Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Basilica of the Agony of the Garden of Gethsemane, Church of All Nations, Jerusalem

Pilgrimage of Passages for Catholics with Columbia Students

May 19, 2023

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

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The outline for this homily was: 

* The invitation to enter Jesus’ prayer as he asked Peter, James, John and the other apostles.

* Three parts of Jesus prayer: relationship to the Father, trust in his omnipotence, and the desire to do the Father’s will in everything.

* Our response to the invitation in prayer and in life. In prayer, we’re called to see to do the Father’s will on earth just as it is done in heaven, for doing the Father’s will is the beginning of heaven on earth. That’s the way we’re strengthened to be faithful in the supreme moment, when we go out with Jesus to meet our betrayers. 

* The Mass is the great school of what Jesus teaches in Gethsemane, linking what he did in the Upper Room to what he did on Golgotha, turning his whole being to the Father, trusting in him, and aligning his will, as we do this in his memory.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Shepherds’ Field, Bethlehem

Pilgrimage of Passages for Catholics with Columbia Students

May 18, 2023

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

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The outline of the homily was: 

* Celebrating this Mass of Christmas on the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord allows us to unite the beginning and end of the manifestation of the physical appearances of Jesus on earth — the day he was born and could be seen by human eyes, and the day he was ascended and taken from human eyes.

* Joseph, Mary and Jesus came here on pilgrimage for the census to the town of David. Angels, Shepherds, Magi all did afterward, as did great saints like St. Jerome and St. Francis.

* Cave teaches us about the shepherds. Vigilance. Haste. Awe. Transformation.

* On the day we visit Yad Vashem, it always is an opportunity to think about the peace on those who rest in his favor the infant Savior brought into the world. At Yad Vashem we see in all its horror what happens when people don’t live in the peace of the Lord and how they can seek to destroy others.  

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Franciscan Wedding Church of Cana

Cana, Galilee

May 16, 2023

 

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

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Basilica of Old St. Patrick, New York, New York

Nuptial Mass for Andrew Lev Shemin and Anna Florette Fata

May 13, 2023

Gen 2:18-24, Ps 103, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 5:13-16

 

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The following text guided the homily:

* Today’s beautiful day, which Anna, her parents, brothers and many cousins, her friends, Archbishop Auza, her fellow coworkers and I from the Holy See Mission, and so many others have long awaited, and a day on which Andrew, his parents, family members and friends have awaited far longer, has finally arrived. And it has a long prehistory, one that goes back far beyond last October 16, when Andrew, astride the Seine River next to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, asked Anna to spend the rest of her life with him in a consortium of love and life. It extends beyond when they first started dating in June 2018, or when they first met through friend groups in 2015. It goes back far beyond their births in 1991 and 1980. It goes back to the beginning, as we heard in today’s first reading. In the Book of Genesis, when God created Adam, Adam had God all to himself in the garden. All of creation had been made for him to govern. He was perfectly in right relationship with God. Even though he seemed to have everything one could ask for, something — more specifically, someone — was missing. And after God had said in the first six phases of creation, “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” and with the creation of the human person, “It was very good,” God finally thundered, “It is not good…for man to be alone.” So he created Eve, whom today’s first reading called a “suitable partner,” symbolically out of his side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. When Adam saw her, he rejoiced and exclaimed, “Finally this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!,” a Hebrew idiom saying that they shared the same strengths and weaknesses. As Jesus would later say in the Gospel, this is the reason why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh in love. The upshot of the Creation account is that God, who is love, has created the human person in his image and likeness … in love and for love. Since no one can love in a vacuum, God could not be solitary, there needed to be a Lover and a Beloved, and in God the eternal love between them was so strong as to take on personality. In creating the human person, therefore, God created not just a “him, male and female” but a “them,” a communion between man and woman, whose love for each other could be so strong as literally to “make love,” to generate new life, as a fruit of their loving communion of persons. From the first marriage of Adam and Eve, to your marriage today, Andrew and Anna, marriage was created by God to be a sacrament of love, to help you to grow to be more and more like God and at the same time more fully human. Today you will not only receive a Sacrament but become a Sacrament for as long as you both shall live, a visible sign, as St. John Paul II used to say, pointing to the invisible reality of the Trinitarian loving communion of persons, a living reminder of the fruitful, faithful, indissoluble love of God and an icon of Christ’s love for his bride the Church.

