Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of the Holy Innocents

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 28, 2022

1 John 1:5-2:2, Ps 124, Mt 2:13-18

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.28.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today’s feast of the Holy Innocents brings us to face one of the most challenging parts of the faith. We’re celebrating the mass murder of all the boys in Bethlehem under two, in which the words of Jeremiah that were fulfilled in Bethlehem, “sobbing and loud lamentation; Rachel weeping for her children and she would not be consoled, since they were no more.” If we mourn the death of any loved one, how much more we mourn the death of those murdered, and how much more we grieve the execution of innocent children! Yet today, despite those fundamentally human reactions, implanted in our nature and supernature by God, we celebrate with a Gloria the feast of the Holy Innocents, and we have to ask why. The answer is not just “because they’re in heaven with Jesus,” because that would be celebrating only a good outcome of a deplorable evil. We’re celebrating something more profound. We’re celebrating the fact that these baby boys made in Jesus’ image and likeness in a very important way experienced the fullness and purpose of human life, which is to live and die for Jesus who had come to die for them and for us. Much later Jesus would say that the one who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel would save it. This is a truth we proclaim every time we celebrate the feast of a martyr. No matter how much that martyr was tortured and killed, we celebrate it as a victory, because the martyr died heroically out of love for the Lord and because of that death now lives forever with Jesus in heaven. The Feast of the Holy Innocents is the most powerful articulation of this most challenging Christian truth we have in the liturgical cycle.

* How Christians mark the feast of the martyrs and, a fortiori, of the Holy Innocents really indicates a great deal about our faith and how we go about our life. Do we look at their deaths principally as great victories or colossal defeats? If we look at their deaths as manifestations of the triumph of evil, then we often will seek to avoid suffering, avoid martyrdom, avoid conflict. If we look at their deaths as exclamation points on lives lived as lives ought to be lived, then we will often accept our own martyrdom should it come to that and, in the meantime, live a life in regular self-offering to Jesus, to the people for whom he gave his life, and to his kingdom. The purpose of human life is to live and die for Jesus, to live and die with Jesus, in little things and ordinary moments, and even in big things and extraordinary ones.

* That’s a truth many don’t want to accept or to live. King Herod certainly didn’t want to live it. When he heard the Wise Men speaking about a newborn king of the Jews, of the long-awaited Messiah, he viewed Jesus only as a threat. And when the Magi didn’t fall for his ploy to return to him to tell him where he was to be found so that he could be selectively assassinated, in a rage Herod killed every infant boy in the area. His lack of willingness to serve God’s plans in the coming of the Messiah led him to wreak so much evil. Once upon a time he had been a faithful man, building the temple, obeying scrupulously the Mosaic law. But he began to get corrupted by lust, power and pleasure and then was totally opposed to sacrifices big and small, not even wanting to put up with people who didn’t agree with him or like him.

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/12.27.22_Adoration_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/12.27.22_Ars_Celebrandi_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 27, 2022

1 John 1:1-4, Ps 97, Jn 20:1-8

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.27.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. John, Jesus’ beloved disciple. Yesterday on the feast of St. Stephen, we were able to get beyond the irenic melodies of silent night to ponder the fact that the baby in swaddling clothes in Mary’s arms had taken our humanity in order to offer it to save us, and St. Stephen testifies to how we are called to follow Christ and give witness of him and his saving plan to others. Today the Church turns to St. John the Evangelist, who left John the Baptist to come and see where Jesus was staying, who was called by Jesus from his fish, boats and parents, who followed him throughout his public ministry, who with his brother James and Peter was called apart by the Lord when he cured the daughter of Jairus, was transfigured, and was in agony, who rested his head on Jesus’ heart during the Last Supper, who outran Peter to the tomb, and who pondered what Jesus said and a depth that has nourished the Church ever since. If St. Stephen is the saint liturgically nearest to Jesus’ crib, St. John is second, because he teaches us several lessons that help us enter far more deeply into the meaning of the Incarnation and the birth of the Son of God.

