

Dan 3:14-20.91-92.95, Dan 3:52-26, Jn 8:31-42

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.29.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Lent is about liberation. Throughout this holy season we retrace — at a much deeper spiritual level — the liberation of the Israelites from slavery as Jesus, the new Moses, seeks to lead us by means of the new and eternal Passover on a journey with him through the desert of life, through even death, into the eternal promised land. Lent is about being set free from the domination of the temptations of the evil one by spending 40 days with Jesus in a spiritual desert. It’s about journeying from the self-imposed pigsty back to the Father’s house. The three practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving all point to this liberation: liberation from egocentric self-dependence through putting God in his proper place in prayer, from giving into our lower appetites by the self-mastery that comes via fasting, from obsessing about our needs wants and needs by sacrificially giving of ourselves, time and possessions for those whose needs are greater.

* Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks about liberation and slavery and describes three great interconnected means by which he wants to help us in Lent experience the freedom he came into the world to give us.

* The first great means is faith. There are many who believe that faith enslaves, that it binds us by commandments, that it leads us to depend on something or someone other than what we can empirically verify, but faith helps us to recognize that what we can perceive through our senses is not all that there is. We see the liberating power of faith in the three young men in the fiery furnace in today’s first reading from the Book of Daniel. Even though they were bound and thrown into the white hot oven, they were interiorly free through faith, which liberated them from the fear of Nebuchadnezzar, from the fear of pain and suffering, from the fear of death, and, as we see in the reading, from presumption. With faith, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar, “If our God, whom we serve, can save us from the white-hot furnace and from your hands, O king, may he save us! But even if he will not, know, O king, that we will not serve your god or worship the golden statue that you set up.” The courage came from their fidelity. And their fidelity coupled to God’s fidelity led to a great conversion of the King and many others as they were rescued by what seems to have been an angel of God. Nebuchadnezzar would exclaim at the end, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted [had faith] in him; they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies rather than serve or worship any god except their own God.” Lent is meant to help us grow in that type of faith so that no matter what white hot furnaces of suffering we may need to endure, we may remain true to the Lord, asking him to save us in this world and even more importantly save us forever from the fiery furnace of Hell.

* The second great means is his word of truth. It’s important for us to grasp that weak faith is not enough. Jesus addressed these words to those who “believed in him,” but who nevertheless would seek to have him killed. Faith alone, understood as believing something to be true, is not enough. The act of faith essentially involves believing something on the basis of our trust in someone, and for us that means a trust in God, who sent his Son.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 28, 2023

Numbers 21:4-9, Ps 102, Jn 8:21-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.28.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* We always learn a great deal from the penances God imposes — for example, the silence imposed on Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, or God’s having the Israelites consume the dust of the golden calf they had made — because they’re always primarily medicinal and therefore teach us a great deal about the deeper nature of the sin that elicited the penance. Today in the first reading from the Book of Numbers, we see the sin of the Israelites in the desert. They were complaining against God and against Moses. Taking up their familiar refrain, they wondered aloud whether God had worked all of his miracles freeing them from slavery in Egypt only to have them die in the desert. Even though God had been feeding them daily with manna from heaven in the morning and quails in the evening and quenching their thirst with water from the rock, they still said, “We are disgusted with this wretched food!” Some people can complain even about the menu at the Last Supper! So God sent among the Israelites saraph serpents who bit them, such that many of them died. It finally brought the people to acknowledge God, to acknowledge their sinful ways and to seek God’s help. They said to Moses, “We have sinned in complaining against the Lord and you. Pray the Lord to take the serpents away from us!” So Moses did. And God gave him what would seem at first glance a strange command in response to their prayers and predicament. “Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live.” And that’s what he did. The Book of Numbers tells us, “And whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.”

* What was this penance about sin and remedy all about? There was a part of it that looked backward and another that looked forward.

* The retrospective part of it involved the sin. It looked back to the Garden when Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent and sinned against the Lord. By sending serpents among the Israelites, God was reminding them precisely about the presence of the devil and how he was slithering among them to lead them to complain and distrust God. He was out to kill them by poisoning them with his venom and that’s precisely what happened. He had bitten them and infected them even before the saraph serpents appeared. The remedy the Lord proposed, making a bronze serpent, mounting it on a pole and having everyone look at it was a means by which to see precisely what had caused their predicament — their sins, their having been bitten by the serpent represented by the saraph serpents — so that they might turn their back on sin, repent of their evil choices and turn anew with trust to the Lord. Anyone who looked upon the bronze serpent would live, but God didn’t say that he or she would be healed immediately. Those bitten would still have some of the poison in them and need to work to get better, but they would be saved. The cure began, however, with looking at the bronze serpent. If they refused to look at the remedy God had given, they would die of the poison.

* That remedy is the prospective part of what God asked Moses to do. It pointed forward to Christ’s own saving action to which he alludes in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells the Pharisees that they were infected with a mortal wound. “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin.” He said that they would be unable to follow him and would die because they would no...