Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
November 19, 2024
Rev 3:1-6.14-22; Ps 15, Lk 19:1-10
 
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 in the readings, we are able to focus on the heart of Jesus’ interactions with us, the meaning of the incarnation, his public ministry, his passion, his death, resurrection and beyond.  It can be summed up by two phrases at the end of the Gospel and first reading respectively: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost” and “I stand at the door and knock.” Those words of Jesus at the end of his interaction with Zacchaeus and the crowds and after his address to the Seven Churches of the Asian diaspora help us to grasp God’s great desire to save us in his mercy. He knocks, he invites, he wants to seat us on his throne and share with us the victory of his triumph over sin and death. Let’s enter into these readings and learn the lessons God wants us to capture.
* The Lord’s merciful desire to save was on full display in the Gospel with Zacchaeus. His love for sinners was so profound that he literally went to the deepest place on earth in search of perhaps the greatest public sinner of that city, to reconcile him to the Father. Jesus went to Jericho, the lowest city on the planet — 853 feet below sea level — to find Zacchaeus, who was not just one of a bunch of tax-collectors loathsome to the Jewish authorities, but the chief tax collector of the region, which was the equivalent of the don of the mafia. He conspired with the Romans to rip off his own fellow Jews through the crooked Roman tax system. Jesus had promised that he, the Good Shepherd, would leave the ninety-nine sheep in his fold to search out and save one lost sheep, and this is what he did, leaving the crowds behind and entering alone with Zacchaeus into his home and into his life. He called Zacchaeus, his lost sheep, by name and heaven rejoiced on that day more for him than for all the others. So, too, today and everyday, Jesus takes the initiative of knocking at the door of our souls, asking for entry, coming to us wherever we are, no matter the depths to which we’ve sunk, no matter the fact that perhaps everyone else around us might despise us. Jesus never abandons us. To the extent that we repent of whatever sins we’ve committed and accept Jesus’ gracious invitation by “welcoming him with delight,” we, too, like Zacchaeus, can have salvation come to us.
* The diminutive Zacchaeus’ climbing of the tree, moreover, is more than merely an interesting detail. The text tells us that he was trying to see Jesus, but couldn’t because of the crowd, so he ran ahead and climbed a tree along Jesus’ route in order to be able to see him. We, too, often cannot see the Lord because other people get in the way. They block our sight in various ways. We’re often too small of stature to see over such obstacles, and, unfortunately, too often others are too selfish, distracted, sinful, judgmental or out-of-it, to do anything to help us and bring us into the presence of the Lord. Like a little child, however, Zacchaeus climbs a tree to see the Lord. Such an act could have led to great mockery for a middle-aged public figure. But Zacchaeus didn’t care. He wanted to see the Lord and no obstacle was going to stop him. His example challenges each of us to consider the extent to which we go, the trees or obstacles we’ll climb, in order to see Jesus more clearly. In our prayer, we regularly “leave the ground,” separating ourselves from the crowds, to go to Jesus, to behold him,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
November 18, 2024
Rev 1:1-4.2:1-5, Ps 1, Lk 18:35-43
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* On Saturday Jesus gave us the parable of the importune woman bothering the unjust judge in order to convey to us the necessity of “praying always without losing heart.” Immediately thereafter is the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican — which the Church strangely doesn’t give us to ponder today, perhaps we meditate upon it on Saturday of third week of Lent each year — which shows us of the importance of humbly begging the Lord for mercy. Today we encounter the living illustration of what Jesus was teaching about persevering, faithful, humble prayer for mercy in the blind man by the side of the road whom St. Mark in his version of the same scene identifies as Bartimaeus.
* As rabbis were accustomed to do on their three-times-per-year pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside begging. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon being informed that “Jesus of Nazareth was passing by,” he immediately began to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles in Galilee to the north and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. But his cries for Jesus were annoying those who were trying to hear Jesus’ teaching. So the first people in the group rebuked him and told him to shut his trap. But that only led him to cry out all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” The word St. Luke uses means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness.
* Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever else he was teaching at that moment. Likely, it was also a “coincidental” opportunity for him put flesh on his parables by showing how God responds to persistent, faithful, humble prayer for compassion. Jesus asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?,” and Bartimaeus said, “Lord, please let me see!” To some degree, Bartimaeus was already seeing by faith but he wanted to see Jesus with physical eyes so that he would be able to do exactly what he did once cured, to “follow him, giving glory to God.” He saw something with inner eyes, but was asking to see more. Jesus replied, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
* This cry of Bartimaeus is one of the most beautiful and frequent Christian aspirations: Domine, ut videam!, “Lord, I want to see.” It’s a beautiful response to Jesus’ perennial question to us in prayer, “What do you want me to do for you?” If Jesus were to ask many of us that question, many might waste his attention on lesser things, asking for him to return us to the shape we were in at 21, or to resolve a particular issue, or other relatively small stuff. Every day, however, we should ask the Lord for the gift to see, for the grace to see what we don’t see, to see things as they really are, the way he sees them. We should beseech the grace to see him and to see ourselves aright. We should ask for the grace to recognize him in the Holy Eucharist, in Confession, in prayer, in others, in the various events of the day, and especially in the beatific vision. He won’t allow us to see everything, because then we wouldn’t have the grace to live by faith,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministries, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Eighth World Day of the Poor
November 17, 2024
Dan 12:1-3, Ps 16, Heb 10:10-14.18, Mk 13:24-32
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* Youth, and particularly university years, is a time in which we are constantly shifting focus from the present to the future, from the short to long term, from the things of today to those of tomorrow. We quickly pass from concentrating on exams, papers, meetings, competitions and plans for tonight to thinking about next summer’s internships, jobs, careers and vocations, possible marriages, children, and beyond. November is the month in which the Church wants us to go from the ephemeral and evanescent to the everlasting and eternal, not in the sense of daydreaming about or dreading the future, but in the sense of deriving direction from the future to help us chart our path in the here-and-now. In the eleventh month of the year, the Church always ponders what are called the “four last things” — death, judgment, heaven and hell — so that we, aware of what’s coming, can start wisely orienting our whole life right now to these inevitabilities in a similar way to how, if we know what the essay questions will be on a final exam, we can start preparing to ace it.
* In tonight’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to us in apocalyptic language about the end of the world, when he says the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give light, the stars will fall from the sky and the heavens will be shaken. Those will be for many, he says, days of “tribulation,” the fulfillment of what the Prophet Daniel in tonight’s first reading says will be a “time unsurpassed in distress since nations began.” But in the midst of those frightening images, there is a way to choose to remain in peace. Jesus says that then we will “see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory,” that the angels will gather the elect, and that even though heaven and earth will pass away, his words will not pass away, inviting us to build our life on him and the words of eternal life he gives us. The ones who do, Daniel says, “will “live forever,” and will “shine brightly like the splendor of the firmament” and “like the stars forever.” These are the ones, as Psalm 16 teaches us today, who make the Lord their “allotted portion” and their “cup,” conscious that he will hold fast their lot. These are the ones who keep the Lord ever before them, knowing that with him at their right hand, they will not be disturbed, their heart will be glad, their soul rejoice, and their body abide in confidence, because they know he will not abandon them, but instead show them the path to life, to fullness of joy, to delights forever at his right hand. So in the midst of all that will pass away in the future, at an hour that no one knows except God the Father, Jesus and his Church are urging us wisely to choose right what will not pass away, and to follow Jesus confidently along the path of life he desires to show us.
* In graphic language, Jesus is urging us to make practical the truth we proclaim every Sunday in our profession of faith: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” Does that rock solid reality fill us with joy or fill us with fright? Are we ready, to use the words of tonight’s Alleluia verse, through vigilance and prayer to “stand before the Son of Man” or, rather, would we seek to run away? If angels were to come in vast numbers right now to announce that the end of the world were coming tonight, would most people — would you and I — jump up and down in jubilati...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
National Director
National Conference of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA
San Juan, Puerto Rico
November 16, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of the keynote address to the Diocesan Directors of The Pontifical Mission Societies, please click below: 
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The following text guided the keynote: 
Dear Diocesan Directors, Dear Fellow Missionaries,
It’s a joy for me to be with you during these days of the 2024 National Conference and to meet and to get to know some of you last night and earlier today. I thank you for all of your dedication and hard work. You are the essential link between the global mission of the Church, the 196 dioceses and the 17,000 parishes in the United States. You are the ones primarily responsible for advancing the holy work of promoting missionary identity, spirit, prayer and involvement among Catholics in your dioceses. I express my deep appreciation to you for this consequential work.
I also thank you for your patience and perseverance during this transitional period in the national office. I know it has been a challenging time for everyone involved in our common mission. I hope to be able to bring some long-term stability and to spur ongoing renewal, as together we continue to implement the Strategic Plan and the Task Force Recommendations that many of you had key roles in formulating. I would like to thank Father Anthony Andreassi, the interim National Director, for having a steady hand on the rudder during this time of transition as well as to the national staff, who have kept their hands to the plow looking ahead and laboring diligently through it all. One of my bedrock passages in Sacred Scripture is Romans 8:28, omnia in bonum, by which St. Paul reminds us that “all things work out for the good for those who love God.” I look forward to seeing how God will prove that truth once again. I look forward as well to earning your trust as the new national director, to strengthening and expanding the good we do, and to addressing together and systematically the various issues that to one degree or another get in the way of our common work.
I’m excited to begin full-time as national director in January. There’s obviously much work that awaits.
The Appointment As National Director
When I was approached last Spring by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the chairman of the TPMS board, and asked to consider becoming one of three candidates that the board might propose to the Vatican as new national director, I told him that I have long had a great love and passion for the Missions and am always open to do what the Church might ask of me. But I expressed a concern about what a possible appointment might mean for my work as Catholic chaplain at Columbia. I’m the founding chaplain of a bold new approach to campus ministry called the Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, just two years old. I told him that I thought that should I chosen, especially while I was leading the Seton Route of the 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, and asked to start in the Fall, it would be a shock to Columbia students already reeling from campus events whom I would not be able to care for adequately on the road. I told him that I thought it would likewise very difficult to begin a national search for a successor on short notice. I told him that my main concern, however, was missionary. I already had many students — there would eventually be 30 — signed up in the Fall for the intense four-month OCIA class I teach every semester and I told him I was troubled that they might fall through the cracks if an interim chaplain were appointed. Some of them were Jewish and had already gone through the difficult conversations with family members.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Stella Maris Church, San Juan, Puerto Rico
2024 National Conference of The Pontifical Mission Societies
Saturday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
November 16, 2024
3 Jn 5-8, Ps 112, Lk 18:1-8
 
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 Jesus asks us what I think is perhaps the most haunting question in Sacred Scripture: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” It’s not a rhetorical question. He was asking it because the answer wasn’t obvious. He had a serious concern as to whether when he comes for each of us or for all of us, whichever comes first, he would find us truly faithful. The whole work of The Pontifical Mission Societies is meant to help us give a personal and collective “yes” to that query. We exist to help Catholics in America show their faith by making a commitment, at various levels, to passing it on. We exist also to support the efforts of Catholics across the world to help raise up new peoples and generations of strong faith so that they, too, may become compelling answers to Jesus’ interrogative. We exist so that, if the Son of Man were to come soon or if he were to come in many generations, there would be a resounding response of faith, hope, love and joy to his arrival.
* The readings today, in a particular way, focus on three different ways Jesus hopes to find us faithful. Each of these relate to our work in mission promotion and support.
* The first way is persevering prayer. Jesus gives us a parable about the “necessity” — not just the invitation! — for us to “pray always without becoming weary.” Prayer is faith in action. Jesus describes a widow, someone who was socially helpless without a husband or a son, who was pleading her case before a corrupt judge, seeking a just decision against an adversary. It would appear that the judge may have been bought off by that adversary. The judge, who apparently feared neither what God or others thought of him, was unwilling to do right by her. But the woman didn’t stop. Eventually he felt obliged to relent, saying, “Because this widow keeps bothering me, I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.” Jesus draws the moral of the story, declaring, “Pay attention to what the dishonest judge says,” before adding, “Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily.” Jesus here wasn’t comparing God the Father to a corrupt magistrate but contrasting him. If even an unjust judge would eventually give in, how much more will a Father who loves his children respond to them when they “pray always without losing heart?”
* Prayer is at the heart of all our missionary work. It’s the reason why St. Therese is co-patron of the missions, as she never ceased to pray for her two adopted missionary priest brothers laboring in Africa as well as for all missionaries to bring the love of Christ to the ends of the earth. We see it in Jesus’ own example. The future Pope Benedict commented in a homily for catechists during the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 about how Jesus preached by day and prayed by night (see Lk 6:12-13). He said, “Jesus had to acquire the disciples from God [the Father]. The same is always true. We ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
November 16, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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. During the month of November, the Church always ponders what are called the “four last things,” death, judgment, heaven and hell. This Sunday Jesus speaks to us in apocalyptic language about the end of the world, when he says the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give light, the stars will fall from the sky and the heavens will be shaken. He declares that then everyone will see him coming with great power and glory as he sends out the angels to gather the elect from all corners of the earth. He tells us that when we see these things happening, we should know that he is near. He adds that we should similarly always be ready, for no one knows the time it will take place except God the Father.
* In graphic language, Jesus is describing the truth we proclaim every Sunday in our profession of faith: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” But many of us are afraid of this reality. If angels were to come in vast numbers right now to announce that the end of the world were coming today, most people, rather than rejoicing, would be screaming in fear. Most people would not be ready. That’s not, however, the reaction the Lord wants from us, for it shows a lack of faith and love. When the early Christians reflected on this reality of Jesus’ second coming, they used to cry out, “Marana tha,” “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20). They looked forward to this event with great expectation, because it would lead to their full unity in love with the Lord forever. Our attitude is supposed to be similar. We pray in every Mass, after the Our Father, “By the help of your mercy, may we be always free from sin … as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ!” The attitude we’re called to have versus Jesus’ second coming is a holy “hope.”
* I remember once when I was preaching a retreat in Los Angeles, an elderly woman came to me, asking, “Father, is it sinful for me to look forward to my death so that I can, God-willing, be with Jesus forever in heaven?” I replied tenderly, but emphatically, “No. It’s not a sin!” Then she said to me, “Then why doesn’t anyone else seem to have this longing?” It was a very sound observation. Few do seem to have this longing. One reason, I think, is because so many of us are focused the things of this world, obsessed about the imminent political changes taking place in Washington, various dramas in our workplaces or families, or the latest happenings in sports or entertainment. Our mind, heart, soul and strength are not focused on God and the things of God but what Jesus elsewhere in a parable would call “worldly cares and anxieties, the lure of riches and the craving for other things” (Mk 4:19).
* Another reason, I think, may have to do with the first part of that prayer I just cited from the Mass, and the link between our being “free from sin” and our ability to wait in “blessed hope” for the coming of the Lord. I’d like to illustrate this point with a story from my childhood. When I was a kid, most days I would wait with eager expectation for the return of my dad from work about 4:15 in the afternoon. At about 4:00, our black Labrador retriever would start pacing around the house with...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
November 14, 2024
Plhm 7-20, Ps 146, Lk 17:20-25
 
