Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx

First Sunday of Lent, Year A

February 26, 2023

Gen 2:7-9.3:1-7, Ps 51, Rom 5:12-19, Mt 4:1-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.26.23_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* At the end of today’s second reading, St. Paul summarizes the principal message of all three readings on this first Sunday of Lent: “For just as through the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one man the many will be made righteous.” We see the disobedience of that one man in today’s first reading in the story of Adam’s and Eve’s fall, by which the human race became sinners. We see in the Gospel the obedience and fidelity of the New Adam, by which we were justified. The entirety of our lives is a battle in our mind, our heart and particularly our choices between the old Adam and the path of disobedience and sin, and the New Adam and the way of obedience and faithfulness. Lent is the time we’re called to repent and believe in the Gospel, to turn our back on the old Adam and embrace the New. As Pope Francis continually reminds us, the devil is real and active — just as real and active as he was in the Garden and as he was in the desert — trying to tempt us to buy into his lies. And often we do. But the Good News is that Christ shows us in the Gospel today not only that the devil can be defeated but how he is to be defeated. To learn how to follow Christ in overcoming these temptations, though, we first need to understand how the devil operates, and that brings us to focus very carefully on the first reading.

* Adam and Eve had it all in the garden. God had made all of creation for them. They were perfectly in the state of grace. They had transparent relations with God, with all of creation, and with each other, as was symbolized by the fact they were “naked and unashamed” (Gen 2:25). God gave them just one limitation. “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:16-17). It was called symbolically the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but we recognize what the word “know” means in Genesis — it means to “become one with” something or someone. Adam “knew” Eve and she conceived a child (Gen 4:1). To “know” good and evil meant that they would come to know evil, while they had been created to know and do good.

* The devil came disguised symbolically as a serpent and he got Adam and Eve to become one with evil. We can examine the steps he took, because he still has the same modus operandi. The first step was to expose that Eve didn’t really pay very close attention to what God said. When the devil asked her what God had instructed, she replied by saying that they were not to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden not touch it lest they die. God had never said anything about touching it — and we’ll see why this lack of precision is relevant later. The second step was to get Eve to distrust God. The devil initially called into question the fact of the consequences: “You will not die!” Then he undermined God’s credibility, as if God were just making rules for the sake of keeping his own prerogatives, rather than because he loved them: God didn’t want them to eat it, the devil said, because it would give them the power to become like God, not just knowing but determining good and evil. God had made them in his “image and likeness,” he wanted them to be “like him,” but the devil was trying to get them to believe that they would become like God not through loving him but disobeying him. And Eve took the bait.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Lenten Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum and Columbia Catholic Ministry

February 25, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.25.23_Fasting_Charity_and_Eucharist_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Lenten Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum and Columbia Catholic Ministry

February 25, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.25.23_Desert_Burning_Bush_Adoration_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Lenten Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum and Columbia Catholic Ministry

Saturday after Ash Wednesday

February 25, 2023

Is 58:9-14, Ps 86, Lk 5:27-32

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.25.23_Homily_LF_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth,” we prayed several times today in the Responsorial Psalm. And the Truth incarnate responds in the Gospel, first for Matthew and then for all of us, by coming into our lives and saying, “Follow me!”