* Jesus spoke about the matrimonial vocation to be a sacrament of God’s love in the Gospel you chose for today. Christian marriage is never just about two people, the husband and the wife. It’s not even merely about the family that, with God’s help and encouragement, they will together raise up,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Michael’s Church, New York, NY

Funeral Mass for Oritsebemigho “Begho” Olubukola Ukueberuwa

May 13, 2023

Rev 14:13, Ps 27, 1 Tim 6:11-12, Jn 12:23-28

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Little did Begho Ukueberuwa realize, on Sunday, May 7, at 8 am, as he approached the starting line for the half-marathon on Exchange Terrace in downtown Providence, alongside Burnside Park, that he was about to start one race and finish another. As he began his first half-marathon in Providence, he was about to finish a full one under Providence. Wearing bib number 11581, he jogged alongside the Providence River and Providence Harbor toward scenic India Point Park, continued past the campus of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design up the tree-line Blackstone Boulevard as he headed north toward Route 95. Nearing the half-way point, about an hour after he started, he was clocked at a respectable 9:19 per mile, as he turned south along the Seekonk River. He journeyed alongside Swanpoint and Riverside Cemeteries as he made his way toward Blackstone Park hugging the River. He crossed under I-195, passed the Marston Boat House and somewhere around where the Seekonk and Providence Rivers merge to form Providence Harbor leading down toward Newport and out to the Atlantic, he could run no more. Notwithstanding his physical strength and his well-admired perseverance, his kidney, muscles, lungs, heart and other internal organs gave way as a result of heat stroke and the inability of his body to cool down. He was brought to Rhode Island Hospital where the medical staff did all they could; where the hospital chaplain did all he could, giving him the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick and the apostolic pardon; where his dad, brother, two sisters and brother-in-law surrounded him, with his mom and two sisters present by phone, as Francis, Jumoke, Toju, Tetse, Dede, Misan and Mene did all they could, praying and whispering in turn into his ear their love for him, their gratitude for his life, and their tearful goodbyes.

* Unconscious, Begho couldn’t reply, but his valedictory in body language resonated what St. Paul wrote in his farewell to St. Timothy, “The time of my departure is near. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” It would have expressed his hope that “from now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance” (2 Tim 4:6-8). He had indeed competed well, as we heard in today’s second reading, and through pursuing righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, gentleness and other virtues, he had sought to lay hold of eternal life, the eternal life to which he was called when he made, here at St. Michael’s, six years ago at his baptism, the noble confession of faith in the presence of Father George Rutler, Mene, friends and witnesses. We pray that early in the morning on Monday, May 8, as his earthly family was repeatedly reminding him of their affection, he heard a voice from heaven say the words we pondered in today’s first reading, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. Let them find rest from their labors, for their works accompany them.” Jesus said in today’s Gospel that dying in him leads to life: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Dying in the Lord is not sterile but fertile. Pope Benedict, in his 2006 encyclical God is Love, said that these words about the fruitful death of t...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Vigil

May 13, 2023

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy 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. It’s a continuation of what Jesus said to the apostles on Holy Thursday night in the Upper Room. He told them he was communicating these things before they happened, so that when they happened, the apostles would believe. He was preparing the apostles not only for his betrayal, crucifixion and death that would occur within hours, but even more for the post-Resurrection reality of the Church, which is why the Church always ponders these passages throughout the second half of the Easter Season so that we might believe more firmly, in the light of the resurrection, everything Jesus says.

* This Sunday, the Risen Lord Jesus speaks to us specifically about four promises, four blessings, four different ways he wants to relate to us.