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: 

* The Pharisees in today’s Gospel asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. They were doubtless asking this within messianic expectations, that the kingdom of God would erupt soon and fulfill Jewish hopes to evict the Romans from Israel and reestablish the Davidic throne. The kingdom, for them, was fundamentally meant to be a political reality, a neo-Davidic theocracy. In the question, the Pharisees were probably egging Jesus on to see whether he thought he was the Messiah and what his future plans might be. But Jesus, as he was accustomed to do, transcended the question. He said that the inauguration of the Kingdom wouldn’t be a spectacle to be observed. There wouldn’t be trumpets intoning “Hail to the King!” There wouldn’t be heralds indicating that the kingdom is “here” or “there.” Rather, Jesus says, “Behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.” This means two things. First, that the Kingdom had already come because the King was present; the Kingdom is where the King is and Jesus was already present. Second, the Kingdom had already come because people had already embraced it, entered it and were living in it because they were living with the King. The “among” here in Greek can also mean “within,” and some people interiorly were already very much in the Kingdom. There’s a couplet in the Our Father in which we pray first “Thy kingdom come!” and then repeat it in other words, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The Kingdom of God is wherever God’s will is done, whenever one begins to live in relationship with God and his kingdom.
* By both of these applications Jesus was indicating that no one needed to wait to observe the kingdom because the kingdom had already arrived. Rather, they needed to know how to look for it. Throughout the Gospel Jesus was giving us indications about how to recognize the kingdom as well as the conditions for entering it and living in it. He says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are “poor in spirit,” to those who treasure God more than all the treasures of the world. It belongs to those who convert and become like little children, who trust in God and accept it as a gift. It is like a wedding banquet full of joy and those who live in the kingdom are those who are profoundly and serenely joyful. It grows like a mustard seed or yeast, imperceptible to people on the outside but the growth is real. It’s like a buried treasure or a pearl of great price, a net cast into the sea or a field with wheat and weeds. By each of these realities Jesus was indicating qualities of the Kingdom so that we would be able to perceive it. Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, said very powerfully back in 2000 in a talk to catechists from around the world, “The kingdom of God … is ‘not a thing.’ The Kingdom of God is God. The Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our – in my life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it – on the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” The kingdom has come to a person when God is truly God of each and every act of one’s life. The Kingdom of God is living within the matrix of the incarnate King of Kings.
* When we enter into that kingdom,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
November 13, 2024
Ti 3:1-7, Ps 23, Lk 17:11-19
 
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: 

* “In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess 5:18), we sang as we prepared for today’s Gospel. Our Christian vocation is one of continuous thanksgiving in all circumstances. We have a beautiful dialogue in the heart of every Mass when the priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” the people reply, “It is right and just” and the priest adds, “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father.” We pray those words on Easter Sunday but also throughout Lent, we pray them and nuptial Masses as well as funerals, we pray them in the midst of prosperity and persecution. It is right and just always and everywhere, in all circumstances, to praise and thank God. To do so is first a religious duty, out of gratitude to God for all that he has given us and done for us. But it’s also the path to our salvation. We see the salvific importance of thanksgiving in today’s Gospel.
* Jesus today heals ten lepers. To have leprosy in the ancient world was about the worst thing that could befall you. Not only would Hansen’s disease eat away your flesh and bones, not only would it lead to your having the most sickening smell imaginable, but it would lead to your total banishment from society. You had to live apart from civilization. You were cut off from your family. You were cut off from simple things like being able to go to the market for groceries or to the well for water. In some sense you were cut off from God because you couldn’t go to the synagogue on Saturdays or the Temple for major feasts. People couldn’t approach closer than 50 feet from you and when you were near anyone you needed to ring a bell and cry out “Unclean! Unclean!” One of the toughest things of being a leper was that the only people with whom you could relate were other lepers, with all the psychological, physical and spiritual problems that lepers bore.
* When Jesus approached, the lepers with diaphragms trained from yelling out “Unclean! Unclean!,” stood at a distance from Jesus, raised their voice, and begged, “Jesus, Master! Have pity on us!” Very few people had genuine mercy on them. People just tried to stay as far away from lepers as possible, as if the leprosy were somehow the lepers’ fault. Jesus did have mercy. He responded, “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” because priests were the only ones under the Mosaic law who were able, intelligently, to pronounce a leper healed and to return him or her to society. Even to say this was to imply that he had cured them, but he actually didn’t pronounce them cured. It took an act of faith on their part to start journeying to find a priest simply on Jesus’ word. But that’s what they did. As they were journeying, however, St. Luke tells us one of them, a Samaritan, realizing he had been healed, turned around. Before he would show himself to the priests, he wanted to thank the one who had given him a miracle. Glorifying God, he came to Jesus, fell at his feet, and poured out his heart in gratitude. Jesus’ words are very powerful: “Ten were cleansed, were they not? Where are the other nine?” He knew he had cured all ten of leprosy, but only one was showing gratitude. Jesus then drew attention to the fact that the man who returned was a Samaritan, someone for whom the Jews had centuries of animosity as those...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Josaphat
November 12, 2024
Ti 2:1-8.11-14, Ps 37, Lk 17:7-10
 
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, Jesus teaches us about a fundamental Christian attitude. Yesterday, we pondered Jesus’ words about setting good example rather than scandal and of forgiving continuously when someone repents, which led his apostles, because of the difficulty they foresaw, to cry out, “Lord, increase our faith!” Jesus described for them the power of faith the size of a mustard seed, that that amount of faith is enough to translocate mountain ranges, and so, even with a little faith, persevering in good example and forgiveness ought to be easy in comparison! That leads Jesus today to talk about the perseverance, humility and gratitude that flow from faith, describing the situation of a servant who has just come in from the fields. Such a servant would never expect his boss to have him sit down at table and serve him as some type of reward for doing what he was supposed to do; rather he would expect him to continue serving. “So should it be with you,” Jesus draws the lesson. “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’” Jesus wants us to go on continuing to work in his vineyard, to set good Christian example, to be merciful like he is merciful, to live by faith. There’s no point at which we should say, “I’ve forgiven enough, now I can stop.” There’s no time when we should think, “I set a good example earlier. Now I can do my own thing.” Jesus wants us to persevere with gratitude for the gift of faith and like him continue serving others with love as he loved and served us to the end.
* In today’s first reading, St. Paul describes various traits that we should have in order to set that good Christian example. He talks about various classes of people — senior men, senior women, young people, even Titus himself. While at certain times of life particular virtues may be more timely, we should aspire to all of these virtues “so that the word of God may not be discredited” and so that critics “will be put to shame without anything bad to say about us.” Let’s examine each of them in turn.

* Say what is consistent with sound doctrine — We all have a duty to speak in a way that’s consistent with the truth that God has revealed. If we teach contrary to the truth, whether we consciously or unconsciously know that it contradicts what God has taught through revelation and through the Church, we can draw people to follow us down a wrong path. We need to know sound doctrine and have the love for God and for others to pass it on.
* Temperate — This means “sober” in terms of food and drink. With the passing of time, we should learn what our limits are, what are true pleasures, and how not to over-indulge. Drunks and gluttons are a sad scandal.
* Dignified — This means that one is “serious” about one’s origin and destiny in God, about one’s divine filiation, and lives accordingly.
* Self-controlled — The word in Greek means “prudent,” someone that has things under control, who doesn’t give in to flights of anger or passion.
* Sound in faith, love and endurance — We must be “healthy” in our total self-entrustment to God and what he teaches, in sacrificing ourselves for God and others, and for perseverance until the end.
* Reverent — We must learn how to regard with love and awe God and the things of God, especially others.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Martin of Tours
November 11, 2024
Ti 1:1-9, Ps 24, Lk 17:1-6
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* “Increase our faith.” Since faith is a gift, and since we as Christians try to walk by faith and not by sight, these words should always be on a Christian’s lips as a prayerful aspiration. God loves us so much that he will generally provide plenty of opportunities for us to need to cry out for increased faith. But Jesus today likewise reminds us that even a little faith is able to do the impossible, like transplanting mulberry trees into the sea. The apostles were provoked to ask Jesus for that gift because of his words about scandal and then forgiveness, and we can ponder them as well as apply this petition to the life of the influential saint the Church celebrates today.
* Jesus begins today’s Gospel passage talking about scandal and the damage it causes for others’ growth in faith. “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur,” the Lord says, “but woe to the one through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” Jesus is clearly describing the punishment scandalous behavior warrants. At the same time that he mentions a millstone, however, he wants to help unshackle someone from that millstone through mercy. One of the most important parts of our life of faith, is our recognition that just as God never tires of forgiving us, we should never tire of asking him for forgiveness and of sharing a similar mercy with others. This is hard. It requires great humility to ask for forgiveness. It requires greater humility to give it. Jesus is calling us not merely to give people a second chance, but, literalistically, an eighth chance. And in another part of the Gospel he says, depending upon the translation, that we need to give a 78th chance or a 491st chance. Since the number 7 in Hebrew carries with it a sense of infinity, Jesus is saying that, like our faith has no upper limit, neither should our mercy. In order to be capable of doing this, we need his help, we need the strength that comes from faith. That’s why we humbly beg, “Increase our faith!”
* In the first reading, St. Paul describes the qualities for the discernment of priests and bishops precisely so that they won’t cause scandal but rather bring people to imitate God. He says that they need to be blameless, which is the opposite of scandalous; married only once, meaning that they can live chastely and not be men who had to marry after the death of a first wife, because then probably they wouldn’t be able to live the continent chastity required; with believing children who are not accused of licentiousness or rebellious, because if a father can’t raise his own children in the faith, how can he raise others’ children in the faith?; not arrogant, because he must be a humble servant like Christ; not irritable, because he must love even those who annoy him; not a drunkard because he must be sober and alert; not aggressive, but meek; not greedy for sordid gain, but poor in spirit because the kingdom he seeks is the Lord’s; hospitable because he sees Christ in the stranger saying, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me”; a lover of goodness, so that his virtue is not just in seemingly virtuous deeds but comes from a good fruit-producing tree; temperate since he must have self-mastery; just, since he should be right with God and fair with others; self-controlled ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
November 10, 2024
1 Kings 17:10-16, Ps 146, Heb 9:24-28, Mk 12:38-44
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s Gospel, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* On this day on which we at Columbia have had the incredible privilege to walk with Jesus on the Columbia campus, to adore him in St. Paul’s Chapel, and to give witness to the source and the summit of the Catholic life, the root and center of your and my life, Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, it’s fitting that we have the Gospel we do, because we see in it the essence of authentic Catholic spirituality, which is a Eucharistic spirituality.
* In last Sunday’s Gospel, you remember, Jesus told us clearly what the first and greatest commandment is, the most important thing we have to do in life: to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Love, as we know, is more than merely words and feelings, but is shown in deeds. Love is choosing to act for the good of another, sacrificing oneself for sake of someone or something else.
* In tonight’s Gospel, Jesus gives us a real-life example of someone who lived this way. It’s an opportunity to help us to determine, in our concrete circumstances, whether we are really trying to love God with all we are and have.
* This is one of the most important things we need to ask, at any stage of our life, but particularly when we’re young. The reason is because there’s a great temptation, as St. Therese of the Child Jesus used to say, to try to “love Jesus by halves.” We try to give him 10 percent, or 50 percent, but we don’t love him lavishly. It’s a little like what happens sometimes with Catholics at the offertory when the collection is taken up. We put “something” in, but often it’s not much of a sacrifice. And that can become the approach we take to our whole spiritual life. We give God a “little” of our time. Every once in a while we use the talents he’s given us to step forward and help the Church. But we’re not generous. And what can happen is we begin to become lukewarm in our faith, often using our time, talents and resources for ourselves or for many other things, far less important than God. That’s why today, on this day on which we have brought our Eucharistic faith out to campus, that we go from trying to love the Lord a “little” to seeking to love him with as much generosity as we can muster. The woman in today’s Gospel shows us how to do that.
* Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem and he began, basically, to “people watch,” in order to instruct his apostles about how to put what he was teaching about loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength into action. There was a stream of people depositing money in the temple treasury, which was a large tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure moneybox. People would put their coins — there were no “bills” in the ancient world — in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coins would resonate as they rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Mark tells us, were putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury tuba. Some of these donors were perhaps the scribes against whom Jesus told the crowds to beware at the beginning of the Gospel, those who liked to wear long robes, stand in market places, plop themselves in the VIP seats at banquets and recite lengthy prayers all to be noticed and greeted; but, because of this conspicuously religious behavior, nobody suspected that they were at the same time greedily trying to “devour the houses of wi...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
November 10, 2024
1 Kings 17:10-16, Ps 146, Heb 9:24-28, Mk 12:38-44
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* In last Sunday’s Gospel, you remember, Jesus told us clearly what the first and greatest commandment is, the most important thing we have to do in life: to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Love, as we know, is more than merely words and feelings, but is shown in deeds. Love is choosing to act for the good of another, sacrificing oneself for sake of someone or something else. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus presents us with a real-life example, an actual standard, to help us to determine, in our concrete circumstances, whether we are really trying to love God with all we are and have.
* After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to instruct his apostles about how to put what he was teaching into action. They saw the stream of people depositing money in the temple treasury, which was a large tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure moneybox. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coins would resonate as they rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Mark tells us, were putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury tuba. Some of these donors were perhaps the scribes against whom Jesus told the crowds to beware at the beginning of the Gospel, those who liked to wear long robes, stand in market places, plop themselves in the VIP seats at banquets and recite lengthy prayers all to be noticed and greeted; because of this conspicuously religious behavior, they were unsuspected when they would then try hypocritically, Jesus says, to “devour the houses of widows” and other helpless people. In contrast to such ostentation, Jesus draws attention to a poor widow who came and put in two lepta, two small coins that together were worth about a penny and likely barely made a sound. Jesus gave a surprising lesson that the disciples obviously never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all of them, for they, he said, “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have justly chosen to drop into the tuba only one of the lepta and kept the other for herself. But she didn’t. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain famous until the end of time.
* What could have moved her to give to the Temple even what she needed to survive? There’s only one reason: deep faith and love. She believed not simply that God exists, or that he worked various miracles in the past to help her people. She believed so much in him and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding it. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that saving work as worth more than even her own life. Faith leads to that type of trust in God and generosity.
* It is this faith, and not just the fact she was a widow, that links the Gospel to the first reading. There we find another widow, in pagan Zarephath, who during a massive drought and consequent famine was down to her handful of flour and oil. She had doubtless prayed to God asking for help for her and her son,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Highland Study Center, Manhattan
November 9, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s talk, please click below: 
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This is the outline of the talk: 

* November, the saints and the call to holiness
* Josemaria Escriva and the universal call to holiness
* Holiness in ordinary life. John Paul II’s characterization of St. Josemaria as the “saint of ordinary life.”
* My own encounter with St. Josemaria and his call to holiness in college and beyond. “The world crises are crises of saints.” My 2002 homily on the scandals. The sanctification of temporalities in the priesthood.
* John Paul II, the high standard of ordinary Christian living and training in holiness.
* Systematic discussion of St. Josemaria and Holiness

* We are all called, and therefore can become, saints
* To become a saint, we must begin with a clear enough sense of what holiness is. St. Josemaria gives us, like the Church, several complementary answers.
* Josemaria stressed that the saints are not superheroes, but ordinary people who willed holiness.
* The pursuit of holiness begins with God’s work, not ours. We must trust in him, depend on him, respond to him.
* We need to desire sanctity
* That desire must become concrete. This is what has led to the elements of a Plan of Life, which could be called a path of sanctity.