* The first thing St. John helps us to grasp is the reality of the Incarnation. Today we begin his first Letter, which we will ponder throughout the rest of the Christmas season. St. John was writing to Christians at a time of the Gnostic and Docetist heresies that believed that all matter was evil and therefore believed that God could have never assumed matter to himself. Therefore, they taught that Jesus only appeared to have a body but was more like a disincarnate ghost. He only appeared to be wrapped in swaddling clothes. He only appeared to eat. He only appeared to walk on water. He only appeared to die on the Cross. He only pretended to give us his body and blood to consume because he didn’t have a real body and real blood. For them, the incarnation was a philosophical impossibility. St. John wrote underlining the sensible reality of the Incarnation: “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the Word of life, for the life was made visible, we have seen it and testify to it.” During these days of Christmas, it’s key for us to use the senses God gave us to grow in faith. It’s important for us to meditate, with the help of crèches, paintings, music, newborn babies and various other realities on the fact that the Creator of the world became a little baby just like we were except original sin; he was fed, he was bathed, he was embraced and kissed, he slept, he squeezed onto fingers and everything else. Most of us don’t ponder enough the sacred humanity of Jesus and the first thing St. John helps us to do is to use our senses to approach the Word of Life made visible, audible, and tangible.

* The second thing St. John helps us to grasp is why Jesus came. He reminds us in the heart of Jesus’ Good Shepherd discourse: “I came so that they may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10).  This life, he tells us, in the prologue to his Gospel, was the “light of men.” This life is not just “bios” or biological life, but “zoe,” or supernatural life. This is why, Jesus testifies in St. John, he came to give witness to the truth. This is the life for which God out of love sacri...

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/12.26.22_Gods_Advent_Preparation_for_the_Eucharist_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/12.26.22_Christmas_and_the_Eucharist_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr

St. Francis Retreat House, Monticello, New York

Retreat for the Priests of the Capuchin Friars of the Renewal

December 26, 2022

Acts 6:8-10.7:54-59, Ps 31, Mt 10:17-22

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.26.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* In the Church’s liturgical calendar, the observance of the feasts of saints is normally trumped by the most important liturgical seasons. For example, when saints’ memorials that ordinarily would have to be celebrated (obligatory memorials) fall in Lent, Easter, Advent or Christmastide, they become optional, encouraging the priest to focus on the liturgical season more than the particular holy man or woman. When such saints’ days fall during the most important parts of the liturgical year — Sundays, the weekdays of Holy Week, and the Easter Octave — they’re generally outright suppressed. Even though the Christmas Octave is liturgically basically in the same category of feasts that take precedence over all saints’ days (as we will see later in the week with the feasts of St. Thomas Becket on Dec. 29, St. Roger on Dec. 30, and St. Silvester on Dec. 31), the Church makes an exception for the first three days after Christmas and has made the celebration of three saints’ days not just obligatory but liturgically festive: today, the Feast of St. Stephen; Dec. 27, the feast of St. John the Evangelist, and Dec. 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Church wants to ensure that marking their feast days are never optional.

* While it’s somewhat straightforward to celebrate the feast of the Holy Innocents during the Christmas season and not much of a stretch to celebrate St. John, since his Gospel on how the Word became Flesh and how we either accept or reject Christ the Light (Christmas Day) who shines on the people walking in Darkness (Christmas Vigil) can be easily tied into Christmas, the feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, which occurs annually the day after Christmas, requires more work to harmonize. The events described in today’s first reading about his calling, ministry and martyrdom, all took place nearly 40 years after the events we celebrated yesterday on Christmas Day. If we’re able to grasp the connection between the two, however, it will help very much to reinforce the message of Christmas.

* The fundamental message of Christmas is that Christ has come into the world to remake us even more wondrously than he formed us in Creation. The Savior is born for us so that we might experience rebirth. As the Collect of Christmas Mass During the Day emphasized, Christ took on our humanity so that we might share in his divinity. The “reason for the season” is not simply “Jesus” but more precisely what Jesus wishes to do in us. That’s what this feast of St. Stephen helps us to ponder. In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, we turn to God the Father and ask, “Grant, Lord, … that we may imitate what we worship,” words that became am imperative for us on the day of our priestly ordination, when we were instructed to imitate what we celebrate. We beg for the grace to emulate Christ the Lord before whose manger we kneel. And if we’re going to imitate Jesus, we can’t forget that that Baby born in a silent night in a stable came into the world to fight, to fight with love as the Good Shepherd to redeem us from wolves, to fight against the devil, to fight for the full love of God and love of others, including the love of those who have made themselves our enemies. And that baby adored by shepherds who grew up to call himself the Good Shepherd calls us to follow him, to imitate him whom we adore.

