Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday, C, Vigil

April 23, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.23.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday. It’s a dialogue that happened on the night Jesus triumphantly rose from the dead. It’s a colloquy that reveals Jesus’ true priorities, why he entered the world, why he suffered, died and rose. He did it all to impart Divine Mercy. That’s why since 2000, this Sunday, the exclamation point of the Easter Octave, is called Divine Mercy Sunday, and is meant to help us focus on and enter far more deeply into that great mystery and gift.

* It’s a gift ever actual. I’m not sure whether you’ve had a chance to see Mark Wahlberg’s new movie called Father Stu, which focuses on the inspiring true story of Father Stuart Long, a priest of the Diocese of Helena, Montana, who died in 2014 of the debilitating disease after only six-and-a-half years as a priest. He is an extraordinary icon and ambassador of Divine Mercy. He was the son of nominally Protestant parents, a football player, wrestler, Golden gloves championship boxer, and English major, who ended up moving to Hollywood in search of movie stardom, only to work as a bartender, bouncer and security guard. This fun-loving, strong, self-confident, kind big boy had his life upended in a life-threatening motorcycle accident at the age of 30. When he recovered, he was convinced that his life had been saved for a reason. He started to search for that reason. A desire to wed his live-in girlfriend, Cindy, who would only marry in the Catholic Church, led him to enroll in classes to become a Catholic. As he was being baptized at the Easter Vigil in 1994, he felt God calling him to become a priest. He acted on that call, eventually entered seminary and was ordained a transitional deacon a dozen years later at 42. Around that time, he started to experience various physical difficulties, which were eventually diagnosed as inclusion body myositis, a progressive disease that eventually takes away one’s control over one’s muscles such that one is practically paralyzed and even can lose the ability to breathe. Bishop George Thomas of Helena, however, after much prayer decided to ordain him a priest anyway, convinced in prayer that the Lord wanted Stu to be an icon of Christ, the Suffering Servant, and show the redemptive power of Christian suffering. Fr. Stu’s unlikely calling manifests the power of God’s mercy in calling sinners to become ambassadors of his mercy. In the movie, when he’s being interviewed for the seminary, the future Father Stu mentions God’s calling Saints Paul, Augustine and Francis of Assisi to prove that sometimes God’s most effective ambassadors of mercy are those whose being and history exude it. He preaches three times in the movie, in a talk at a prison, in a reflection as a seminarian at Mass, and at his ordination, and each time describes that God in his mercy cares for us all. And after he enters the nursing home, where he spent the last three years of his his priesthood, we see how his principal ministry was anointing the sick and hearing the confessions of his fellow residents, staff and people from all over greater Helena, who, at 8:30 each morning, would start to form a long line stretching even outside the front door. They found in Father Stu someone whom they knew could understand their moral failings as well as someone...