* Resolution to take holiness seriously.
* Keep presence of God throughout the day.
* Leads to unity of life.
* Prayer
* Eucharist
* Gospel
* Spiritual Reading


* Holiness for most is sought not by withdrawing from the world, but remaining in it without being of it. The setting is right in the middle of the world, in daily life.
* To stay in the world and become saints, we need to learn how to sanctify our work. This is one of the most practical insights of St. Josemaria and of Opus Dei.
* Holiness is not cookie cut. While there are similar pillars of holiness, the path taken is individual.
* But sanctity always involves heroism.
* Heroism involves the virtue of persevering in allowing God to work and corresponding to his efforts.
* The universal call to holiness involves regarding others as called to be saints, too.
* That means we have a mission to form others toward holiness


* Conclusion
* Prayer

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
November 9, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.9.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
 
The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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. During these days after the national elections when we are looking ahead to the changes coming soon, Jesus helps us to focus on things that are of perennial importance, not just to ourselves, our families, and the Church, but also to our country and to the type of service we, Catholics, are meant to provide. Today Jesus helps us concentrate on the generosity we’re called to give in imitation of his own.
* Last week, you remember, Jesus told us clearly what the first and greatest commandment is, the most important thing we have to do in life: to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Love, as we know, is more than merely words and feelings, but is shown in deeds. Love is choosing to act for the good of another, sacrificing oneself for sake of someone or something else. This Sunday Jesus presents us with a standard to help us to determine, in our concrete circumstances, whether we are really trying to love God with all we are and have.


* After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to instruct his apostles about how to put what he was teaching into action. They saw the stream of people depositing money in the temple treasury, which was a large tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coins would resonate as they rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Mark tells us, were putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury tuba. But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small, super thin coins that together were worth about a penny and likely barely made a sound. Jesus gave a surprising lesson that the disciples obviously never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all of them, for they, he said, “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. Or she could have justly chosen to drop into the tuba only one of the lepta and kept the other for herself. But she gave all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain famous until the end of time.
* What could have moved her to give to the Temple even what she needed to survive? There’s only one reason: her deep faith. She believed not simply that God exists, or that he worked various miracles in the past to help her people. She believed so much in him and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding it. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that saving work as worth more than even her own life.
* The truth is that the stronger our faith, the more we are willing to trust in God and the more we are willing to sacrifice. The more we love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, the more we will give of ourselves and what we have to the advance of his work. The first apostles, moved by faith in Christ,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
November 8, 2024
Phil 3:17-4:1, Ps 122, Lk 16:1-8
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.8.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we are able to continue to meditate on the realities we celebrate on All Saints and All Souls Days. The  Gospel is meant to help us to prepare for our judgment by inspiring us toward a life of sanctity, minimally out of eternal self-interest. Jesus stresses in a brutal, cutthroat, bottom-line manner what we need to do and does so by means of what for many Catholics is the most confusing parable in the Gospel, what’s popularly called the Parable of the Dishonest Steward, something that can get some people to wonder whether Truth incarnate is praising a crooked business manager for deception, whether he who gave us the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” is himself praising someone for violating it. But Jesus is doing no such thing. In order to grasp what Jesus was and was not saying and what the crucial lesson is for us, however, we first need to understand better the literal sense of this passage through grasping something about the way loans were done in the ancient world.
* In the Parable, a manager is about to get sacked because he was squandering the property of his business owner. His boss gave him his pink slip and told him to do an audit of the books prior to his dismissal. So the man called in those mostly tenant farmers who owed his employer money or items and reduced their debts considerably. At first glance, this seems like dishonesty, like he was allowing these debtors to steal from his boss, but it wasn’t. In the ancient world, the way loans were conducted was that the manager or broker would be paid by adding on something to what was borrowed, rather than a percentage taken out of the master’s proceeds. For example, if someone borrowed 50 denarii or 50 barrels of oil, he would have to pay back the 50 to the master and another 10 — or 30 or 50 — to the broker, whatever the broker thought he could get. This dishonest steward was probably tacking on way too big of a commission, and, in order to maximize his profits, was probably, like Fannie and Freddie two decades ago, lending out the master’s property to very bad risks, allowing people on the Master’s fields who were going to waste it rather than produce. Hence, when the manager called in those who owed, for example, 100 containers of wheat, and reduced the amount to 80, what he was almost assuredly doing was eliminating most or all of his commission. Therefore, he wasn’t allowing them to steal from the owner; he was eliminating his own take. Faced with the decision of saving his life by making friends who would take care of him after he was fired or trying to hold out to the end onto the possibility of making money via these commissions, he chose to save his life. His master — and Jesus through the master in the Parable — calls this prudent and wise.
* What’s the application to us? Jesus wants us to examine whether we are in the place of that dishonest steward. God has given each of us tremendous gifts on the basis of which we have made profits, or tried to make profit. He has given us our hands, which we use to work. He has given us our brains, which we use to think. He has given us our families and friends, our education, our lives, and so many other blessings. He has given us our vocation to holiness, the Word of God, the Sacraments, prayer and so much more! With these gifts, we have profited! But have we been using those gifts fundamentally to build up our kin...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Mercy of God
November 7, 2024
Phil 3:3-8, Ps 105, Lk 15:1-10
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.7.24_Homily_I.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, as we continue to pray and commit ourselves as Catholics to work for national reconciliation, we encounter today in the liturgy of the word some of God’s most powerful messages on his mercy and the way that it is meant to transform us, so that, enriched by God’s mercy, we might share that mercy with others, both bringing others to God for the mercy they need from him, and by forward the mercy we’ve received from God in the way that we seek to be merciful to others.
* In today’s Gospel, Jesus communicates something that we can never truly grasp deeply enough, which is just how much he passionately cares for those who are lost. He gives us two Parables, the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, both of which — together with the Parable of the Prodigal Son that immediately follows (and that the Church inexplicably excises from the lectionary as we make our way sequentially through St. Luke’s Gospel) — communicate to us two of the most important spiritual lessons as we relate to God.
* The first lesson is how precious we are to him. We’re not just a number. If we’re lost, he cares about us so much that he’ll leave everything else behind to come for us. He doesn’t say, “I still have 99 sheep. Let the lost one learn his or her lesson the hard way.” No, he leaves the others and, just like Mary and Joseph scampered ancient Jerusalem in search of the adolescent Jesus, the Good Shepherd goes in search of us. The Parable of the Lost Coin gives us a sense of why. This is not a story about losing one of ten silver dollars. The coins Jesus was referring to comprised the typical Jewish ten-coined headdress that a woman would wear for her wedding. To lose one of those coins would be like losing a wedding ring, something that would cause a wife or even a husband to overturn every rug and retrace every step. For Jesus, he would search for us with even greater passion because we’re not just a symbol of love and commitment like a ring or a coin from a spousal headdress, but we are his Bride, for whom he would always lay down his life. That’s the first point, how precious we are.
* The second point is about the extraordinary joy of God when we’re found. The joy in these parables is off the charts. Both the shepherd and the woman call all their friends and neighbors to celebrate with them. And Jesus says, in the moral of the Parables, “In just the same way, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who have no need of repentance!” This is an extraordinary truth. We know how much joy Mary, for example, gave God by her constant yes. She was the supremely righteous person who because of her sinlessness did not need to repent of anything. And yet her Son, Truth incarnate, tells us, that heaven rejoices more whenever any of us repents than the yeses and faithfulness of even 99 Blessed Virgin Marys. That is not meant to downgrade in the least God’s joy at Mary’s or our fidelity. But it’s meant to highlight, with Jesus’ own words, his desire for mercy. Based on these Parables, Pope Francis has underlined, “God’s greatest joy is forgiving!” It’s so important for us to recognize how much God loves each one of us, especially when we’re lost, and in response, to give God this joy by allowing him to bring us back to the fold and renew us in our spo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Faithful Departed
November 6, 2024
Phil 2:12-18, Ps 27, Lk 14:25-33
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.6.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, as we pray for the 47th President of the United States, for the gift of wisdom and the healing of his many flaws, for peace in our country, and for us as citizens to assume a greater responsibility for the culture and direction of our country, the readings today help us to focus on even more important and lasting realities, but those that, when properly understood and lived, can help us to be the salt, light and leaven here in our country that the Gospel demands. The readings help us, in this month of November, to deepen our reflection on the call to holiness and on the last things (death, judgement, heaven and hell). They move us to think about salvation, to stoke up our desire for it, and to make the choices that will secure it.
* In the first reading, St. Paul tells the Philippians and us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” The word for “work” in Greek used here means to “complete the work” or to “finish the job” of your salvation; the word for “fear” is the Greek word for “reverential awe.” We’re not supposed to be afraid of God but with a holy awe grasp the gift of God and make sure we allow him to bring to completion the work of salvation he has begun in us. The “trembling” buttresses the holy awe. If someone had a winning lotto ticket worth hundreds of millions of dollars, we can imagine how the person would take care of the ticket, making sure it wouldn’t be accidentally dropped or lost, while bringing the ticket to lottery officials to obtain the treasure. We’re supposed to treat our salvation as something far more valuable than that, as we journey to God to reap the eternal treasure he seeks to impart.
* St. Paul tells us that in this “completing the work,” God gives us his help. “For God is the one who, for his good purpose, works in you both to desire and to work.” God both fills us with the desire for salvation and then gives us his  grace to act on that desire. We see the desire described in the Responsorial Psalm when the inspired author says, “One thing I ask of the Lord, this I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may gave on the loveliness of the Lord and contemplate his temple.” God has implanted within us this desire for salvation, for him, for his house, for his kingdom, for his glory, for his love. He always implants within us a desire to seek and ask for what he desires to give us. But we have to act on that desire and God helps us with that as well,  to “complete the work” that the fulfillment of that desire requires.
* Jesus describes that work in today’s Gospel. To complete the work of salvation, Jesus says, we need to count the cost and joyfully pay it. We need to grasp that the offer of salvation God gives us through sharing his own eternal life is the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, worth sacrificing everything else to obtain. With a holy awe and trembling, we need to respond to his call to follow him, and he gives us the grace both to desire and to act on that call. He tells us that to follow him as his disciple to salvation, we have to do three things. First, we need to “hate” father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and  sisters. The Hebrew word for “hate” doesn’t mean “detest,” but rather means the opposite of “prefer.” It basically conveys not putting the person or thing we “hate” in first place. Jesus,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Tuesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Mass for the Nation or State
November 5, 2024
Phil 2:5-11, Ps 22, Lk 14:14-24
 
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, on the day on which Americans choose the 47th President of the United States and when many will be obsessively focused on the election results, we have in the Word of God today something even more urgent and important. It’s something that should be characteristic of Christian leaders and citizens. It describes the road, not to the White House, but to the Father’s House. Today as we remember to vote, it’s key for us to remember the etymology of the word vote: it comes from the Latin votum, which means “vow,” and reminds us ultimately of our commitments to God, to make sure we are casting with freedom our ballot for Jesus each day. As we think about the positions, policies and personal qualities of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, it’s crucial that we focus even more on the thoughts and actions of Jesus Christ. That’s what today’s readings help us to focus on.
* In the first reading, we have one of the most important passages in the whole New Testament, which sums up who Jesus is and how we’re supposed to relate to him. It’s so central to our faith that the Church prays it every Saturday night as the Canticle for Vespers, as we enter into the Christian Sabbath and ponder Christ’s Resurrection. It’s the epistle on Palm Sunday, and the Gospel Verse on Palm Sunday and Good Friday, as we prepare to ponder Jesus’ passion and death. Everything begins with St. Paul’s words, “Have among yourselves the same attitude that is … in Christ Jesus.” We are to put on the mind of Christ, as the King James translation has it. Then St. Paul stresses what Christ’s mindset was. Even though he was the morphe (form or shape) of God, the unchangeable divinity, he took on the morphe of a slave in human likeness, the permanent condition of being man. This points to the meaning of the incarnation. He didn’t hold onto his divine essence because he knew, first, he couldn’t lose it but second he chose to divest himself of all divine appearances in lieu of his mission of salvation. He “emptied himself” and “humbled himself,” St. Paul tells us in a kenosis that a led even to crucifixion. That’s the first part of Christ’s mindset that we’re called to understand and imitate: having received his total outpouring, we’re called not to grasp onto things but to humble and pour ourselves out in turn, obedient to the Father in life and in death. The second part of this passage refers to how Jesus after this kenosis is lifted up by the Father: “God greatly exalted him,” he raised him up on the third day, and “bestowed on him the name that is above every other name,” which means both “Jesus” (God saves) as well as “Kyrios,” Lord. Every tongue in creation is meant to make the profession, “Jesus Christ is Lord.” This is the “glory of God the Father,” when his Son is exalted as Savior and Lord. Jesus wants us to enter into that exaltation by entering into his kenosis.
* Pope Benedict commented on this passage in two catecheses in 2005, at the very beginning of his pontificate. About the first part of the hymn, verses 5-8, he said, “Christ, incarnate and humiliated by the most shameful death of crucifixion, is held up as a vital model for Christians. Indeed, as is clear from the context, their ‘attitude must be that of Christ’ (v. 5), and their sentiments, humility and self-giving, detachment and generosity.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Charles Borromeo
November 4, 2024
Phil 2:1-4, Ps 131, Lk 14:12-14
 
