Fr. Roger J. Landry

Mass for December 31

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 31, 2022

1 Jn 2:18-21, Ps 96, Jn 1:1-18

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* “Children, it is the last hour.” Those words of St. John in the first reading today are a fitting starting point for our reflections as the civil year 2022 draws to its close and we mourn together the death of Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI. St. John goes on to describe the “many antichrists” who have appeared. The antichrist is not the devil, but, as St. John says later in his first epistle, anyone who denies the mystery of Christmas that we continue to celebrate, anyone who denies that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. During St. John’s time, there were many Docetists and Gnostics who because they believed that all matter was evil denied that God could have ever taken on human flesh. But today there are other types of antichrists, who even though theoretically they may have no problem with the incarnation, live as if God hadn’t taken on our humanity to make us sharers in his divinity. For us to have lived 2022 as a year of the Lord and for us to prepare to live 2023 in this way we must live it together with Christ, the Word Made Flesh who has entered our world, continues to dwell among us in the Holy Eucharist, has promised to remain with us always until the end of time, and desires to be our full-time Savior, Lord, King, Shepherd and Friend. Many times practicing Catholics can behave as practicing antichrists through most of their day, week and year, denying that Jesus wants to come to them in the flesh of their work and study, their sufferings and joys, their Mondays through Saturdays, their TV rooms and bedrooms, indeed that he wants to come to be God-with-them in all aspects of their life. That’s the essence of the spiritual cancer of secularism, which — despite the fact that we believe in God — gets us to live as if God doesn’t exist, as if he hasn’t become one of us, as if he doesn’t want to accompany us, love us, and help us each moment.

* That’s the proper context for us to consider how to live this “last hour” of the last day of the year leading to the “last hour” of the year that’s about to begin. It’s meant to be a year of the Lord, a year lived together with him. How can we best mark this day?  I think the phrase from St. John’s Prologue today is very helpful: “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” The past year has been a year of many graces, graces upon which God wants to build in the upcoming year. Yes, there have been sins — our own sins and the sins of so many in the Church and world; we can think about what’s happening in Ukraine, the attacks on pregnancy help centers and push for state referenda on abortion in our country, and various scandals in the Church, to name just a few —  but as St. Paul reminds us, “Where sin abounds, grace superabounds” (Rom 5:20). God’s grace has been greater than all and every sinful disgrace. For us to cooperate in what God wants to do in us in the new “year of the Lord” that is about to begin, it’s important for us to look back, therefore, and see the graces he’s given us in 2022, in 2021, in 2020 and beyond as the foundation for what he hopes to do this year.

* One of the most important spiritual practices of the saints and serious Christians is a nightly general examination of conscience. For many years I have done it in the way taught by Blessed Alvaro del Portillo, who was beatified by Pope Francis in 2014. He taught that in the daily general examination,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, Year A

December 31, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.31.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us as we mark the transition from one year to the next, thanking God for all of the graces he’s given us in 2022 and begging his help that 2023 will be a true “year of Lord.” As we make this transition, the Church has us turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary and ponder in particular the ongoing mystery and reality of her motherhood, because Mary’s maternity and the passing of time are intimately connected. St. Paul tells us, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … so that we might receive adoption as sons.” The fullness of time is precisely the moment when Mary’s fiat allowed the eternal to enter into time, when the Son of God took on her humanity and entered our world, changing human history into salvation history. Therefore, Mary is not just the Mother of God-with-us but the Mother of all of us entrusted to her by that Son when he died so that we might live.

* At the transition of one civil year to the next, when we’re all led to think about the passage of time, about all that has happened during the past year and all that might occur in the year to come, the Church has us turn to our Mother Mary to show us how to live it with faith, no matter what occurs. Little did Mary expect, as she was beginning the Jewish New Year about 6 BC, that that year would inaugurate the “fullness of time” that St. Paul describes, that God would “send his Son, born of a woman,” and that she would be that woman. Little did she know she would receive a visit from the Archangel Gabriel, conceive and carry the Son of God in her womb, put her life at risk for conceiving a child from someone other than by her husband Joseph, give birth to Jesus in Bethlehem in the midst of poverty and rejection, receive as surprise guests shepherds, angels and wise men from afar, present him in the Temple as Simeon announced that he would be a sign of contradiction, have Herod hunt down her Son to kill him and have to flee in the middle of the night to Egypt. What a year that must have been!And that was just the beginning of the adventure.

* The Church sets Mary before us today as a model of faith and trust in God as we begin 2023 because she, like us, needed faith, needed trust in God, to journey into the unknown. As we commence the new year, not having any idea what it will bring, she gives us her maternal confidence in faith that whatever comes, whether seemingly good or bad — tremendous happiness or sadness, births and conversions of loved ones or unexpected deaths, even our own, great advances for the Church or colossal failures — that whatever comes, whether seemingly adverse or propitious, Christ wants to incorporate into his saving mission, even making his grace super-abound when sin abounds.