* “Follow me!” These words mean that we have to change course, we can no longer go our own way and do our own thing. Once Christ calls us, once he teaches us his way, we are summoned to walk in his truth. That’s the call to conversion. Conversion literally means turning with Jesus.  When he turns to the Father, we turn with him. When he turns to his mother, so do we. When he turns to our neighbor, we follow him across the road. When he sets his face firmly on Calvary, we walk with him along that way of the Cross. There are two types of people with different standard reactions to Jesus’ command. Some people are in Matthew’s circumstance, where it’s obvious to them and everyone else that they have been going in the opposite direction of the Lord. These words come as nothing short of a revolution. Many will stubbornly continue to go their own way. Others, like St. Matthew today, will seize the summons as a once in a life time opportunity. We’ll return to him in a moment. The second main group of people hear Jesus’ words, “follow me!” as nothing revolutionary at all. They think that, even if they might have some diversions here and there, from time to time, they “basically” follow the Lord. They can claim, for example, that they’re devout Christians and yet use their high offices to expand the slaughter of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in the womb, or turn hardened hearts to Jesus’ brothers and sisters at the border, or respond with indifference to the slaughter of innocents in Ukraine or in northern Nigeria. They assert they follow Jesus but don’t really make time for him each day in prayer or come to be with him and receive him worthily in the Holy Eucharist. They say they follow him but they think he’s going the wrong way on various issue controversial to our woke age, like his teachings on sexual morality, or his choice to call only men as his apostles despite his exaltation of his mother and many other women, or his affirmation of loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, and forgiving seventy times seven times. This latter group is somewhat like St. Peter after Jesus had revealed Peter’s vocation to be the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church. When Jesus announced for the first time that he would be betrayed, tortured and crucified, Peter said, “No such thing will ever happen to you, Lord!,” and Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do.” After having changed his name from Simon to Peter, Jesus changed it again to Satan, because, like Satan in the desert, Peter was trying to lead Jesus, not follow him. He was thinking according to worldly logic, not divine. He was not interested in the Lord’s teaching him how to walk in the truth, but in his own instructing the Lord the way things should go. And many are in this category: they believe they’re following the Lord — and, like Peter, they’ve made various big choices to follow him — but they don’t follow him yet fully. They still want sometimes to be in charge of the relationship. Even after the Resurrection, when St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent, A, Vigil

February 25, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.25.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* 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 tomorrow on the First Sunday of Lent. It’s a conversation in which we eavesdrop on Jesus’ dialogue with the devil in the desert, in which Jesus invites us to journey with him for his 40 days there to learn from him how to live well not just Lent but the entirety of Christian life. He seeks to strengthen us not just to fight against the temptations of the evil one but to choose and order our whole life to God.

* Permit me to say a few words about going into the desert with Jesus. Most of us have no desire at all to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a brief visit. At a spiritual level, however, we should always have a great love for the desert, because that’s where the Holy Spirit drove Jesus and where he seeks to lead us each Lent. Without Jesus, the desert is sterile and lifeless. But with Jesus, it becomes a place of great vitality. We see this in the famous prophecy of Ezekiel where the water from the temple trickles down into the Arabah desert and grows ultimately into a river, leading to all types of vegetation and aquatic life and restoring life to the Dead Sea. That’s a symbol of the living water from Christ’s pierced side that begins to well up in us through prayer and the sacraments. To go into the desert with Christ is not a sterile exercise, but one that is meant to bring life even to those places within us that seem to be most lifeless. The problem is that going into the state of the desert, even with Christ, is increasingly difficult for people today. Removing ourselves from distractions, from cell phones, televisions, computers, car radios, newspapers, podcasts, social media scrolls, and the various things that crowd our lives with so much noise is increasingly difficult today. We’re so connected that if we are out of cell phone range we can easily feel totally lost. The first temptation we face each Lent is to resist or refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that our Lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up are sweets and booze. The first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ’s voice from the desert saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31).

* Once we accept that invitation and journey with Christ into the state of the desert, Christ can begin to strengthen us. The details of Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, including the temptations by the devil, could only be known if Jesus had divulged them, because no one else was there. He very much wanted the details known so that we would be able, in prayer, to live them with him. Jesus prayed and fasted for an incredible forty days, which obviously would have left him physically weak and famished. It was at this moment of physical weakness that the Devil came to him to tempt him. In the temptations Jesus suffered and later described to his disciples, the devil brought out in a pristine form the types of temptation that Christ would later undergo in his public ministry and that each of us undergoes in life. By focusing on how Christ responded, we, too, can learn how to respond as Jesus did.

* The first temptation was aimed right at Jesus’ tremendous hunger after 40 days of eating nothing: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of Bread.

Father Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday after Ash Wednesday

February 24, 2023

Is 58:1-9, Ps 51, Mt 9:14-15

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.24.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the readings from Sacred Scripture the Church gives us today, she wants us to ponder the true meaning of the fasting to which we’re called in Lent and in life. Two days ago on Ash Wednesday, Jesus told us that he wanted us to fast differently from all the rest who look gloomy, neglect their appearance and even put white paste on their face to make them appear more pallid so that everyone else may recognize they’re fasting. Jesus tells us that the type of fasting he wants of us is meant to be done for and in communion with the Father who relates to us in secret. He wants us to anoint our head and wash our face so that no one will be able to notice that we’re fasting. God wants a different type of fasting from us.