To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In this month of November, we focus on the call that the Lord has given us to be holy as he is holy. Today, Jesus and St. Paul speak to us about the path to holiness. Let’s begin with St. Paul.
* On Friday, if we did not have the celebration of All Saints, we would have begun reading at daily Mass from St. Paul’s beautiful letter to the Philippians, which we will have throughout until Friday. Philippi was the first place in Europe to hear the Gospel. It was the place where, after St. Paul had had a dream of a Macedonian asking him to come over, he left Troas and went on a boat to Neapolis, eventually coming to Philippi, a Roman colony with lots of disunity. It was there he met Lydia and stayed in her house. It was there he cured the possessed girl whom others were using to divine by the power of the devil. It was there he was thrown in jail and liberated by the earthquake. St. Paul had a special relationship with Philippi. It was the only place from which he accepted charity for himself, probably to give its people a chance to repair for the sufferings he endured there. He had a great desire for its unity and sanctity, and this letter was meant to help everyone come to unity. The real climax and center of the letter we will hear tomorrow, when St. Paul will tell us “Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus.” He calls us to put on Christ’s mind, to adapt ourselves to the Lord, to respond to his grace to think as Christ thinks, to will as Christ wills, to act as Christ acts. That’s his fundamental prayer for the Christians in Philippi and for the Christians in New York. That’s the path to holiness. That’s the proper context to understand what he says in today’s first reading: “Complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love, united in heart, thinking one thing.” Their unity will come about by their all attuning their minds and hearts to Christ’s. Once that happens, then the rest of his prayer will come about: “Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory,” because Christ did everything out of selflessness and for the Father’s glory. “Rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests but also everyone for those of others.” Christ ultimately regarded us as more important than himself, giving his life to save our lives. Even though he was God, he became our servant so that we might enter into divine life. When we adopt Christ’s attitude, then we, too, will not act out of self-centeredness or for earthly fame but will seek God’s glory, kingdom and will. We will seek to follow Christ’s example of greatness by becoming the servant of all, by washing the feet of others, by giving our lives for their salvation. We will seek, like Jesus did, to empty ourselves and become a servant, obeying God all the way to death.
* We see that attitude, that mindset, of Christ in today’s Gospel when he gives invitation advice to those who had been invited to a dinner with him, a dinner in which he cured a man with dropsy to their scandal (as we would have heard on Friday if we didn’t have the proper readings for All Saints), a dinner in which he spoke about taking the lowest seats. He teaches us not to have dinner parties out of self-interest or for our own vanity or ambition — something that was probably taking place then as the creme de la creme were inv...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
November 3, 2024
Deut 6:2-6, Ps 18, Heb 7:23-28, Mt 12:28-34
 
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* Today we start what will surely be a highly dramatic and historically consequential week, nearing the end of a political season that many, on various sides, have been framing in apocalyptic terms. Some are charging that what’s at stake is the end of democracy if one presidential candidate — whom they are labeling as a fascist, an insurrection inciter, and a convicted criminal — is elected. Others are saying that what’s at stake are the lives of millions in the womb and the freedom of the Church, if the most pro-abortion presidential candidate of all time — who wants women proudly to shout their abortions and prevent any medical personnel from religious or conscientious objection, and who, among other anti-Catholic words and actions, believes Knight of Columbus should be disqualified from judgeships and high government service — gains the majority of the electoral college. Both campaigns, not to mention media programs, celebrities, columnists, social media influencers, and thousands of zealous adherents, have been ramping up the fears of catastrophe if one or the other is elected. In an already anxious age, millions are understandably on edge.
* And lots of people are looking to pastors, priests and ministers. Some are looking for guidance about what to do. Others are looking at them for other reasons. This morning, I saw a tweet from last night from a highly influential Protestant lay religious leader and best-selling author whom I know, who wrote: “If your pastor doesn’t make clear tomorrow from the pulpit that you are to vote against” a particular political ticket that opposes Christian teaching on two particular issues, “you have an obligation to leave that church and take your [money] with you.” And so some are apparently looking to see whether their preachers are, in effect, faithful Christians worthy of continuing to serve as ministers or bridges between God and his people. And the only way for preachers to show that they are would be to use the pulpit today to instruct their flock to vote for a particular outcome on Tuesday.
* Because of the anxiety most have, because of the questions many have, and because of the expectations for particular talking points some have, it’s especially important for us to turn today and listen carefully to the Word of God. Right on cue, God seeks to orient us as his sons and daughters as we face this momentous week. He wants to strengthen us as his sons and daughters so that we might do what we ought, and then, as salt, light, and leaven, to help guide our neighbors and fellow citizens.
* In today’s Gospel, a scribe asks Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” The question, in other words, asks, “What is the most important thing I need to do?” Note that Jesus doesn’t say, perhaps to the surprise of some contemporary commentators, “Make sure you vote this way in the election.” Instead, he tells us something far more important, not just for life in general but even for our duties as citizens.
* I’d like to focus on the two most important lessons he gives us.
* The first is about the primacy of God. Jesus echoes in the Gospel something from today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. It’s a message that is fundamental not just for Israel to hear but for the United States and people of every country and time: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” In an age that seems to reduce almost everything to pol...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
November 3, 2024
Deut 6:2-6, Ps 18, Heb 7:23-28, Mt 12:28-34
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today we start what will surely be a highly dramatic and historically consequential week, nearing the end of a political season that many, on various sides, have been framing in apocalyptic terms. Some are charging that what’s at stake is the end of democracy if one presidential candidate — whom they are labeling as a fascist, an insurrection inciter, and a convicted criminal — is elected. Others are saying that what’s at stake are the lives of millions in the womb and the freedom of the Church, if the most pro-abortion presidential candidate of all time — who wants women proudly to shout their abortions and prevent any medical personnel from religious or conscientious objection, and who, among other anti-Catholic words and actions, believes Knight of Columbus should be disqualified from judgeships and high government service — gains the majority of the electoral college. Both campaigns, not to mention media programs, celebrities, columnists, social media influencers, and thousands of zealous adherents, have been ramping up the fears of catastrophe if one or the other is elected. In an already anxious age, millions are understandably on edge.
* That’s why it’s especially important for us to listen carefully today to the Word of God. Right on cue, God seeks to orient us as his sons and daughters as we face a momentous week as well as to strengthen us, as salt, light, and leaven, to help guide our neighbors and fellow citizens. In today’s Gospel, a scribe asks Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” In other words, “What is the most important thing I need to do?” And Jesus doesn’t say, perhaps to the surprise of some contemporary commentators, “Make sure you vote this way in the election.” Instead, he tells us something far more important, not just for life in general but even for our duties as citizens. I’d like to focus on the two most important lessons.
* The first is about the primacy of God. Jesus echoes in the Gospel something from today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. It’s a message that is fundamental not just for Israel to hear but for the United States and people of every country and time: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” In an age that seems to reduce almost everything to political messianism, in which political campaigns are trying to enlist and manipulate religious believers toward political ends, as if this election is the definitive battle between good and evil, light and darkness, life and death, with the only option to vote for one candidate or the other as a savior, the Word of God wants us to remember that there is only one Lord. As we prayed in the Psalm, he is our strength, rock, fortress, deliverer, refuge, shield, horn of salvation, stronghold and savior. The Letter to the Hebrews makes this even more explicit in reminding us that Jesus, our incarnate Lord whom we will celebrate in three weeks as King of the Universe, is our eternal high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, perfect, higher than the heavens, who remains in office forever and is always able and eager to save those who approach God the Father through him, since he lives forever to make intercession for them. These words are a great consolation, on November 3rd and for November 5th, November 6th and beyond. The Good Shepherd will not leave us orphans. He has promised to be with us always until the end of time. He has triumphed over sin and death.
* These words,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
November 2, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, as we participate in the dialogue between the Lord Jesus and a scribe — basically a Scripture professor with a specialty in Mosaic law — about the “first of all the commandments.”
* Jesus’ answer to the scribe’s question is well-known to us. Quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, perhaps the most famous passage of the Hebrew Bible, he said, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” (see Deut 6:4-5) Then he volunteered what he thought was the second of all 613 commandments the Scribes had enumerated in what we now call the Old Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” taken from the Book of Leviticus (19:18), before concluding by saying, “There is no other commandment greater than these.” Upon hearing Jesus’ answer, the scribe exclaimed, “Well said, teacher!,” and expressed his agreement that loving God and neighbor is “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices,” worth more, in other words, than all of the other worship given to God in the temple. The worship that is most important, the priority we should have in our relationship with God, is to love God and to love our neighbor with everything we have. Jesus concludes the conversation by saying to the scribe, somewhat curiously, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Through his understanding, in other words, he was close to the kingdom but not yet in it. Why? In St. Luke’s Gospel, after a similar conversation with another scholar of the law who had asked, not, “Which is the first of all the commandments?,” but “What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” to which the same answer was given about loving God and others, Jesus said to him, “Do this and you will live.” The upshot is that to enter the kingdom, we must do more than know what we need to do, but actually do what we know we need to do.
* And so we need to ask ourselves? Do I really love God? To love God is more than to acknowledge his existence. It means more than to fulfill certain duties to him owe out of justice. It means to be willing to sacrifice for him, willingly, the way we sacrifice readily for anyone we love, like a man in love sacrifices for the woman he wants to be his wife or a mother sacrifices for a beloved child. It means to care about what God cares about. It means to seek to please him as much as we can. Many of us can think our relationship with God is fine if, basically, we love the Lord with “most of our heart,” with “some of our mind,” with a “little of our strength,” and with the “majority of our soul.” As long as we’re not committing mortal sins, we tell ourselves, as long as we’re not betraying God, or angry at him, or despising him, or doing anything evil against him, then things are basically fine in our relationship. Or we can think that we love the Lord simply because we have good thoughts about him, admire him, think that he’s kind, merciful and generous. But Jesus is calling for much more than this. Love is more than having good feelings or impressions about another; love is the unconquerable benevolence that leads to willing, to choosing consistently,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
All Saints Day 2024
November 1, 2024
Rev 7:2-4.9-14, Ps 24, 1 Jn 3:1-3, Mt 5:1-12
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today on this great solemnity, we first celebrate the saints. We celebrate the great and famous saints we know about, like the saints whose images and intercession surround us in this beautiful Church: Our Lady, St. Bernadette, St. John the Baptist, St. Louis de France, St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, St. John, St. Anne, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Therese, St. Joseph and St. Joan of Arc. We celebrate also the countless quiet saints, those whom Pope Francis calls the “saints next door,” among whom we pray are numbered those we have known who passed on to us the gift of the faith, who died in the love of the Lord and now live in His love. The saints are the multitude who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” as we heard in today’s first reading, and brought those white baptismal garments “unstained into the everlasting life of heaven,” like they were instructed to do on the day of their baptism. These are the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation,” who have not just been called “children of God” through baptism, as St. John told us in today’s second reading, but have lived as children of God throughout their lives, seeking to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as Christ loved them. They are the ones who, as we prayed in the Psalm, have longed to see God’s face, whose hands were sinless, whose heart was pure, whose desires were not for vain things but for the things of God. These are the ones who have ascended “the mountain of the Lord,” the eternal Jerusalem, and who “stand in his holy place.” These are the ones who are singing today in that holy place the beautiful endless song glimpsed in the passage from Revelation, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
* But All Saints Day is not just about celebrating those who have lived truly successful lives, who have received and responded to the love of God and made the eternal Hall of Fame. It’s also meant, in having us focus on them, to spur us to imitate them so that one day November 1 will in the future be our day, too. As the ancient black spiritual intones, “O Lord, I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in.” St. John Paul II reminded us as we began the third Christian millennium that everything the Church does is meant to help us become holy, to help us respond to what the Second Vatican Council called the “universal call to holiness.” St. John Paul II wrote, “Since Baptism is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his Spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask catechumens: ‘Do you wish to receive Baptism?’ means at the same time to ask them: ‘Do you wish to become holy?’ It means to set before them the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt 5:48).” He continued, “This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few ‘uncommon heroes’ of holiness. … The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community … must lead in this direction.” On All Saints Day each year the Church indeed reproposes wholeheartedly this high standard of the Christi...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for Chastity
October 31, 2024
Eph 6:10-20, Ps 144, Lk 13:31-35
 
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The text that guided today’s homily is below: 

* Today in the Gospel, Jesus is confronted by the fact that Herod was trying to kill him. Jesus was unafraid, however. He sent him a message, calling him a “fox,” an indication that he was sly and ferocious, and then gave this paranoid man who thought Jesus might be the risen John the Baptist whom he beheaded a mysterious thing for him to dwell on, which summarizes his whole mission: “Behold, I cast out demons and I perform healings today and tomorrow, and on the third day I accomplish my purpose. Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day, for it is impossible that a prophet should die outside of Jerusalem.” First, he synthesizes his work as exorcizing and healing — something that would come to its fulfillment in the two days from the Last Supper to Good Friday to his being placed in the tomb — and then on the “third day,” accomplishing his purpose, a clear sign of the Resurrection. He also gave a clear indication that he knew he would die in Jerusalem, something that would have taken away any intimidation factor Herod might have thought he had, but also open Herod up to the fact that this was part of Jesus’ plan.
* The sad thing, however, that got Jesus to weep over Jerusalem was that despite his work of healing and exorcizing, some would not receive it. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,but you were unwilling!” They were unwilling. They didn’t want to allow God to gather them, to heal them, to free them from the power of Satan. They didn’t respond to the appeals of God’s loving mercy through the prophets but instead killed them, much like many of them were preparing to call for the Crucifixion of God’s own Son and image. It’s a reality that we need to face in every age, that sometimes we’re unwilling to let Jesus do his work and transform us the way he wants to do. But nevertheless, forward he goes, accomplishing his work, healing, casting out the devil, and gathering us from the evil one who wounds and possesses. Jesus’ courage is compelling as is his love.
* Jesus wants to give us a similar courage so that, having gathered us, we might be his instruments to gather with him, to heal with him, to cast out with him. In the Responsorial Psalm today, we bless God because he is our “rock who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war,” because he is our “fortress,” “stronghold,” “deliverer,” and “shield.” He strengthens us. We see how in today’s first reading, which is the end of our study of the Letter to the Ephesians, dedicated to how Jesus has come into the world to reconcile and sum up all things and help us, united to him, to become holy and immaculate in his sight, to become his Bride purified by water and the word. Jesus in uniting us to himself wants us to become strong with him, as he is our fortress, stronghold, deliverer and shield. St. Paul urges us to “put on the armor of God,” which means to “put on God.” He reminds us that our struggle isn’t fundamentally “with flesh and blood” — meaning other people, for whom we’re called to give our lives to help Jesus save — but “with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens.” We see in the Gospel how Jesus himself battled against these ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Mary, Our Lady of Grace, St. Petersburg, Florida
Quarterly Meeting of The Pontifical Mission Societies
Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 30, 2024
Eph 6:1-9, Ps 145, Lk 13:22-30
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