* After faith, the second way Mary seeks to mother us as we transition from one civil year to another is by helping us acquire a contemplative heart like hers. In this Sunday’s Gospel of the visit of the Shepherds to Bethlehem, after Mary had heard all that they had told her about what the angels had said to them, St. Luke tells us that she “kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” Pope Benedict, for whom the whole Church is now praying, talked about Mary’s contemplative heart in his apostolic exhortation on the ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.30.22_Eucharist_and_Confession_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.30.22_Eucharistic_Pastoral_Plan_to_Make_Eucharistic_Families_and_Parishes_1.mp3

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of the Holy Family, Year A

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 30, 2022

Col 3:12-21, Ps 128, Mt 2:13-15.19-23

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.30.22_Holy_Family_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily:

* We celebrate today the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We mark the fundamental fact that when the Son of God became man, when the Word became flesh, he became flesh as a little child within a family. That was a divine choice, for Jesus did not have to come into our world in that way. He could have come as a 33-year-old adult and immediately begun his public ministry of preaching, teaching, healing and saving. He could have come as an 80-year-old sage or at least as a 12-year-old wunderkind dazzling the scribes and priests in the Temple. But he was conceived and began his existence as a one-celled human zygote in Mary’s womb, progressed to a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus until finally he was born as a baby in a family, where he was nourished according to his human nature and grew in “wisdom and favor before God and man.” Why did he choose to come into our world this way? He didn’t tell us the reason, but one doesn’t need to be a great theologian to see why it made sense: the eternal Son of God wanted to redeem all of human life in its totality, from its very beginning, which meant redeeming the family from its very beginning.

* All of existence is meant to be familial. Saint John Paul II used to call the Blessed Trinity a family, because it is a structured communion of persons in love, with a Father, a Son and the love between them so strong as to take on personhood. The human person was made in the image and likeness of God as a communion of persons, “male and female he made them” (Gen 1:27-28), and hence the image of God is familial: a husband and a wife can love each so much that, like the Trinity, their love can generate a third person. They can literally “make love” and then name, raise and live in joyful communion with the love they make.

* But we know that man, woman and children didn’t live up to their being in the image of God. Right from the beginning, sin invaded the family. It began with Adam and Eve and the first sin, in which Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, with neither taking responsibility and with both thereafter hiding the most vulnerable aspects of their humanity from each other and God. The legacy of sin quickly affected their children. Cain killed his brother Abel. There was jealousy between Abraham’s sons Isaac and Ishmael, enmity between Isaac’s sons Jacob and Esau, envy between Jacob’s 12 sons, ten of whom ganged up to try to kill their brother Joseph. There was deadly jealousy in King David’s family, with Absalom trying to defeat his father to usurp his crown. Jesus’ family tree chronicles generations of infidelity to each other and to God. There is rampant polygamy and concubinage. Divorce was permitted by Moses because of the hardness of people’s hearts to keeping their life-time promises. God would sum up the relationship with his people through the Prophet Hosea under the idea of adultery, because adultery, rather than fidelity, had almost become the rule in the relationships within individual families and the family of Israel with God. Simply put, the family had become a mess. As the human family “increased and multiplied,” so did sin.

* Jesus was born of a family in order to redeem the family, to reconcile all of family life to God, because the family has a crucial role in the world God created.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.29.22_Eucharistic_Apostolate_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.29.22_Eucharistic_Plan_of_Life_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Mass of December 29, Fifth Day in the Octave of Christmas

Memorial of St. Thomas Becket, Martyr

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 29, 2022

1 John 2:3-11, Ps 96, Lk 2:22-35

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.29.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today, on the fifth day of Christmas, the Church gives us what happened on the 40th day after Jesus’ birth, his presentation in the temple. There Simeon, moved by the Spirit, whose whole life was an Advent for the long-awaited Messiah, encountered him. And when he embraced the Anointed Child in his arms, he called him a “light to reveal you [God] to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” Jesus came as “light of the human race” (Jn 1:4), as the “refulgence of eternal light” (Wis 7:26) and the “refulgence of [God’s] glory” (Heb 1:3). This was indeed good news of great joy for all the people, but at the same time some treated this gift as bad news of great foreboding. As St. John would say, “The light came into the world but people preferred darkness to light” (Jn 3:19). The glory of God took on our flesh but people were seeking their own glory rather than God’s. That’s why as soon as Simeon testified that his eyes has seen God’s salvation in the one named “God saves” (Jesus), as soon as he had said that the infant he was holding in his arms was God’s light and glory, he turned to say to Mary, “This child is destined for the fall and the rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be contradicted… so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” The response to Jesus’ light and glory would unveil what was in people’s hearts. Even though Jesus had come to save everyone, not everyone would accept that gift. Simeon said that rather than everyone’s following and echoing Jesus’ word, many would contradict what he said in words and in body language. He would become the cause of the “ruin” and the “resurrection” of many, depending upon their response to Jesus’ word, his light, his glory, and his offer of salvation. And so it’s important for us to examine during this Christmas octave what the thoughts and response of our heart are to Jesus.

* St. John in the first reading helps us to do so concretely. Throughout his first letter, St. John calls Jesus the “light” and summons us to live in the light and walk in the light. St. John describes three stages of the incarnate Jesus’ progressive illumination in our lives. At one level, they all say essentially the same thing about the type of communion Christ seeks to form with us; on another, they go progressively deeper.

* The first level has to do with God’s word, his commandments, and his truth, which are a light for our steps and a lamp for our soul. St. John says, “The way we may be sure that we know Jesus is to keep his commandments.  Whoever says, ‘I know him,’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.” If we’ve become one with God, we’ll become one with his word, with his will, with the Truth he enfleshes. To know Jesus Christ — rather than just to know about him — is to become united with him in doing the will of God, which is fleshed out in the commandments, in the word of God, in what Jesus has taught, in what the prophets taught in anticipation of him, in what the apostles have taught in application of his life and lessons. Do we see God’s word, do we view the commandments as God’s light and glory? Do we allow ourselves to experience Jesus’ resurrection through conforming our life to this truth?

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.28.22_Eucharistic_Charity_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

St. Francis Retreat Center, Monticello, New York

The Word Became Flesh and Dwelled Among Us:

Priests as Catalysts for the Eucharistic Revival of the Church in the United States

December 26-31, 2022

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.28.22_Eucharist_and_Sacred_Preaching_1.mp3