* The first promise is, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments and I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth.” In 1565, these words were put by Thomas Tallis into one of the most famous and beautiful motets of all time, which I am playing now in the background. It’s the promise that if we love Jesus by keeping his commandments, to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and to love our neighbor as he loves us, then he and the Father will give us the Holy Spirit to be always with us. Earlier this week, on May 8, the Church in the United States celebrated the Memorial of Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, born in Bayonne, NJ at the beginning of last century and the first American to be beatified in the United States, which took place at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark in 2014. She wrote in one of her spiritual reflections, “God’s purpose in my life is this in general: To teach men that Our Lord’s promise ‘If any man love Me, he will keep My Word; and My Father will love him and We will come to him and make our abode with him’ is held out to every soul regardless of calling; and is the perfect realization of His prayer and ours: Thy kingdom come.” God’s desire is to come and dwell within us. This is what we pray for when we ask, “Thy Kingdom come!,” we’re asking to dwell with God in his kingdom, beginning now, within. That’s the Mission of the Holy Spirit who has been sent to us, for whose outpouring on Pentecost we are now beginning to pray. This is the first, incredible promise Jesus makes to us that comes from our seeking to live in his life, our seeking to do his will and remain in his word by keeping his commandments.

* One of the Holy Spirit’s chief works is to convince us we are beloved sons and daughters of God the Father. The Holy Spirit is poured into our hearts so that we might cry out, “Abba, Father!,” so that we might recognize the intimacy of a relationship with God as “dad.” That leads to Jesus’ second promise in this Sunday’s Gospel: “I will not leave you orphans.” In the midst of a culture in which there’s a true crisis of loneliness, in the midst of human lives in which sometimes we can feel abandoned, just like Jesus did on the Cross, in which the apostles felt like sheep without a shepherd after the crucifixion, Jesus promises that we will not be left orphans. He will not allow us to be abandoned by Father and mother.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Memorial of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, St. Pancras, St. Leopoldo Mandic, Blessed Alvaro del Portillo

May 12, 2023

Acts 15:22-31, Ps 57, Jn 15:12-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.12.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Throughout this 15th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, recounting what Jesus said during the Last Supper, Jesus has been focusing on the type of communion he came into the world to bring about, communion with him and with others. He began with the image of the Vine and the Branches. Yesterday and today he has focused on how that ontological union with him (brought about by the sacraments) is meant to lead into a moral union, a union based on communion in his love.

* Yesterday he said the most important words ever uttered, that just as God the Father loves him, so he loves each of us individually. He calls us to remain in that love, to hunger for it, to choose it, and tells us that the means by which we will is through keeping his commandments, the commandments that precisely train us to love God and love others. All the law and the prophets, all the commandments in other words, hang on the two-fold imperative to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And he tells us that remaining in his love in this way is the path to true and unending happiness, so that Jesus’ joy may be in us and our joy complete.

* Today he specifies more clearly what his commandment is in which we are supposed to abide. He gives us “his” commandment, which he also calls “new.” It’s the summary of the Christian moral life. “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus loves us, he told us yesterday, as much as the Father loves him, which is a total, self-sacrificial love to the extreme. Jesus didn’t call us to love him as he loved us, but to love others at the level of total self-sacrificial love. Jesus wants us to be able to say to others in body language, “Just as God the Father loves Jesus and Jesus loves me, so I love you.” Jesus teaches us this same truth after the resurrection when he gives St. Peter three times to reconstitute his fidelity after his three fold denial. Jesus asks three times whether he loves him more than everything else and three times Peter replies that he does. Jesus, in response to each, doesn’t stop there in mutual love. He says, “Feed my sheep.” “Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for Jesus would be shown in how he cares for those Christ has entrusted to him, both old (sheep) as well as young or vulnerable (lambs). And Jesus told Peter, using a euphemism for crucifixion, that when he would grow old, he would love the Lord and others in imitation of Christ. It’s the same way with all of us. Our love for the Lord will be shown by our love for others and not just by any old feelings of sympathy, but by our willingness to give our lives for others, which begins with giving our time, using our talents, and willingly putting others’ lives above our own. Five years ago, when this Gospel came up at daily Mass, Pope Francis made this point: “Jesus says something remarkable to us: ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Love always takes this path: to give one’s life. To live life as a gift, a gift to be given — not a treasure to be stored away. And Jesus lived it in this manner, as a gift. … We must not burn out life with selfishness.”