*  “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” someone from the crowd asked Jesus today. That is a question that must involve all of us individually and personally as human beings and as Christians, but it is something that must deeply motivate our work as missionaries, just as much as it did Jesus himself, St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier, St. Therese and scores of apostles and missionaries across the century. Jesus came into the world so that the world might be saved through him. Throughout the Gospel, he makes the point that some will be saved and some won’t be, some will be the sheep on his eternal right and others will be the goats on his left, some will choose to live in the light and others to remain in darkness, some will receive him and those he sends and others will reject him.
* In response to that question, a typical Jew at the time would have expected him to answer, “Yes!, only a few will be saved,” because most Jews believed that only Jews — and Jews who faithfully kept God’s covenant — would make it. The interrogator likely thought he was among the few. But Jesus didn’t reply attempting to satisfy the person’s curiosity, because he hadn’t come from heaven to earth to answer the questions of inquiring minds. He had come from heaven to earth to save us, and so he responded not by saying how many are saved by how any is saved. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” he said. The word translated as “strive” is from the Greek word to “agonize” and it’s used in a verb tense that means “keep on agonizing.” To enter and remain in Christ’s kingdom, and to get to Heaven ultimately, in other words, we need continuously to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to make the greatest, possibly most painful exertion of our life, to fit through a gate that is “narrow.” We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in an NFL training camp to make the cut, harder than a young gymnast works to make the Olympics and win the gold, harder than an immigrant father of large family works to ensure his family’s survival, harder than a missionary to plant the faith in a place that is resistant to the Gospel. To be a faithful Christian means to “agonize” to follow Christ always. There is no point that we can stop fighting to follow him and “live off the interest” of previous years of good discipleship. We are called to struggle, to keep fighting the good fight of faith, until the day we die. As the former National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, Archbishop Sheen, used to say, “If we’re not going uphill, we’re sliding downhill.” If we’re not swimming against the current of the world toward Jesus, we’ll be floating down stream over the falls. “Unless you pick up your cross each day and follow me,” he tells us, “you cannot be my disciple” (Lk 9:27,14:27). The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the Cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through. We need to agonize to fit through the narrow gate as if our whole life depended on it — because, in fact, Jesus says it does. In the midst of a culture that is consistently trying to water down our commitment to God, Christians who desire to be faithful need to strive ever harder to pick up the Cross God gives them each day to and un...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Family
October 29, 2024
Eph 5:21-33, Ps 128, Lk 13:18-21
 
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: 

* What is the kingdom of God like? Jesus asks because he wants us to be able to understand it. But it’s something that we can understand only by simile, only by analogy. Until it’s fully flourishing, we’re only going to be able to see certain of its reflections. Today Jesus wants to stress that the kingdom of God, first, begins really small. But then it grows. And it grows in such a way that so many, like the birds of the air flying from all over the planet, are able to find rest in its branches. It grows in such a way that it gives us rest, a home, where we can make a nest. We might not be able to “see” the nest and the birds when we plant the seed in the garden, but Jesus wants us to have that confidence and hope that even the littlest of beginning can result in that end. Likewise, he describes yeast. A tiny pinch of yeast from previously leavened bread, put into a new dough, elevates the whole loaf. In a sense, we know not how: it’s from the inside, acting to lift the dough up. In a similar way the kingdom starts with just a little pinch: one Christian on a street, one student in a dorm or university, one one employee in an office, one priest in a diocese or one sister in a convent or religious order, can have an enormous impact. We see that in the life of every saint. Even if they seem to be hidden, they’re not hidden at all. One teenage girl in a place like Nazareth could change salvation history by a simple, faithful, yes. A young girl with tuberculosis in a convent in northwestern France can change the whole history of the church simply by her prayers and by her obediently writing down what God was doing in her soul. A parish priest in New Haven, Connecticut, caring for his people, could found a legacy, the Knights of Columbus, that would stretch across the globe. So we have to know this about the kingdom, that little things can be extraordinarily consequential. All we do sometimes is plant that tiny little mustard seed or try to be that pinch of yeast. And then we trust that God will do the rest.
* Today in the first reading, we see one of the most important areas in which this kingdom is meant to grow, the soil in which the seed is planted, the dough in which the little pinch of yeast is given. It’s marriage and the family. We see how the kingdom can come just from that place. St. Paul’s words here in his Letter to the Ephesians have two contexts. The first context is the entirety of his letter. His Letter to the Ephesians, which we’ve been hearing for almost the two weeks, is about the kingdom and what Christ came to do. Christ came to reconcile all things in himself in the heavens and on earth. His entire mission was to bring us anew into harmony with the Father and in reconciled harmony with each other. This is the outgrowth of our being holy and immaculate in the Lord’s sight, as we heard two Thursdays ago. And it’s key for us to grasp that in the family, even just one little family, the kingdom can explode.
* Probably one of the most eloquent documents in Church history is Evangelii Nuntiandi, Saint Paul VI’s 1975 Apostolic Exhortation on evangelization. In one section of it, he was describing the evangelization of Africa. The way it happened was not just by White Fathers coming as missionaries from France. The most effective way it happened, he described, is when families would be “planted.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of SS. Simon and Jude, Apostles
October 28, 2024
Eph 2:19-22, Ps 19, Lk 6:12-16
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* St. Paul in today’s first reading tells the Ephesians and us that our Christian existence is “built upon the foundation of the Apostles.” The feast of the apostles SS. Simon and Jude gives us a chance to ponder several aspects of our Christian life and how to strengthen it by grounding it more firmly on the foundation of what the Lord has done and continues to do through these two apostles. These thoughts are all the more important for students as you look ahead to what the Lord is asking of you in your life.
* The first thing we can examine is the theme of our calling. The apostles’ vocation, we see, was born from Christ’s prayer. Jesus had pulled an all-nighter praying to his Father about whom he should choose and praying for those he would choose. His prayer was not just a single invocation, but a persevering intercession. This prayer for those whom he would call continued throughout his public life and we can presume even after his Ascension. During the ordination rite of the Last Supper we see how fervently Jesus prayed to the Father. “I pray for them,” he said aloud, “I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me because they are yours. … Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are. … I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. … Consecrate them in the truth. …  I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” And then he prayed for the apostles’ work to be fruitful, for all “those who will believe in me through their word,” and prayed for their salvation, “I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, … that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” Jesus’ ongoing prayer would take on a very specific form, as we would see in Jesus’ Holy Thursday dialogue with St. Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your [singular] own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers.” It’s important regularly for us to take the time to recall with gratitude and wonder that our Christian vocation, likewise, has its beginning in Jesus’ prayer. Just as much as Jesus prayed all night and then called Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, Simon, Jude, and Judas Iscariot,” so he has prayed and called each of us. He has prayed for each of us, to keep us in the Father’s name, to unite us to God and to each other, to consecrate us in the truth of God’s word, in the truth of Jesus’ own consecration to the Father. Jesus has prayed for us that our faith may not fail and that we will strengthen the faith of each other and those we serve. Jesus continues to pray for us. He’s praying for us at this Mass. He’s praying for us when we have difficulties in our work. His persevering prayer for us is an example for us to persevere in prayer together with him during it as well.
* The second theme is our discipleship. When Jesus came down the mountain, St. Luke tells us, he chose the twelve from among the “disciples,” from among those who were already as the Greek word disciple means Jesus’ “students,” who were zealously following him, who were living by faith, who were hearing his words and seeking to put them into practice. Together with Jesus’ prayer,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 27, 2024
Jer 31:7-9, Ps 126, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52
 
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* One of the most important things for university students is to answer the big questions of life: Why did God make me? What is the purpose of my life? What is he calling me to do with the gift of my life and the time he has given me? In religious terms, these are called vocational questions. This week, as we prepare for All Saints Day, it’s an opportunity for us all to focus on our most fundamental calling, which is to become a saint. We either become holy and fit to dwell in God’s presence forever or we will spend eternity self-alienated from God in Hell. Within that universal call to holiness, however, there are many paths. Most Catholics are summoned to seek holiness in the Sacrament of Matrimony, as they seek to be God’s instrument to help sanctify their spouse and their children. Others will seek it through religious or consecrated life. Today’s second reading focuses on the call to the priesthood. Others will strive to become holy in some other form of self-giving love to God and to others. But it’s important for us to think about, and pray about, the question of our vocation in life and to be ready to respond freely, wholeheartedly and joyfully when God makes our life purpose clear.
* Today’s readings have a clear vocational thrust to them. In the first reading, we see how God through the Prophet Jeremiah called the people of the ten tribes of northern Israel home. He called them as a loving Father. He summoned them as a family. He called them all, leaving none forgotten: not just the men and boys, the strong and sturdy, but mothers, children, even the lame and the blind, promising that he himself will console and guide them, leading them on level roads so that none will trip, directing them to brooks of water to stay hydrated for the journey. This is an image of the way God calls us all through the fulfillment of the twelve tribes of Israel and Judah, which is the Church, the family Christ himself came to form, to lead us all to the house of the Father where he has gone to prepare a place for us.
* While the first reading focuses on the universal call to holiness in this life and the next, the Gospel helps us to perceive many elements of the personal call God gives us in Jesus’ dramatic encounter with the blind man in Jericho, Bartimaeus. Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location on the planet. Jesus went there, symbolic of the lowest depths of the human experience, showing that there’s no abyss into which Jesus won’t descend for us in order to lead us on the 20-mile uphill trek to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up with him permanently to the heavenly Jerusalem. There he encounters Bartimaeus, a blind man, begging by the roadside. Bartimaeus had not been born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he uses later, anablepo, asking Jesus in the Greek literally to “see again.” He hadn’t just lost his sight, however; to some degree, he had lost his dignity. He was sitting by the roadside begging for help. He could not rely on himself anymore. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus would come to meet him and to call him.
* When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he began to cry out, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 27, 2024
Jer 31:7-9, Ps 126, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52

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The following text guided the homily: 

* “What do you want me to do for you?” Which one of us would not want the Lord to ask us the question he asks Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel? Bartimaeus’ response is one that has become a common aspiration of Christians through the centuries: “Lord, I want to see!” The early saints saw in this expression more than a cry from a physically blind man. They recognized in it the plea of all those in every generation who have been in any type of darkness. “Lord, I want to see!” See what? We learn from Bartimaeus the purpose of our sight. The Gospel tells us, “Having regained his sight, he followed Jesus on the way.” Just like St. Peter’s mother-in-law, as soon as she had been cured of a severe fever, used her health to serve others (Mk 1:30-31), so Bartimaeus, now that he could see, used the gift of his sight to follow the divine Giver, the Light of the World (Jn 8:2). Our eyes — both our physical eyes and the eyes of our heart — are gifts of God so that we might see Jesus and follow him. Our whole nature has been created by God so that we might say, like those Greeks in the Gospel who had not yet met the Lord but presented themselves to Philip: “We want to see Jesus!” (Jn 12:21).
* We want to see Jesus in prayer. We want to see Jesus in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We want to see Jesus in others, in the faces of those we love, in the faces of those we find difficult to love or like. We want to see Jesus behind the distressing disguises of the poor, the sick, the lonely, the homeless, the abandoned, the blind. We want to behold Christ’s face in the beauties of creation. We want to see him behind each of the commandments, teaching us how to love. We want the eyes to see his will in our daily life, in the present and for the future. We want to see him in the deliberations of conscience guiding us in the choices we have to make. As the Holy Father said in his new encyclical on the Sacred Heart released on Thursday, we want to see him on fire with love for us and the human race. Ultimately, we want to see him forever face-to-face in heaven, smiling upon us. But so often we’re blinded. Sin blinds us. Worries blind us. Pain and suffering blind us. Hatred and prejudices blind us. Others, including those we love, can get in the way and obstruct our vision. Today, the Lord comes to us and asks us, as he asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” As we enter into the scene, we behold not only how Jesus interacted with this particular beggar who was blind, but how he intervenes in each of our vocations and how he seeks to transform us to minister to others. Let’s try today, like in lectio divina, to ponder the various elements of this rich scene together, drawing lessons from Jesus’ interaction in our life.
* “As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd” — Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location. Jesus was passing through the depths of the human experience in order to ascend the 15-mile road up hill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up. There’s no abyss into which Jesus wouldn’t descend for us.
* “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging” — Bartimaeus was not born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he uses later, anablepo, asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” He hadn’t just lost his sight, however.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
12th Marian Eucharistic Congress, Diocese of Charleston
Greenville Convention Center, Greenville, South Carolina
October 26, 2024
 
