Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph Church, Hammond, Indiana

Diocese of Gary Diocesan Eucharistic Holy Hour

March 31, 2023

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Palm Sunday A, Vigil

April 1, 2023

 

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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: 

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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: 

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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: 

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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...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 27, 2023

Dan 13:1-9.15-17.19-30.33-62, Ps 23, Jn 8:1-11

 

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’s powerful readings of the rescue of people from stoning through accusations of adultery can and ought to be looked at four different levels: the literal sense in which God rescued the innocent Susanna and the anonymous adulterous woman; the way that God similarly rescues us, whether guilty or innocent; the way that these actions point to the betrayal of Jesus by the “elders” whose consciences had been corrupted; and the way that God wants to transform us to have a similar care for those facing accusation, trial and even death.

* Let’s begin with the literal sense of these passages, which requires the majority of our attention since they are the basis for the others. In the first reading, we see the utter corruption of two old men — judges of the people chosen to exact justice — in the story of Susanna. The opposite of love is not hatred but lust, and in contrast to the beauty of self-giving love, we see today the real hideousness of rapacious iniquity. Either these judges would assassinate her soul through adultery or they would have her tried and killed by a false accusation if she didn’t succumb to their advances. While the desires of the flesh may attenuate over time, the lust for power, for control, for satisfying the insatiable desires of a corrupt heart can actually grow, as the conscience gets more and more deadened, such that it’s no longer a crime of the flesh but of calculation, using one’s prestige and office to do evil rather than good, to do injustice rather than implement justice. Daniel says that they “suppressed their consciences. They would not allow their eyes to look to heaven [in prayer], and did not keep in mind just judgment.” They had been thoroughly corrupted and their sins against the sixth commandment led, as they routinely do, to sins against the eighth, against the fifth and obviously against the first.

* In the Gospel we see similar wickedness. Another set of elders with a reputation for being religious and fair brought to Jesus a woman caught in the very act of adultery, using her to make a point, as a pawn, for their own lust for power. Two things stick out initially about their catching her and bringing her to Jesus. First, how did they catch her in the very act of adultery unless their eyes were already on her? And how come they didn’t bring the guy who was her partner in sin, but just her? Is it possibly because they excused the male because they themselves had often committed adultery with this woman in their own hearts? They brought her before Jesus to try to entrap him with the question as to whether she should be stoned in accordance with the law of Moses. If Jesus had replied, “No,” he would be setting himself up against the Mosaic Law and they could use that against him with faithful Jews. If he said, “Yes,” not only would he lose the support of the sinners he had come to call, save and reconcile, but he would put himself against the Roman authorities who had taken to themselves the sole authority to implement capital punishment. In their sinfulness, they were using her as a mere pawn to try to bring down Jesus.

* But God rescued each of them. Susanna said to herself, “I am completely trapped. If I yield, it will be my death; if I refuse, I cannot escape your power. Yet it is better for me to fall into your power without guilt than to sin before the Lord.” The early saints said that it was better to die than to sin.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A

March 26, 2023

Ezek 37:12-14, Ps 130, Rom 8:8-11, Jn 11:1-45

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* The episode of Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead is so rich that whole retreats can be preached upon it. The Church gives it to us on the Sunday before Palm Sunday not only because it is meant to frame our preparation for Holy Week, but even more simply, because it is what Jesus did right before he entered Jerusalem on a donkey. By it, Jesus was teaching his disciples 2000 years ago — and continues to teach us today — invaluable lessons of our faith. Jesus said to his followers before heading to Bethany, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” Jesus worked the miracle the way he did — from his initial delay, to the words he chose, to his prayer to the Father, to his calling forth of Lazarus after four days in the tomb — so that we may believe certain crucial truths that will help us not only better appreciate this miracle but also grasp the great things Jesus will accomplish during Holy Week in Jerusalem. Let’s focus on three of those truths.

* The first lesson Jesus communicates by the way he worked this miracle is that he is willing to die for each of his disciples. As soon as Jesus announced that he would go to Lazarus, the disciples exclaimed, “The Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Later, when Jesus reiterated that he was going, St. Thomas, who was one of the most realistic and perhaps pessimistic of the disciples, said simply, “Let us also go, so that we may die with him.” They all recognized that Jesus was risking his life to go bring Lazarus back to life. We now know in hindsight what Jesus recognized in foresight: that their worst fears were about to come true — Jesus would be captured, tortured and killed. Jesus would indeed give his life to return Lazarus to life. But Jesus loved Lazarus enough to do it. Lazarus was his friend, and as Jesus would say a week later during the Last Supper, “No one has any greater love than this, to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13).

* The central truth Jesus wants us to capture is that we are his friends, too, and that out of love for us he went up the mountain not just to bring Lazarus back to life, but to give his life to bring each of us back to life. St. John tells us that Jesus “loved Martha and her sister [Mary] and Lazarus,” and the crowd, seeing him weeping at the tomb, said, “Look at how much he loved him!,” so Jesus loves us just as personally and just as much. Right after he described that no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, he said: “You are my friends. … I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (Jn 15:14-15). It’s obvious that Jesus, from a distance, could have cured Lazarus and even brought him back to life. After all, he had already worked several such miracles from a distance, like the healing of the Centurion’s servant, the royal official’s son and the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mt 8:13; Mt 15:28; Jn 4:50). By going up to work the miracle in person, however, Jesus was showing everyone that helping Lazarus was worth his life. In a similar way, God could have come up with another way to save us without Jesus’ leaving heaven, without his taking on our flesh, without his going up to Calvary and being massacred on a Cross, but he likewise wanted to show us we were worth saving. The greatest source of our human dignity is that Jesus accounted...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Lenten Day of Prayer for Women

“The Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 25, 2023

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_Eucharistic_Almsgiving_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Lenten Day of Prayer for Women

“The Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 25, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_Desert_Adoration_1.mp3

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Lenten Day of Prayer for Women

“The Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 25, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_the_Mass_1.mp3