* Jesus, who teaches us today that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for others and proved it on Calvary,

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York, NYThursday of the Fifth Week of EasterMay 11, 2023Act 15: 7-21, Ps 96, Jn 15:9-11

 

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: 

Today in the Gospel Jesus says what I believe are the most important words in the history of the world. They’re important whenever anyone says them, but the fact that God himself said them in the way that he said them, and then put them into his own body language, makes them the most life-changing phrase ever: “I love you,” he tells us. We need to stop and ponder the reality of those words! “I love you.” But then Jesus puts them into a context that ought to astound us: “Just as the Father loves me, I love you.” The Father loves him perfectly, profoundly and intimately — and Jesus tells us that he loves us in that same way. And he doesn’t merely love us “all” in that way, but he loves each of us in that way, as St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “He loved me and gave his life for me” (Gal 2:20).

Grasping this reality is essential not only for the Christian life but for human life. “Man cannot live without love,” St. John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis. “He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” (RH 10). This is true for love in general. We need the love of family, the love of friends, the spousal love of a husband or wife (either human or mystical), the total self-giving love of someone who values us that much. Without it, we’re lost. Many people who don’t experience this love spend their lives looking for it in places they won’t find it. If they haven’t experienced the love of a mom or dad, they often get themselves into trouble seeking that love in relationships that will never truly substitute. If they’ve suffered violence in relationships that should have been loving, often they’ll get involved in lifestyles that will try to reconstruct the love that should have been present in the first place. But it is also true in terms of divine love. There are many people — including many Catholics — who have never really experienced the love of the Lord. Their notion of God is perhaps an angry God, or a distant, negligent God, or a God who is a stern taskmaster making sure they fulfill all their duties lest they be punished, or even an indulgent God who doesn’t care about them enough to concern himself with their self-destructive choices. They haven’t experienced a loving God. Many people are filled with a type of self-pity or self-hatred because they have never experienced God’s love and often don’t believe they are lovable by God or anyone else, that they can never please him, that they’re constantly letting him, themselves and everyone else down. Today Jesus says to them, and to all of us, “I love you … just as my Father loves me!” And he shows them how much he loves them by telling them that he will lay down his life for them out of agapic philia, which we will have in tomorrow’s continuation of today’s Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He will love them to the extreme of his self-giving.

After Jesus says the most important words in history he then gives us the most important command of the Christian life. “Remain in my love.” As much as he loves us, he knows that many of us run away from that love. That type of burning love can make us uncomfortable because we don’t think we’re worthy of it, because we don’t want to let God down.

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, ManhattanWednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Memorial of St. Damien of MolokaiMay 10, 2023Acts 15:1-6, Ps 122, Jn 15:1-8

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today in the Acts of the Apostles, we come to one of the most pivotal events not only in the history of the early Church but the history of the Church, period. It’s the Council of Jerusalem, the first such Council in the history of the Church. It came about because “there arose no little dissension and debate” after some Christians coming from Judea were telling the Gentile Christians in Antioch, “Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.” The question was far broader than merely of circumcision, but about the ground of salvation, the way we relate to God, the role of the Mosaic law in the faith and the manner in which Jewish and Gentile Christians were to behave with regard to each other. So Paul, Barnabas and others went up to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and priests about it.

St. Paul was once a Pharisee and believed that salvation happened through rigid observance of the Mosaic Law in all its details. But after he was converted on the road to Damascus, converted from a false notion of the holy life to a true one, he began to see that one is saved by Christ and not by our own actions obeying all 613 commands and all the other precepts of the Mosaic law. We’re saved by God’s mercy rather than by our merit. He would spend most of his apostolic life proclaiming this truth. He wrote two letters (one to the Romans and another to the Galatians) explaining in detail how Christ, rather than the law, is our Savior, and he spent parts of two other letters (Colossians and Philippians) talking about how baptism rather than circumcision enters us into the life of faith and the Covenant with God. He brought all of these inspirations to the Council in Jerusalem and we’ll see later how the Holy Spirit led the early Church to the solution with regard to the Gentiles.