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Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
October 26, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, when we will travel with Jesus to Jericho, the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location on the planet. Jesus was passing through that place, representative of the moral pit of the world, in order to ascend from there the 15 mile road uphill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift up the human race and us.
* St. Mark tells us that as Jesus was passing through the town, “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging.” Bartimaeus was not born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he himself uses later — anablepo — asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” But he hadn’t just lost his sight. To some degree, he had lost his dignity. He was sitting by the roadside begging. He could not take care of himself. He needed basic help. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus would come to meet him. When Bartimaeus heard that Jesus was passing by, he didn’t cry out for alms, which would have been a small request. He didn’t cry out at that point even for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles to the north in Galilee and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. And his prayer would be answered.
* Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” Like rabbis were accustomed to do on all their pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. When he heard Bartimaeus’ pleas, he stopped in his tracks and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than what he was teaching at that moment, because he was about to show the Gospel rather than just verbally describe it. He was also going to manifest how he responds to persistent prayer. They said to Bartimaeus, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you,” words that should encourage anyone. But the words are nevertheless surprising. If Jesus knew he were blind, why wouldn’t have he gone over to where the blind man was begging? The reason is that Jesus loved him too much and understood the human heart too well to do that. Instead, he drew near, he got close, but then he had Bartimaeus make the effort to get up and come to him, to exercise Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to grow his faith, and to give him greater participation in the miracle Jesus himself was about to accomplish. It takes courage to get up and leave our comfort zone to respond to the Lord.
* Bartimaeus had that courage and did. St. Mark tells us, “He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.”  The cloak was his outer garment that kept him warm at night. It was in a sense his security blanket. It was quite valuable to him and part of his life. But in crying out, in taking courage and going to Jesus who was calling, he was intentionally embracing a new life and establishing a new security. He left his cloak behind,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Unity of Christians
October 25, 2024
Eph 4:1-6, Ps 24, Lk 12:54-59
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we shift gears in our biennial two-week liturgical meditation on St. Paul’s deepest and most eloquent Epistle. Since a week ago yesterday, St. Paul has been sketching out in the first three chapters of the Letter the theology of Christ’s whole mission, which can be summarized as his work to “sum up,” to reconcile “all things in himself, in the heavens and on earth.” In the last three chapters of his missive, he begins to draw moral consequences for how we’re supposed to participate in that reconciliation between us and God and in God with each other. God’s ultimate plan in Christ is to form us as a family, as a true communion of saints. In today’s passage, St. Paul pushes on that accelerator.
* He urges us to “live in a manner worthy of the call [we] have received,” the call to be — as he said last week — “holy and immaculate in [God’s] sight” and describes the virtues we need to respond to his call for reconciliation: first, humility, because pride always separates us from God and from others; second, meekness, so that we will have the self-discipline to control our anger and choose the good; and third, patience (makrothumia) so that we can “bear with one another through love.” These are the means by which we can “preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” Then St. Paul sketches what I might call the theological grounds of our unity: that in Christ we have been made “one Body.” We have become temples of the “one Spirit.” We all have the “one hope of our call” to eternal communion with God and others. We are all disciples of the “one Lord.” We each have the “one faith” or trust in God and his promises. We have the “one baptism” that has made us spiritual siblings. We all recognize our divine filiation of the “one God and Father of all,” who is over all (omnipotent), through all (provident) and in all (omnipresent). God who calls us to live in a manner worthy of our calling to be in a loving communion with him and others will give us all of the means we need — and these are the means! And these means are not merely individual; as we prayed in the Psalm, we are a “people that longs to see [God’s] face.”
* In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the signs of the times. Just as we are able to interpret meteorological indicators and adapt our clothing and associated behavior, so Jesus wants us to perceive the signs of his kingdom and make similar adjustments to live in accordance with his calling to that kingdom, a kingdom of unity, holiness, charity and peace. He gives the analogy of making peace with adversaries before the judge sentences us to prison, communicating that as we’re walking through life toward our judgment, we should reconcile now, we should love now in deeds. This is a mystery hidden to the wise and the clever of the world, as we prayed in the Alleluia versicle but revealed to the childlike, who forgive easily. God who wants to reconcile all things in Christ wants us to reconcile whenever we see to settle something with a brother or sister who shares with us the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace and the one Body, Spirit, hope, Lord, faith, baptism and God and Father of all. The pilgrimage of life is meant to be a kairos of mercy received and shared and we need to reconcile with God and others along the way.
* During the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father that our relationships wi...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Anthony Mary Claret
October 24, 2024
Eph 3:14-21, Ps 33, Lk 12:49-53
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the first reading, St. Paul prostrates himself before God the Father in prayer, begging him to sent the fire of the Holy Spirit upon the Christians in Ephesus and upon us to strengthen us in our inner self. He prays that the Holy Spirit will strengthen us in mind, will and conscience so that we might allow Christ to dwell in our hearts, and, rooted in love, to have the courage to understand “the breadth and length and height and depth [of] the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and “be filled with all the fullness of God.” Several early saints interpreted the breath, length, height and depth as the dimensions of the Cross, which is fundamentally not a sign of pain but of the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that bore that pain for love of us. St. Paul was praying to the Father to raise us as his children by the Holy Spirit to be strengthened by the Cross, to allow his crucified and risen Son to abide in us and to help us to understand the cruciform dimensions of the Christian life so as to open ourselves to the fullness of the God of love. It’s an extraordinary prayer, begging for a fullness St. Paul himself had already tasted when he himself admitted he had been crucified with Christ and that the life he was living in the flesh he was living by faith in the Son of God who loved him and died for him, a fullness he called “God’s power and wisdom.”
* In the Gospel, Jesus speaks about the fire he had come to earth to ignite, and links it to “the baptism with which [he] must be baptized,” which is the baptism of blood on the Cross. He said he was in “anguish” until that baptism be accomplished and the fire begin blazing. His love on the Cross is meant to be a fire of love that is meant to light the world ablaze, the type of love that will transform and strengthen us within. It’s a living flame that will eventually unite all people in the love of the Father who sent his Son to form a loving family, but that union will happen only when people allow themselves to be “burned” and “transformed” by Christ’s love. Many are afraid of the fire, afraid of zeal. That’s why Jesus says that he has come not to “bring peace but division,” because he and the fire of his love would be a sign of contradiction dividing even family members; this is not because Christ is a divider, but when someone in a family opts for Christ, others who want to be first get jealous and angry, and that’s what divides. This was true in the early Church. Often when Jews converted to Christianity, they were disowned by their family. Still today when a Muslim converts to Christianity in Pakistan and various other fundamentalist Muslim countries, or a Hindu converts in certain fundamentalist areas in India, a contract is put out on them, and most often by the members of his or her own family. There are those who find the all-consuming fire of Christ’s love a threat and the sinful reaction to others’ coming alive in love does divide. But the love of Christ burning in the family is able to forgive and to heal, so that all members of the family, God-willing, will grow stronger in faith, allow Christ to remain in their home, and come to the celestial home of the Father from whom every family on earth takes its name.
* This fire of love that Christ came to unite features prominently in the new encyclical Pope Francis published this morning entitled Dilex...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John of Capistrano
October 23, 2024
Eph 3:2-12, Is 12:2-6, Lk 12:39-48
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks about the characteristics of a “faithful and prudent steward” whom he implicitly contrasts with an unfaithful and imprudent one. The faithful and prudent steward has two basic qualities. First, he is vigilant for the Master’s presence and lives in such a way as if the Master is always present. Second, he gives to others the Master’s food at the proper time. The unfaithful and imprudent steward is one who says “My Master is delayed in coming” and instead of nourishing others starts to abuse them, beginning to “beat the menservants and maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk.” Jesus asks, “Who, then, is the faithful and prudent steward whom the Master will put in charge of his household?,” and he wants us to be among them. He reminds us, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” None of us, in other words, has been entrusted with “little,” but “much” and “more.” But the Lord wants us to recognize the gifts we have received and be good stewards of them in giving to others of the storehouse with which he has entrusted us.
* So what are those gifts with which we’ve been entrusted and what is the type of stewardship that a faithful and prudent servant carries out with regard to them? In today’s first reading, St. Paul describes that treasure and that prudent and faithful stewardship.  “You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for your benefit,” he wrote to the Christians in Ephesus. “Of this I became a minister by the gift of God’s grace… to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ and to bring to light for all what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God, … so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the Church.” He was constantly in God’s presence because he was in God’s grace, which is not a thing but our sharing as creatures in the life of God. The Lord had blessed him with the gift of revelation and he needed to dispense it as food to others, lavishing them on the feast of the fact that “Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same Body, and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” The treasure is Christ’s salvific will. St. Paul’s stewardship was to preach it to all the nations. St. Paul knew that he had been given “even more” for this task, and that’s why he was speaking “with boldness of speech and confidence of access through faith in [Christ].”
* This stewardship of the revelation of the Lord and the need to dispense it to the nations is the background for the feast we celebrate today. St. John Capistrano (1386-1456) is an example of a prudent and faithful steward who knew he had received a treasure from God and wanted to pay it forward. He was a brilliant young man who became mayor of his town at 26. He was used to being in charge. But he was vain and occasionally vicious. He had a major conversion and discerned that the Lord was calling him to be a Franciscan despite his marriage and personal weaknesses. The day he presented himself to the Franciscans, he mounted a donkey, sat backward toward the tail, put a paper on his back listing all his sins, and then let the donkey be led to the Franciscan monastery as the people of the town, especially the kids, pelted him with filth and epithets. He was accepted,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Red Mass for Columbia Law School Catholics
29th Tuesday of Ordinary Time, Year II
October 22, 2024
Eph 2:12-22, Ps 85, Lk 12:35-38
 
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The following outline guided the homily: 

* It’s great to be celebrating the second of what we pray will eventually be hundreds of Red Masses for Columbia Law School Catholics in the decades and centuries ahead.
* Red Mass Tradition. 1243 by Pope Innocent IV for the ecclesiastical court. Grew quickly. It begins the judicial year. First Red Mass in the US was celebrated in 1928 by Cardinal Hayes at old St. Andrew’s Church, down by the courthouses here in NYC.
* The Red Masses take their name from the Red Vestments worn by the priest when he celebrates a Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit. Judges, Lawyers, Paralegals, Court Personnel, and everyone working in the legal profession have a special need for the Holy Spirit’s seven-fold gifts: wisdom, understanding, knowledge, prudence, courage, reverence, fear or awe of the Lord. We ask for those gifts tonight on us and on all those involved in the administration of justice and those preparing to be officers of the court.
* The Holy Spirit fills us with hope and the readings and today’s feast of St. John Paul II are all about hope.
* Those in the legal profession are meant to be signs and agents of hope.

* Hope for justice for those who are wronged.
* Hope for improving the laws of a nation and making it a better place for everyone.
* Hope for getting deals done in a way that’s fair to everyone.
* Hope within families for solid providers to care for loved ones.


* What hope is

* Hope is living with God in the World.
* That means presence of God. Aware that the Lord is near. Not doing our own thing but doing things in collaboration with him, with his virtues, with his integrity care and concern.


* JP II at the United Nations: Witnesses of Hope.

* General Assembly of the United Nations in 1995.
* “I come before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity,a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence.”
* In that speech, he gave the reason for the hope that he bore within. For him, hope was essentially a paraphrase of his famous repetition of Jesus’ words “Be not afraid!” in the Mass to inaugurate his papacy which took place 46 years ago today.
* He said to the representatives of the nations of the world, “Now is the time fornew hope, which calls us to expel the paralyzing burden of cynicism from the future of politics and of human life. … We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust. Hope is not empty optimism springing from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past.
* Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God’ and he thus perceives that heis not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the Creator!
* Hope and trust: these may seem matters beyond the purview of the United Nations. But they are not. The politics of nations, with which your Organization is principally concerned, can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience. … In order to recover our hope and our trust at the end of this century of sorrows, we must regain sight of that transcendent horizo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 22, 2024
Eph 2:12-22, Ps 85, Lk 12:35-38
 
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The following points were made in the homily: 

* Today on the Memorial of St. John Paul II, as I look at this morning’s first reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians and Jesus’ promise in the Gospel about eternity, my thoughts turn to what John Paul II said to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1995. The readings today are about hope and he came, he said, “I come before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence.” In that speech, he gave the reason for the hope that he bore within. For him, hope was essentially a paraphrase of his famous repetition of Jesus’ words “Be not afraid!” in the Mass to inaugurate his papacy which took place 46 years ago today. He said to the representatives of the nations of the world, “Now is the time for new hope, which calls us to expel the paralyzing burden of cynicism from the future of politics and of human life. … We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust. Hope is not empty optimism springing from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past. Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God’ and he thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the Creator! Hope and trust: these may seem matters beyond the purview of the United Nations. But they are not. The politics of nations, with which your Organization is principally concerned, can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience. … In order to recover our hope and our trust at the end of this century of sorrows, we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires.” He finished by saying, “As a Christian, my hope and trust are centered on Jesus Christ. … Jesus Christ is for us God made man, and made a part of the history of humanity. Precisely for this reason, Christian hope for the world and its future extends to every human person.” When George Weigel was choosing a title for his definitive biography of St. John Paul II, a work in which I played a small role, he chose “Witness to Hope,” something that not only summarized his speech to the United Nations, but his whole life.
* We are all called to be witnesses to hope because of our faith in Jesus Christ and bring that hope to the campus and to the world. Today’s first reading teaches us that our hope comes from the fact, as John Paul II said, that Jesus is with us in the world. St. Paul describes to the Christians in Ephesus their situation before the proclamation of the Gospel. “You were at that time without Christ, alienated from the community of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.” They were hopeless because they were living without God in the world. Once one begins to live with God, one begins to have hope in every circumstance. We could even define hope as “living with God in the world.” Pope Benedict wrote about this in his beautiful 2007 encyclical on Christian Hope, Spe Salvi. “Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without God i...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life
Columbia University
October 21, 2024
 
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10.21.24 Overview of the Theology of the Body
 
To download Father Landry’s “Cliff Notes” of the Theology of the Body, please click here: 
Summary of the Theology of the Body
 

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi, Martyr
October 21, 2024
Eph 2:1-10, Ps 100, Lk 12:13-21
 
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 in the Gospel, there is a huge contrast between two types of riches, two types of inheritance, two types of legacy, one very often sought by those who are spiritually worldly, the other counseled by Jesus; one ultimately a patrimony of monopoly money, the second an endowment of God. It’s important for us to enter into this scene which is as relevant today as it was what someone in the crowd shouted the question to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus’ response to the man’s request for Jesus to command his brother to give him his share of the inheritance is, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance. He was the one who told the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins with a hunger for an inheritance that leads one to treat his father as if he were already dead. All sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, or the things of this world, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10). Jesus gives today an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins: “Take care to guard against all greed,” Jesus says, “for … one’s life does not consist of possessions.” He then tells a parable about the rich fool who was blessed with a bountiful harvest who, instead of sharing any of his good fortune with those who were hungry after the harvest of grain had filled up the barns he already had, decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones in an unbelievable building project of selfishness. The man egocentrically said to himself, “As for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years.” He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. And that led to other excesses as he convinced himself to “rest, eat, drink and be merry!” Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus drew the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.”
* We’re living in a culture of the grain bin. We obsess about storing treasures or even junk up for ourselves, constantly building new storage facilities to house the stuff that can no longer fit in our homes, rather than giving the stuff we don’t need away. Perhaps the most ubiquitous grain bin of all are financial portfolios, where so many focus, even sometimes obsess, about seeing them grow, while often few think nearly as much if at all about how to share those blessings with others, especially those in desperate need. To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls us to become rich in what matters to God. In the passage right after today’s section, which unfortunately is not included, Jesus tells us: “Sell your belonging and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York City
29th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
October 20, 2024
Is 53:10-11, Ps 33, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45

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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, the young apostles James and John go up to Jesus with a request. It’s a petition that flows straight out of their desires, their hungers, their ambitions for life. With great chutzpah and resolve, they approach Jesus and say, “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you?” When Jesus asks them, “What do you wish me to do for you?” and they retort, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” By this point in their life, even after two years with Jesus, The two young fishermen wanted to be the Messiah’s right and left hand men, his two viceroys or executive vice-presidents, in what they anticipated would be Jesus’ glorious Messianic administration. The other ten apostles all got indignant at James and John, not because of the impudence of the question, but because they all coveted those spots, too, but hadn’t yet ginned up the courage to ask. It should lead each of us to ask: What am I really seeking as a person, as a young Catholic? If Jesus were to say to us what he said to the sons of Zebedee, “What do you want me to do for you?,” what would we ask for?
* The setting of this scene is unforgettable and it reveals that sometimes we can have our priorities totally out of whack. Jesus had just announced to the apostles, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death, but after three days he will rise.” Jesus was indicating that he would fulfill the prophecies foretold by Isaiah, part of which we hear in today’s first reading, that God’s suffering servant would be “crushed in infirmity,” “give his life as an offering for sin,” endure “affliction,” and “through his suffering … [bear] their guilt.”
* In response to this disturbing prediction, James and John approach Jesus and ask, not how Jesus is handling it or how they might help, but, for the promotion and a blank check. They ask him to do whatever they want and specify they want positions their ambitions covet. To get a sense of the ugliness of the brothers’ jockeying for position, I return to an example I used a month of ago: imagine that your father came to you and told you that the doctor had just given him two weeks to live and, instead of consoling him, instead of even showing that you cared about him, you and your siblings immediately shifted the attention to who would get the house and the car.The behavior of the sons of Zebedee was raw ambition at its most egocentric and egregious. Jesus responded with magnanimity and mercy, “You do not know what you are asking,” and then gave them some of the prerequisites to reign with him in his kingdom: “Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized,” alluding to the chalice of suffering prophesied by Isaiah and the cleansing ablution of blood that would pour forth from his wounds on Good Friday. To his question, the brothers with hubris and impetuosity respond, “We can!” They, of course, would fall alseep and then scamper in the Garden when Jesus prayed to the Father to take that chalice away from him. Jesus, however, foretold that they ultimately would indeed drink that cup of suffering, which is what they were prepared for in their post-Ascension apostolic work and the suffering...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
29th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
October 20, 2024
Is 53:10-11, Ps 33, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45
 