* We see that St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Christmas

December 24, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.24.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Merry Christmas! 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 celebrate the birth of the Lord.

* There are four different Masses at Christmas with four totally different sets of readings: the vigil Mass in which we hear again the Gospel we pondered last week of the Angel’s appearance to St. Joseph; the Mass during the Night, in which in the Gospel we examine what the angels said to the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks at night; the Mass at Dawn, the Gospel of which centers on the Shepherds’ encounter with Jesus, Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem; and the Mass during the Day, in which we meditate on the beginning of St. John’s Gospel and the theological reality of the Word of God’s becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Each of the Gospels, and the readings that complement them, merits a full treatment, but what I would like to do is to focus on St. Luke’s account of the shepherds with the angels and then with Mary and Joseph and ponder four lessons we can learn from them about what God expects of us as God’s eternal word enters into a consequential conversation with us as he is born of Mary in Bethlehem.

* The first lesson is about vigilance. The Shepherds were on watch. They were able to hear the message proclaimed by the angels because they were awake and this alertness points to an interior readiness to receive God’s word through the Angel. Their hearts were open, waiting for God and longing for God. They were in a state of Advent. They were willing to stretch their imaginations to recognize that God’s highest glory would be found wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger and that such lowliness would be in turn lifted to divine heights. The first Sunday of Advent each year features a Gospel passage that reminds us that we need to awaken and remain alert for the Lord is coming like a thief in the night. The shepherds are models of what it means to be awake and alert for the Lord’s arrival. Like the shepherds, we are all called to be vigilant, to be alert and awake. One great way to determine whether we’re really alert and awake to God, whether we’re able to stretch our imaginations to embrace Christ in the real, real world, is whether we’re able to give up some of our sleep to come to be with him, like happens with the beautiful tradition of Christmas Midnight Mass, which is a bulwark against the propensity to fit the celebration of Christmas and the worship of God into our crowded life; but an annual reminder that we are called to make our lives revolve around the mysteries of faith and that those mysterious realities are worth changing sleep patterns and inconveniencing ourselves. The truth is that if we’re not awake to the presence of God with us, to his word announced through messengers, then we’re essentially living in a dream world that will make us often miss God’s promptings. The shepherds show us what should be occurring in us spiritually throughout the year, staying awake to God’s promptings, to God’s voice, with interior longing, so that when God speaks and calls, we’re listening and ready.

* The second lesson the shepherds teach us is how to respond to God’s promptings. The Gospel passage tells us that “they made haste” to go to Bethlehem. This expression calls to mind what we know about the Blessed Virgin Mary, who as soon as the angel told her that her elde...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Mass of December 23

December 23, 2022

Mal 3:1-4.23-24, Ps 25, Lk 1:57-66

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.23.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* In today’s final O Antiphon, we turn to Jesus and pray, “O Emmanuel, rex et legisfer noster, expectatio gentium et salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster,” “O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, expectation and Savior of the nations, come and save us, Lord our God.” God-with-us comes to rule us, to show us how to love God and others, as the fulfillment of our longings for salvation. And in today’s readings we sense not only his proximity but what he will do when at last he comes.  “Lift up your heads and see: your Redemption is near at hand,” we pray in the Responsorial Psalm. We lift our heads, our hearts, our hands and our voices, because God is coming to be with us to redeem us in his kingdom and through his two-fold law of love.