We learn in this scene two essential truths. First, that we’re saved by God’s action to which we freely respond, not principally by our own action. The Mosaic law functions to help us prepare to receive the fullness of that saving action in Christ, when he comes to bring us fully into communion with God through his passion, death and resurrection and through the sacraments he instituted so that we might enter into his life. Second, we learn how to relate to each other. One of the reasons why this dispute between Jews and Gentiles was such a big deal was not simply the question of whether Gentiles needed to live as good Jews before they could be good Christians, but it was because stricter Jews, like the Pharisees, had no interaction with Gentiles. They avoided them as if they were lepers. They didn’t eat with them. They didn’t enter into their houses. This is the partial background as to why the Hellenist widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of the bread, because many of the Jewish Christians would just keep their cultural tradition of complete separation. That obviously couldn’t work in the communion of the Church. The Council of Jerusalem was crucial so that Christians would live in communion with each other, which is what Jesus intended from the beginning, that we would be one as he and the Father is one.

And that brings us to the Gospel, where Jesus gives us the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches, which is an image of the type of unity we’re all supposed to have in him, an image of how our works are supposed to flow from our saving bond with him rather than deta...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

May 9, 2023

Acts 14:19-28, Ps 145, Jn 14:27-31

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.9.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

One of the greatest paradoxes in the Christian faith, one of the most important things for us to grasp and live, involves the reality of God’s peace in the Christian life, especially in times of persecution. Jesus tells us in the Gospel today and reiterates for us in every Mass, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” He was saying these words to the apostles just hours before he would be arrested and on the vigil of his being massacred by Roman soldiers. He wanted them to remain at peace during all that would transpire, just as he would be at peace. At the beginning of this discourse, which we heard on Friday, Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God. Have faith also in me.” Today he repeats those words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” He reiterates that he is going away but will come back and has given them these words of peace before everything would transpire “so that when it happens you may believe.” Now that it has happened, and the Church reflects on these words in the light of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, it’s important to check how deeply we believe in these words about peace (and everything else) Jesus tells us. He reminds them that the “ruler of this world is coming” but clarifies that “he has no power over me.” Jesus will allow everything that will occur to happen to him so that the world will know “that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.” Jesus peacefully underwent even his crucifixion in order to show his love for the Father, because real love is revealed above all in trial.

Jesus was able to say these words because, as we’ve been talking about all Easter season long, by his resurrection he would show that not even a brutal crucifixion is enough to take one’s peace away, that there’s nothing truly to be afraid of, that in the end God triumphs and all of us who live and die in him will share that victory. That’s the ultimate ground for the peace he gives us and leaves with us. Our peace is grounded in our living relationship with him, the Prince of Peace. It is made possible by the peace treaty he signs in his own blood with God the Father through his mercy. It’s effectuated by the gift of the Holy Spirit that he and the Father send. We see both fully on display on Easter Sunday evening when Jesus enters the closed doors of the Upper Room, twice wishes his startled followers peace, and then says “Receive the Holy Spirit” and “those whose sins you forgive are forgiven.” Pope Francis said several years ago in a homily in the Vatican that the peace Jesus leaves and gives is fundamentally the Holy Spirit, stressing that when Jesus in the Upper Room wished the apostles “peace be with you,” he then breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The peace that Jesus leaves with us, the peace that the world can’t give or rob, is the peace that flows from our grounding our entire life on God, which is made possible by life according to the Holy Spirit. If God is our treasure, if God is our foundation, if Jesus is our way, truth and life, if we’ve constructed our existence on him the cornerstone, if we are living by the Holy Spirit, then persecution, trouble, or even crucifixion can’t take that peace away but rather can confirm it.

If this is true, why is there such lack of peace in the world, in our country, in the Church, in so many of our families, religious communities,