* On the surface of today’s Gospel, Jesus implies that he was preaching but not practicing his teaching on fasting. His contemporaries perhaps had heard rumors that before his public ministry, Jesus had fasted for 40 days in the desert, but it didn’t appear that he and his followers were fasting at all now. That’s why the disciples of St. John the Baptist came to him to ask why his disciples weren’t fasting the way John and the Pharisees fasted. John, we know, was an heroic faster, living basically off of locusts and wild honey, and we can presume that many of his disciples were imitating his asceticism. Unlike the Pharisees who used to criticize Jesus to try to entrap him, John’s disciples seemed to have a genuine interest in the truth about what they needed to do and were shocked that Jesus and his disciples seemed to be lax when it came to this spiritual discipline. Delicately and respectfully, they asked Jesus why his “disciples” were not fasting, as if Jesus himself, the Lamb pointed out by John, might be an exception to the discipline. Jesus, in response, gave us an important principle: “Can the sons of the wedding chamber [the loose translation “wedding guests” doesn’t do justice to the Greek, which I’ve translated literally above and can more loosely and accurately be translated groomsmen] mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them and then they will fast.”

* In giving us this principle, Jesus highlighted two things:

* First, he identified himself, basically, as the long awaited Bridegroom of the People Israel described by the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea and defines the apostles as the groomsmen awaiting the time when the Bridegroom would go to meet the Bride and the bridesmaids and take them for the wedding reception. It was not a time of mourning — one of the two purposes of Jewish fasting, mourning over one’s sins; the other was supplication — but of celebration. Jesus points out here that the fundamental attitude of those who associate with him needs to be celebration at his presence. We Christians are sons of the wedding chamber heading toward the eternal wedding banquet and we need to be marked by the joy that always is associated by those in the wedding party.

* Second, Jesus mentions that a time will come when the Bridegroom is violently ripped away from them — which happened in the Garden of Gethsemane and then on Calvary — and they would fast (and mourn) on that day like a bride if her husband were kidnapped or killed.

* The question we should ask as Christians, however, is why are we fasting today? Why do we fast throughout Lent?

Father Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Memorial of St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr

February 23, 2023

Dt 30:15-20, Ps 1, Lk 9:22-25

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.23.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Throughout Lent, we focus first and foremost on God’s desire to save us and we recognize, as we heard yesterday with St. Paul, that “now is the day of salvation.” This Lent, today, is the time to respond. “God so loved the world,” St. John tells us in his most famous passage, “that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God does not want us to perish. He didn’t even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, so that we might not die but have life to the full. But God’s will is not enough, because he willed to make us free. We need to respond to his gift of salvation. Todays’ readings, on our second day in the pilgrimage of Lent, are about the choices we are called to make in response to God’s offer and to the grace he gives us that St. Paul appealed yesterday that we wouldn’t take in vain.

* The choice is framed by Moses in today’s first reading. The Israelites were drawing toward the end of their 40-year pilgrimage in the desert. Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, accompanied them through the desert for four decades and now they were on the opposite side of the Jordan from the long-awaited Holy Land. God had told Moses that he would die before crossing, so Moses, in today’s first reading, was giving as a sort of last will and testament, a summary of what God had done for them and taught them. As the long experience of their time in the desert had taught them, God’s wondrous actions were not enough. The ten plagues weren’t enough. Their passing through the Red Sea on dry land wasn’t enough. The manna from heaven, the daily quails, the water from the rock and the theophanies associated with giving the Ten Commandments were not enough. None was sufficient to keep many of the Jews faithful. Many of them complained that they should have remained with their fleshpots in Egypt, others made a golden calf, even Aaron the high priest fell into the clutches of a wavering faith. So Moses want to urge them to choose and choose wisely. He framed the decision facing them as it truly was, a decision of life and death: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” Moses reminded them that the choice for God is a life-giving choice, a choice full of blessing; and that the choice against God — even if it might seem at first a choice that leads to life and happiness — is actually fatal. This is not something, of course, that they recognized. Throughout the desert they complained that they had left their fleshpots in Egypt behind just to perish in the desert by...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Ash Wednesday