* We see two aspects of this redemption in the readings today. The first is purification. The Prophet Malachi tells us that the Messiah — “the Lord whom you seek” who would “suddenly … come to the temple” — would be “like a refiner’s fire, … refining and purifying silver. … He will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or silver that they may offer due sacrifices to the Lord.” Jesus’ essential work in us is to purify the treasure we hold in clay vessels (2 Cor 4:7). That process of purification is implicitly alluded to in today’s Gospel scene. At a superficial level, the reason why we have the birth and naming of St. John the Baptist two days before Christmas is that, historically, it preceded the birth of Christ, and since December 17, we have been traversing all of the proximate historical events of that first Advent. But the birth and naming of the precursor both point to the birth and naming of the one John came to announce, Jesus. John’s mission was to purify, to help the people prepare the path for the Messiah to come, who would say at the Jordan, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:10-12).

* The second aspect of redemption is intergenerational love. Malachi announces the mission of John the Baptist, the new Elijah. About John, God says, “Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me … to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” The mission of the precursor was to prepare the way and the day of the Lord, who would seek to reunite us as one family. Malachi talks about intergenerational reunion that begins not just with dry duties of familial piety and an extrinsic obedience to the fourth commandment, but something altogether full of love, that the hearts of parents and the hearts of kids would be turned lovingly toward each other. That’s one of the things that the Lord wants to have happen at every Christmas, that children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, extended families all come together to be reunited in worshipping God-with-us. We know that the disunity that happens in families occurs because of sin, when people choose to act as gods or want to be treated as gods, determining the law.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Mass for December 22

December 22, 2022

1 Sam 1:24-28, 1 Sam 2:1.4-8, Lk 1:46-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.22.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* For me, one of the most evocative phrases of the second phase of Advent is a line we pray in the Advent Preface the Church prays at all of the Masses between December 17 and 24: “The Virgin Mother longed for him with love beyond all telling.” Advent is a season of longing, of desire, and no one shows us that desire better than Mary, not only as Daughter Zion summing up in herself the longings of the Jewish people across the centuries awaiting the coming of the Messiah, but also as the Mother chosen by God the Father to conceive and bear that Messiah, that Son of the Living God. So many first-time moms are bursting with excitement for the birth of their child. Mary’s longing was, the Preface reminds us, beyond all description. She wants to help us enter into that holy longing.

* Today’s O Antiphon is a commentary on Advent longing. The Church prays,  O Rex gentium et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti. “O King and Desired One of the Nations, O Cornerstone who makes one from both [who unites the house of Israel with all the nations]: come and save the human person whom you formed from the clay.” In this O Antiphon we first make explicit what is implicit in the O Adonai of December 18 when we refer to Christ not only as the “leader of the house of Israel” who gave the Israelites the law, but also the “Adonai” or Lord who spoke as Yahweh (I am who am, the God of every being) to Moses in the burning bush. Jesus is king of all nations, not just Israel, and he comes to unite Israel with all of the nations in the worship of the one true God as one family. He is the Desideratus gentium, the Desired One of the Nations, who implanted within us a holy longing for him and for the redemption he alone brings. And we pray in this O Antiphon for him to fulfill this Mission. Just as he is the creator of us all, having breathed into our common ancestors at the beginning of time the breath of life, our soul, so he wants to remake us and reunite all of us he formed from the clay as one family.

* Today we see what’s supposed to happen with the soul he has breathed into us. It shows us what our response is supposed to be when God fulfills our longing for him with love beyond all telling. We’re called to burst with praise and thanksgiving. Mary shows us this in her famous Magnificat, when she exclaims, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Our souls are meant to magnify God and God, in fulfilling our desires, has given us so many reasons for soul-bursting praise. The Almighty has done great things for us and holy is his name! At the same time, we see in Mary’s Magnificat, that in order to praise and thank God aright, we need to experience longing for him and for the gifts that come from his generous hand. Mary describes how God looks on us in our lowliness, how he defends the innocent, the weak and the small with the strength of his arm, how he lifts us up the lowly, how he fills the hungry with good things, how he routinely and mercifully comes to the rescue of Israel. Each of these situations — poverty, hunger, weakness, even desperation — increases our recognition of our need to be saved and stokes our longing. And then when God comes in response to the prayers made out of that longing, how can our souls remain quiet? In her Magnificat,