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The following text guided the homily: 
Today is World Mission Sunday and what a joy it is to be here in this Cathedral dedicated to St. Patrick, the heroic missionary of Ireland. It’s from this exquisite house of God that vigorous missionary outreach takes place every day to those who live and work in Manhattan as well as to the over five millions of visitors, from various countries, religions and backgrounds, who enter each year. It’s here, today, that we have a chance to focus on the call Jesus gives us in the Gospel today to become truly great through sharing in his mission for the salvation of the world.
My name is Father Roger Landry and I’m the new National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, which includes the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, the Missionary Childhood Association, the Society of St. Peter and the Apostle and the Missionary Union of Priests and Religious. All four are part of the Catholic Church’s global missionary outreach, tasked with spreading our faith through developing in every baptized person a missionary spirit, rooted in prayer, sacrifice and charity. In union with the Holy Father through the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, we help make possible the Church’s proclaiming the Gospel to those who don’t yet know Jesus Christ or where the Church is too young, too poor, or too persecuted to be self-sufficient.
I’m so grateful to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the chairman of the Board of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA, for his invitation to preach here from this pulpit where my predecessor for 16 years, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, would powerfully proclaim the Gospel not just to New York but to the world. I thank Msgr. Marc Filacchione, the Director of the Archdiocese’s Society of the Propagation of the Faith office, and his entire team for their hard work each year in catalyzing Catholics throughout the Archdiocese of New York to respond so generously in support of the Church’s worldwide missionary efforts. I thank all of you here today for living out your Catholic faith on the Lord’s day and your commitment to help share the Word of God and the Word-made-flesh with people everywhere who need Jesus just as much as we do.
Today in the Gospel, there’s a conversation about ambition. Jesus had just announced to the apostles, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death, but after three days he will rise.” Jesus was indicating that he would fulfill the prophecies foretold by Isaiah, part of which we hear in today’s first reading, that God’s suffering servant would be “crushed in infirmity,” “give his life as an offering for sin,” endure “affliction,” and “through his suffering … [bear] their guilt.”
In response to these disturbing predictions, the apostles James and John approach Jesus and ask, not how Jesus is handling it or how they might help, but, with great chutzpah and self-interest, for a promotion and a blank check: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Jesus patiently and nobly indulges them by asking, “What do you wish me to do for you?” And they retort, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, New York
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 20, 2024
Is 53:10-11, Ps 33, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45
 
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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Immediately before the passage in today’s Gospel, while Jesus and his disciples were heading up to Jerusalem from Jericho, Jesus took the 12 apostles aside and told them again what was going to happen to him. “Behold,” he said, “we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death, but after three days he will rise.” Jesus was indicating that he would indeed fulfill the prophecies announced by Isaiah in his suffering servant psalms, part of which he heard in today’s first reading, that he would be “crushed in infirmity,” would “give his life as an offering for sin,” endure “affliction,” and “through his suffering … their guilt he [would] bear.”
* What was the reaction of the Twelve? What would your reaction be if your spiritual father, or mentor, or one of your best friends came to you to tell you he was about to be publicly executed? The brothers James and John approached Jesus immediate and with great chutzpah asked Jesus for a blank check: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Jesus indulges them by asking, “What do you wish me to do for you?” and they reply, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” The two fishermen wanted to be the Messiah’s right and left hand men, his two viceroys or executive vice-presidents, in what they anticipated would be Jesus’ glorious Messianic reign. They were concerned about themselves rather than with Jesus. Their behavior was raw ambition at its ugliest. Jesus responded, “You do not know what you are asking,” and then gave them yet another indication of the expectation-shattering type of kingdom he would be establishing: “Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized,” alluding to the cup of suffering prophesied by Isaiah and the cleansing ablution of blood that would take place on Good Friday. To his question, the brothers impetuously respond, “We can.” Jesus then foretold that they ultimately would indeed drink that cup of suffering, but reminded them that God the Father had already prepared those who would sit at his right and left, which would be the Good and Bad Thief on Calvary, the sheep and the goats at the General Judgment, and likely, dynamically, Mary and Joseph in heaven.
* Hearing this conversation, however, the other ten apostles objected and became angry at James and John, not because of the brothers’ impudence, but out of jealousy: they themselves wanted the positions that the brothers had the guts to ask for. Their anger gave Jesus the opportunity to give one of the most important instructions to them and to the whole Church about the path to greatness, about the means to become like him, about the way to reign with him and advance his kingdom. We need to focus carefully and persistently on what Jesus says, because it goes so much against our worldly ways.
* Four weeks ago, you may recall, we had an opportunity to focus on ambition and the path to greatness in God’s kingdom. The theme is a common one in St. Mark’s Gospel, because the apostles were so obsessed about which of them would be the greatest and their voracious egocentric hunger came to the surface at least four times,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Diocese of Albany Unleashing Love Women’s Conference
St. Edward the Confessor Church, Clifton Park, New York
October 19, 2024
 
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Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty- Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
October 19, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, when we will eavesdrop on the dialogue Jesus has with the apostles James and John and, then, with all of the other apostles, on the subject of ambition.
* The brothers James and John with great chutzpah ask Jesus for a blank check: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Jesus indulges them by asking, “What do you wish me to do for you?” and they reply, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” The two fishermen wanted to be the Messiah’s right and left hand men, his two viceroys or executive vice-presidents, in what they anticipated would be Jesus’ glorious Messianic reign. But Jesus responded, “You do not know what you are asking,” and then gave them yet another indication of the expectation-shattering type of kingdom he would be establishing: “Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized,” alluding to the cup of suffering prophesied by Isaiah and the cleansing ablution of blood that would take place on Good Friday. To his question, the brothers impetuously respond, “We can.” Jesus then foretold that they ultimately would indeed drink that cup of suffering, but reminded them that God the Father had already prepared those who would sit at his right and left, which would be the Good and Bad Thief on Calvary, the sheep and the goats at the General Judgment, and likely, dynamically, Mary and Joseph in heaven.
* Hearing this conversation, however, the other ten apostles objected and became angry at James and John, not because of the brothers’ impudence, but out of jealousy: they themselves wanted the positions that the brothers had the guts to ask for. Their anger gave Jesus the opportunity to give one of the most important instructions to them and to the whole Church about the path to greatness, about the means to become like him, about the way to reign with him and advance his kingdom. We need to focus carefully and persistently on what Jesus says, because it goes so much against our worldly ways.
* Four weeks ago, you may recall, we had an opportunity to focus on ambition and the path to greatness in God’s kingdom. The theme is a common one in St. Mark’s Gospel, because the apostles were so obsessed about which of them would be the greatest and their voracious egocentric hunger came to the surface at least four times, all disgustingly when Jesus spoke about how he would suffer, be betrayed and crucified to establish his kingdom. We spoke then about how Jesus didn’t seek to suppress their ambition but to reorient it, pushing them to become great in faith, great in humility, great in holiness, great in knowing and transmitting the faith by word and example, and great in sacrificial love. This Sunday we focus with Jesus on that last Christian ambition.
* Jesus tells the apostles, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them and their great ones make their authority over them felt.” It’s still the same way today. Greatness is determined by how much power one wields in politics, how much money or influence one has in business, how many magazine covers and social media followers one has in entertainme...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist
October 18, 2024
2 Tim 4:10-17, Ps 145, Lk 10:1-9
 
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The following text guided today’s homily:  

* Today, on the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist, it’s worthwhile to ponder the life of this secondary author of a quarter of the entire New Testament. He was a young doctor, very likely in Antioch in Syria. St. Paul calls him a “beloved physician” (Col 4:14). At some point, however — it seems to have occurred at Troas — he began to accompany St. Paul, based on when he started to use the word “we” in the Acts of the Apostles (16:11). He gave up his medical career in order to become a “co-worker” (Philemon 24) of St. Paul. He loyally stayed with St. Paul until the end, being the sole coworker in prison in Rome with the apostle at the end of his life when St. Paul wrote his second letter to St. Timothy, today’s first reading. There’s no indication at all that he was a leading light during St. Paul’s missionary journeys. He was simply a companion and a helper. But after St. Paul died, he wrote down for a friend — “Theophilos,” who could have been one person, or could have been representing all of us, as a “God-lover” — what he remembered. Little did St. Luke know when he was writing his orderly account for Theophilos that billions of people would eventually read it. As a continuation of the 72 lay “non-apostle evangelizers” Jesus sent out in the Gospel, St. Luke just wanted to share the faith — and God did the rest. “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us,” he wrote in the introduction to the Gospel that bears his name, “I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilos, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.” Then he continued the story with a second book, a sequel, about how the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles and the early Church to continue Jesus’ mission, what eventually became entitled the Acts of the Apostles.
* St. Luke wanted to write things down so that we would be certain about the things of the faith. Without his efforts, so many aspects of Jesus’ teaching we may never have learned. We wouldn’t know the details about John the Baptist’s conception and birth or the drama of the scenes of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple and the Finding of Jesus in the Temple. We wouldn’t know of the beautiful scene of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. We wouldn’t know of today’s Gospel and the mission of the seventy-two disciples. We wouldn’t have entered Bethany with Jesus to hear Jesus’ words to Martha and Mary about choosing the better part and the one thing necessary. We wouldn’t have the Parable of the Good Samaritan. We wouldn’t have the scene of the healing of the ten lepers, the encounter with Zacchaeus, Jesus’ interrogation by Herod, or two of Jesus’ seven last words. We wouldn’t have the scene of Emmaus, which is in some sense summarizes all that Jesus continues to want to do in the Church. So today we thank God for the great gift that he has given us through the faithful cooperation of the beloved physician who became St. Paul’s coworker faithfully to the end.
* But we should focus in a particular way about how his “orderly account” is all about how Christ has come as the Divine Physician to share his healing mercy with us.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr
October 17, 2024
Eph 1:1-10, Ps 98, Lk 11:47-54
 
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The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* Today we begin two weeks of study of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which is one of the most uplifting and synthetic of all the great apostle’s teaching of the early Church, in which he makes plain God the Father’s plan and will to bring all things into a union of love through the work of Christ his Son continued and carried out in his body the Church. At the very beginning of the letter, which we have today, St. Paul describes what God has done for us and what he asks of us. It’s important for us to ponder these truths often, especially when we are having a bad day or are tempted to forget who we are.

* St. Paul begins by reminding us of how blessed we are to be Christians: the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” God held nothing back. There are no blessings we haven’t been given. And we’ve been given those blessings not just through Christ but in Christ, who is the greatest blessing of all.
* He then reminds us of our vocation: God chose us in Christ, “before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.” Before God said, “Let there be light” and “Let us make man in our image,” he not only had us in mind but chose us and he gave us the vocation to be saints, to be holy and immaculate before him. If he’s given us this vocation, he will provide the means, and those means are the every spiritual blessing in Christ his Son.
* He then reminds us of our filiation and inheritance: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.” In St. Paul’s day, when someone was adopted, he was treated identically to a biologically child; if he were older than the oldest biological child, he received all the rights of primogeniture. For St. Paul to talk about our being adopted, he means that we have received the full inheritance of Jesus! How can we not praise the glory of this grace?
* But obviously we’re sinners and fallen, but God has taken that into consideration as well from before the creation of the world. “In Christ, we have redemption by his Blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of his grace that he has lavished upon us.” He has lavished his mercy upon us in Christ as part of every spiritual blessing.
* And he has also made plain his plan so that we can cooperate freely and fully with it: “In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.” The mystery is now an open secret: God wants to bring us into communion, communion with God, communion with each other. He wants us to grasp that all of creation is part of God’s plan of love. Christ’s mission is to restore to unity the various divisions that entered through sin.