February 22, 2023

Joel 2:12-18, Ps 51, 2 Cor 5:20-6:2, Mt 6:1-6.16-18

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.22.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* “Return to me with your whole heart!” These words that God says to us today through the Prophet Joel summarize the whole meaning of Lent. Lent is about returning to the Lord not partially but with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength. As we prayed in the Psalm, God wants to give us his help so that we might have a “clean heart,” thoroughly washed from sin and guilt. Just like Paul urged the Christians in Corinth in today’s second reading, so God appeals to us to convert, not to receive his grace in vain, but to act with urgency to be reconciled to him. Now is the acceptable time, he says. Now — not later, not even tomorrow — is the day of salvation. He wants us to seize this gift!

* The ashes we receive are a reminder to us not to procrastinate on seizing that gift of salvation.

* First they are a sign of our mortality, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. Lent reminds us that we will die and we never know the day or the hour. But ashes point beyond death. Like at the beginning of creation when we were formed from the dust of the earth and God infused into us the breath of life, so ashes point to the fact that we are not just a mortal body but have an immortal soul, which God wants to infuse with his life. Yes, we will die, but God wants to raise us, even now. Ashes remind us that Lent is ultimately about death but also about resurrection, and how Christ calls us to share in his triumph.

* Second, ashes are a sign of repentance. We see them used this way by the prophet Jonah with the Ninevites, by Daniel, by the Maccabees. They are a summons to repent and believe in the Gospel. The conversion to which they point is not meant to be a minor course correction in life, eliminating a bad habit or striving to acquire a new good one. Ashes point to how the conversion to which we’re summoned is ultimately a death and resurrection, in which we die to our old ways and rise to a new life of faith with Christ.

* Third, as we see famously in the Book of Esther, they are a means of supplication, of prayer, for others, for their salvation. Ashes are a sign that we recognize we need a Savior and that, as St. Paul reminds us, now is the day of salvation. God, as we pray in the Psalm, wants to restore us to the joy of salvation and Lent is meant to bring about that joyful restoration!

* Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks to us about the three practices that help us to grow in those realities to which the ashes point: to die to ourselves so that Christ the Savior might live, to help us correspond to the graces he breathes into our soul so that we might live faithful to the Gospel. Jesus calls us to pray, to give alms and to fast. Prayer helps us die to our ego so that we may live for and with Christ, putting on his mind. Almsgiving has us think of others’ needs and act to help them, rather than be obsessed about our own pleasures. Fasting checks the domination of our appetites over us and makes possible our hungering for what God hungers. They are a way by which God the Father helps to restore our proper relationship with him through prayer, with others through charity, and within ourselves through fasting. They are a means by which we enter into Jesus’ prayer, his fasting for 40 days in the desert, and his total self-giving down to the last drop of his blood. Today is a day in which we make resolutions with regard to all thre...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church

February 21, 2023

Sir 2:1-11, Ps 37, Mk 9:30-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.21.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus continues to stress with his disciples the same lesson they rejected in Caesarea Philippi, that God the Father told three of them to listen to on Mt. Tabor, and that Jesus reemphasized as they were descending the mountain. He reiterates today, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.” In response to this, they do not console him or even ask him questions to try to understand. Instead, they begin to debate who’s better than whom. It’s sad and ridiculous. It would be like if a mom said she had two weeks to live and the kids, rather than focusing on her, began immediately in her presence to talk about who is her favorite or who gets her car. But Jesus never tried to eliminate his followers’ ambition, but to purify it and direct it toward true greatness. He told them the path, which would be his path, the path of cruciform love: “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” To be great we must become great in loving service. And to illustrate exactly what he was describing, lest we interpret it according to our comforts, he took a child and said, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” An infant is someone who cannot will to reward us, with whom we cannot engage in a quid pro quo. An infant is not even able to thank us. While it’s true that whenever we love we receive more than we give and that those who love children receive so many blessings in return, Jesus’ point is that we need to love those who cannot explicitly reward us. That’s the type of service we’re called to give to which we’re supposed to aspire.

* In the first reading from the Book of Sirach, we ponder the wisdom of the Cross, of this life of cruciform love. Today’s passage begins, “When you come to serve the Lord, … prepare yourself” not for a stream of consolation, but “for trials.” It then describes them: “time of adversity,” “crushing misfortune,” even “a crucible of humiliation.” These trials are all tests, meant to help purify us, just as “in fire gold and silver are tested.” For that reason, while we’re in them, we should not think that God has abandoned us, but is helping us to learn how to be great, to learn how to love him and trust in him so that we might truly serve him and become the servant of all. So he tell us “Be sincere of heart and steadfast, incline your ear and receive the word of understanding undisturbed in time of adversity, wait on God with patience, cling to him, forsake him not, … accept whatever befalls you, be steadfast when sorrowful, be patient in crushing misfortune, trust God and God will help you … and direct your way. Wait for his mercy, trust him and your reward will not be lost, hope for good things, love him and your hearts will be enlightened.” Sirach reminds us, “Study the generations long past,” including the martyrs, “and understand: has anyone hoped in the Lord and been disappointed? … Persevered and been forsaken? … Called upon God and been rebuffed?” God “saves in time of trouble and is a protector to all who seek him in truth.” This is the type of trust in trial we witness in Jesus when he was fulfilling today’s Gospel words on the Cross. Psalms 22 and 69 which he cited on Calvary in his words “My God,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto

February 20, 2023

Sir 1:1-10, Ps 93, Mk 9:14-29

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.20.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, on the heels of a study of creation in the Book of Genesis through the lens of the Letter to the Hebrews, the Church begins the study of the Book of Sirach, the longest of all of the Old Testament works of wisdom literature. Normally the study is two weeks, but this year, we will have it only two days, since Lent begins this Wednesday. Today we encounter the introduction to the Book, which highlights the main theme: Awe and wonder at the mystery of God’s wisdom concealed in creation, from sands on the seashore, to drops of rain, to heaven, to earth, to subterranean realities. The inspired Joshua ben Sirach tells us that real wisdom comes from God, “one, wise and truly awe-inspiring, seated upon his throne, … Most High all-powerful creator-king and truly awe-inspiring one, the God of dominion.” His wisdom effuses throughout his creative word, for “the word of God on high is the fountain of wisdom and her ways are everlasting.” But God “has lavished” this gift of wisdom, this capacity to understand, “upon his friends.” Throughout the Book of Sirach, we see how that font of God’s wisdom lavishly overflows to those who live in friendship with the Lord.

* When we turn to the Gospel, we see one way in which that wisdom is lavishly poured out upon us in the explanation that Jesus gives to his apostles about why he was able to drive out a demon they couldn’t. He was imparting to them the means by which they could share not just in his wisdom but more fully in God’s powerful recreative work. The scene is a father’s request on behalf of his son, who since birth has been possessed by a demon in such a way that it was causing him to be deaf, mute, thrown into convulsions and even suicidal. When the father and a crowd meet Jesus returning from Mount Tabor with Peter, James and John, he tells Jesus that the apostles were arguing with the Scribes over why they couldn’t heal the boy. Doubtless the Scribes were attacking them for their failure. Jesus seems to express some frustration that, because of a lack of faith among a “faithless generation,” the miracle wasn’t able to be worked by the nine apostles who were at the foot of Mt. Tabor as he was being transfigured. There was two-fold lack of faith.

* First is the father who asked, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us,” to which Jesus replied, “If you can! Everything is possible to one who has faith!” And the father replied that he did have faith but needed more of it to overcome his weakness and doubt.

* The second lack of faith was in the disciples. When they asked Wisdom incarnate why they couldn’t drive it out, he responded, “This kind can only come out through prayer.” In many of the early manuscripts it said “prayer and fasting.” Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “I was able to do this miracle but I have divine power that you don’t.” He said “prayer” and perhaps “fasting,” the type of activities that they were capable of, the practices in which he was engaged. Wisdom incarnate from whom all wisdom flows was sharing with his friends his secrets. It was a summons for them to grow in faith, like the father of the boy, through their own prayer and fasting.

* It was a summons likewise for us. Miracles still happen, and happen all the time. We see stupendous miracles in Lourdes and in every approval for a beatification or canonization....