* That’s God’s blessing, calling, help, mercy and plan, but he has made us free and each of us needs to respond to that plan by embracing it and letting our whole life develop in accordance with it. As we prayed in today’s Psalm, “The Lord has made known his salvation,” but we’re called to “sing a new song to the Lord for he has done wondrous ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque
October 16, 2024
Gal 5:18-25, Ps 1, Lk 11:42-46
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we come to the end of our reading of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians and he summarizes everything he’s been saying about the contrast between living while imagining one is saved by the law and external deeds versus living to be saved by God through his grace received and responded to with faith overflowing in love. He does so in describing two totally divergent sets of effects. One he calls the “works of the flesh,” because this is what living focused on the “works of law” produces and is entirely the production of the individual; and the other is called the “fruit of the Spirit,” which like natural fruit is made, requires the cooperation between the one who sows a seed (in this case, God the Holy Spirit) and the one who receives it (in this case, us). The contrast couldn’t be greater. Often when we think of the “works of the flesh” we think first of those living under the three fold concupiscence of the lust of the eyes (materialism), lust of the flesh (carnal sensuality) and the pride of life (a desire for control and dominion). But St. Paul makes clear in context that living according to the works of the law, rather than in communion with the Legislator, can produce these same works of the flesh. He says that the works of the flesh are “obvious”: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.” He says that those who do such things “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” not so much because they’ll be punished but because they won’t be interested in and receptive to God’s kingdom after having made other things their god.
* In the Gospel, Jesus pronounces a series of “woes” (indications of a cursed life)  to those Scribes and Pharisees who, even though they thought they were living the way God wanted them to live were living ultimately according to the flesh. Unless they converted, he said, they’d be doomed, because while they were paying tithes on the smallest of garden herbs they were “pay[ing] no attention to judgment and to love for God.” They focus on the most conspicuous seats and the greetings of others, but are spiritually dead, “like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” To use the words of today’s Psalm, they’re ultimately like the “chaff that the wind drives away.” They impose burdens on others hard to carry, Jesus says, without lifting a finger to help them, the exact opposite of a Good Samaritan. We see the works of the flesh in the way they attacked Jesus and others he had come to save. We see their idolatry of the law. We witness their immorality, hatred, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of anger, acts of selfishness and envy in the way they conspired to have Jesus framed and executed. We see their dissensions and factions in the discussions of the Sanhedrin, to which many of them belonged. On the outside they seemed to be doing the works of God, Jesus was saying, but on the inside they were just doing works of the flesh, refusing to enter the kingdom, and producing only chaff and interior death.
* St. Paul calls the Galatians and all of us Christians to another path. In the Psalm, it’s described as the way of the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on his law day and night,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Teresa of Avila, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
October 15, 2024
Gal 5:1-6, Ps 119, Lk 11:37-41
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There seems to be a serious contradiction in today’s readings. In the Psalm, we expressed a great love for the law of the Lord. “In your ordinances is my hope and I will keep your law continually,” we prayed, “because I seek your precepts. I will delight in your commands which I love, and I will lift up my hands to your commands and meditate on your statutes.” Yet in the first reading St. Paul implies that the law is a “yoke of slavery,” that circumcision, which featured prominently in the law, “does not count for anything,” and that those who are “trying to be justified by law” are “separated from Christ” and “fallen from grace.” In the Gospel, moreover, Jesus scandalized the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner because he didn’t undergo the elaborate hand-washing ritual that the Scribes prescribed had to be done before eating, pouring a one-and-a-half egg-shells worth of water down his folded hands from fingers to wrists, drying the water by making a fist and rubbing the other hand, only to repeat the gesture of another one-and-a-half egg-shells of water poured from wrists to finger tips. Jesus replied by calling the Pharisees “fools.” What is it? Is the law our hope, delight, and the substance of our prayerful meditation or is it worthless and foolish?
* This leads us to two central truths that need to be grasped in our faith. The first is the purpose of the law of God. As Jesus would say elsewhere in the Gospel, the entirety of the law and the prophets hangs on the two-fold command to love God with all we are and have and to love our neighbor. The second is that, on occasion in salvation history, some began to look at the law not within this lens of helping us to love God and others, but as an end in itself, almost even an idol. People, like the Scribes and the Pharisees Jesus confronts, and the Judaizers against whom St. Paul battles, began to focus more on the law than on the Legislator and those made in his image and likeness. Over time they began to create a system of interpretations and “fences” around the law (to try to prevent someone from even getting close to breaking it) that often directly opposed love of God and neighbor. We see this often in the Gospel when Jesus is accused of doing evil because he healed people on the Sabbath day, as if the only day we couldn’t love our sick neighbors was on the day of the Lord. The harmony that flows out of the apparent contradiction in today’s readings is that we are called to hope, seek, delight in, love, meditate upon and keep the law of the Lord continuously, but what God means by this is his law of love for God and for all those God loved enough to take on our human nature and die for. Some aspects of the law, like St. Paul described for us last week, were a “tutor” or “disciplinarian” meant to train us out of our fallen nature and help us to love God and neighbor in little things, preparing us to accept what Jesus the Master would come to teach as a fulfillment of that preparation. The law of circumcision, for example, consecrated human generation to God’s plans so that men and women would not forget that human love was meant to be part of the Covenant, but this physical act of consecration was surpassed in the new Covenant by a spiritual dedication: a circumcised heart was far more important than the snipping of foreskins (Deut 10:16; Deut 3...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Merton Institute for Catholic Life
Columbia Catholic Ministry, New York
October 14, 2024
 
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10.14.24 Love and Responsibility

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Pope St. Callistus
October 14, 2024
Gal 4:22-24.26-27.31.5:1, Ps 113, Lk 11:29-32
 
To listen to the audio homily, please click below: 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the first reading, we continue to explore the sharp contrast St. Paul has been making in his Letter to the Galatians between judaized Christians who thought we’re saved by our own efforts to keep all the precepts of the Mosaic Law, and the Christians he worked to form who grasped that we’re saved by God, by our response to the manifold graces he gives us. Using an allegorical style of interpretation he learned in rabbinical school, he described the two spiritualities flowing from Hagar through Ishmael and Sarah through Isaac, respectively, as a “yoke of slavery” versus a “freedom” in response to God’s “promise” (grace through the promised coming of the Messiah and his incarnation, passion and resurrection of Jesus) for which Christ has set us free. The Christians in Galatia were being persuaded by the Judaizers that they couldn’t be good Christians unless they yoked themselves entirely to the Mosaic law like the Scribes and Pharisees did. The law was lived by them not as an experience of freedom to love God and others maximally, but as a straightjacket in which many focused far more on the law — and all of the binding interpretations of the law made by the Scribes — than on God. St. Paul stressed that Christ, in fulfilling the Mosaic law, freed us from that slavery, and in the new and eternal Covenant, he sought to help us live by faith in the freedom of the truth as beloved sons and daughters of God.
* These two different spiritualities provide a context for us better to grasp what was happening in today’s Gospel. Many of the Jews who had been influenced by the Scribes and the Pharisees were seeking signs from Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus had been working many signs. Immediately before this scene, as we saw in Friday’s Gospel, Jesus had exorcised a demon from a possessed man, but Jesus’ critics refused to accept that sign as pointing to what it obviously spotlighted, that Jesus was working for God and trying to free people from the domain of the evil one. Instead, they pretended as if the miracle were a sign of another agency, that Jesus was casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons. Likewise these same critics weren’t accepting any of Jesus’ other signs, his many miracles of healing and feeding. They were essentially only looking for signs that corresponded to their preconceived prejudices: if Jesus were the Messiah, then he would work signs that pointed to his liberating them from the Romans and establishing a political renewal of the Davidic Kingdom. If he were the Messiah, then everything he did, they thought, would be signs corresponding to and indeed confirming what they were laying the foundations to establish. The Messiah couldn’t possibly work signs that would contradict what they were expecting, they thought. So they sought miracles, but only those miracles that confirmed what they wanted confirmed. None of Jesus’ miracles seemed to be doing this, which is why they continued to seek signs. They were like children of Hagar, yoked to a slavery of their interpretation of the law and their rigid expectations as to how God would send a Messiah to save them. In contrast, we had on Saturday Jesus’ response to the shout of the anonymous woman, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you,” when the Lord responded about the real thing that makes Mary most blessed of all: “Blessed rather are...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
28th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
October 13, 2024
Wis 7:7-11, Ps 90, Heb 4:12-13, Mk 10:17-30
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* One of the characteristics of being young is that we can live to some degree “in” and “for” the future. We dream about what we’ll do when we’re older, where we’ll go to school, what profession we’ll choose, where we’ll live, whether and with whom we’ll marry, and lots of similar questions. As we mature, we begin to make our questions more precise, our dreams more concrete, and our values clearer. And we get to the point where we begin increasingly to have to choose a path, to say yes to one school and no to all of the others, to select one field of study and no to many other interests, to say yes to one person and no to all other suitors. At this stage, some get overwhelmed by the cancer of optionitis: they try to keep all of their options open as long as possible, avoiding definite commitments out of fear of missing out on something, only to discover later that they have missed out on many of the most important joys of human life, which come only through making tough choices and firm commitments. That mature, however, recognize that they cannot have everything, but have to prioritize what’s really important and then act according to those priorities. They know they have to choose, and sometimes those choices are tough.
* Today’s readings are about young people making choices and they contain a great deal of divine wisdom to help us examine what we value most. The questions they raise are valuable to people no matter what their age, but they are particularly relevant for young people to examine what they really aspire to in life and ultimately to which God they want are going to serve. Let’s together enter into the drama that concerns not just these Biblical figures but you and me and everyone who will ever live.
* In the first reading, we encounter the thoughts ascribed to the young King Solomon. When he was the age of a Columbia freshman, beginning his reign as king over the Lord’s people, he pleased God very much. One night God appeared to him and told him to ask anything of him and he would grant it (1 Kings 3:4-15). Solomon could have requested for anything whatsoever, but he did not appeal for power, money, health, a long life, or even a beautiful queen. He knew he was, he said, “a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act,” and so he asked for “an understanding heart to judge [God’s] people and to distinguish right from wrong.” He asked, in short, for wisdom. In tonight’s first reading, Solomon tells us, “I preferred [wisdom] to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. … I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases.” He valued wisdom more than political power, than all the money in the world, than physical vigor and looks, even than light. He wanted help from God to make right judgments, to choose well, to order his personal and political decisions on earth in accordance with the way things really are, the way God made them. How much do we prioritize divine wisdom? Do we value it more than robust health and world-class athletic abilities? Would we sell it divine wisdom — and become a fool — in order to obtain Elon Musk’s fortune? Would we sacrifice divine wisdom if it proved an obstacle to getting a coveted job or entering into a desired relationship? Do we really seek and treasure the truth or, even at a university in which we are supposed to live by the mot...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
28th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
October 13, 2024
Wis 7:7-11, Ps 90, Heb 4:12-13, Mk 10:17-30
 
To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* As a young king of the Lord’s people, Solomon pleased the Lord very much. One night God appeared to him and told him to ask for whatever he wanted (1 Kings 3:45-15). Solomon could have requested, and likely received, anything he asked for. Solomon did not appeal for power, or money, or health, or a long life, or even a beautiful queen, but for a “an understanding heart to judge [God’s] people and to distinguish right from wrong.” He asked for wisdom. In today’s first reading, Solomon shows us that, to some degree, he was already wise in asking for what he did. “I preferred [wisdom] to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. … I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases.” He valued wisdom more than political power, than all the money in the world, than physical vigor and looks, even than light. He wanted help from God to make right judgments, to choose well, to order his decisions on earth in accordance with the way things really are, the way God made them.
* This is the prayer we all asked for in the responsorial psalm today. We begged God, “Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain wisdom of heart.” We asked him for the grace to help us see how, even on our hardest days, God has been there, forming us, helping us, passing on to us a wisdom not of this world. “Make us glad,” we asked, “for the days when you afflicted us, for the years when we saw evil.” This type of wisdom would reach its culmination, St. Paul would tell us, in “Christ Crucified,” who is a “ stumbling block for Jews and foolishness for Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Christ Crucified would become the wisdom of God and he would call us to follow him along that cruciform path of wisdom. He would beckon us, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his Cross daily, and follow me” (Lk 9:23). Jesus wants us, like Solomon, to prefer this wisdom to scepters and thrones, to wealth and the things of the world, to health and beauty, even to light. God wants to give us this wisdom. But this wisdom doesn’t come on the cheap. We have to treat it like the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, worth sacrificing all we have to get it — because this relationship with God and the way it changes us is worth far more than everything else in the world.
* This helps us to understand the great drama taking place in today’s Gospel in Jesus’ encounter with the Rich Young Man. He was a virtuous youth. He had kept the commandments of the Lord from a young age. He was concerned about the deepest and most important questions, like the one he asked Jesus, “What good must I do to inherit eternal life?” He already had some faith in Jesus, coming to him not just as a rabbi who knew a lot but as a “Good Teacher,” whose whole bearing intrigued him as someone who gave signs of the divine and inspired him to approach and ask about the way he should live in order to live for ever. The young man also recognized that, despite all his material wealth and moral uprightness, there was something missing in his life. His heart yearned for more and greater. He grasped that the life God intended for us had to consist in so much more than merely not breaking the second tablet of the Decalogue. And so he asked in St.

Alexandra Landry
Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Washington Heights, New York
Retreat Talk for Columbia Catholic Ministry
October 12, 2024
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.12.24_Ally_Landry_St._Francis_Cabrini_and_Mission_1.mp3
 

 
 

Madeline Wiseman
Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Washington Heights, New York
Retreat Talk for Columbia Catholic Ministry
October 12, 2024
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.12.24_Madeline_Wiseman_St._Francis_Cabrini_and_the_Eucharist_1.mp3
 

Austin Carr
Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Washington Heights, New York
Retreat Talk for Columbia Catholic Ministry
October 12, 2024
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.12.24_Austin_Carr_St._Francis_Cabrini_Charity_and_Community_1.mp3
 

Jack Matthews
Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Washington Heights, New York
Retreat Talk for Columbia Catholic Ministry
October 12, 2024
 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.12.24_Jack_Matthews_St._Francis_Cabrini_and_Prayer_1.mp3
 

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Washington Heights, New York
Retreat for Columbia University Students
Saturday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Carlo Acutis
October 12, 2024
Gal 3:22-29, Ps 105, Lk 11:27-28
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Every retreat is ultimately about helping us become saints. It seeks to reinvigorate the call we received at our baptism to become holy as God is holy. Here at the Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American saint, with her body exposed underneath the altar, we have a powerful reminder that God is calling each of us, here in America, to a similar sanctity. October 12 is the feast of the first millennial saint, Blessed Carlo Acutis, who died on this day in 2006 at the age of 15. He will be canonized by Pope Francis next year. He shows us that even great holiness is attainable even for young people, provided that one responds with maturity to the gifts God gives to help us become like him. And every Saturday, like today, the Church has us remember and seek the intercession of the holiest disciple of all time, the woman God the Father chose for his Son and that Son on Calvary chose for us. Today we’re able to focus on all three of these great holy ones to inspire and help us on our journey, and we can examine in particular how the Word of God helped all three achieve the purpose for which they were made.
* In today’s Gospel, we see the importance of the Word of God in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the conversation between Jesus and an anonymous woman from the crowd who sought to praise his mother.“Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed!,” the unnamed woman called out. If any womb was blessed, it was the immaculate womb of Mary of Nazareth that tabernacled for nine months the Creator and Savior of the world! If any breasts were blessed, it would have been those that nursed and fed the one through whom God the Father gives us each day our daily bread! But Jesus wasn’t going to limit the praise of the mother whom he daily honored to her inimitable physical bonds to him as the Son of God made man. He replied to the woman by highlighting a far greater source of Mary’s blessing, something that each and every one of us not only can emulate but is called to emulate: “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, in Hebrew there is no distinction between the verb “to hear” and “to obey.” If we hear the Word of God as it’s supposed to be heard, we hear it as a word to be done. A similar distinction is found in Latin. The word to hear is “audire” and the word to obey is “ob-audire,” an intensified listening, almost like eavesdropping. There is meant to be no disconnect between what we hear and what we do, but sin invades, trying to help us not to listen attentively and not to do what we hear. Jesus praises his mother for the way she approaches the Word of God. Her whole life can be summarized by how she responded to the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation: “let it be done to me according to your word.” Her whole life developed according to the Word and the will of God. St. Athanasius described that before Mary had ever conceived the Word of God in her womb, she had already conceived Him in her heart through faith. So many medieval depictions of the Annunciation and of the miraculous virginal conception of Jesus in the Incarnation show the Holy Spirit entering through Mary’s ears, to highlight this form of faithful listening. In a parallel scene,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
October 12, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, as we eavesdrop on his famous dialogue with the young adult whom Christian tradition has dubbed the Rich Young Man.
* The Rich Young Man was a good man. He had kept the commandments of the Lord from a young age. He was concerned about the deepest and most important questions, like the one he asked Jesus, “What good must I do to inherit eternal life?” He already had some faith in Jesus, coming to him not just as a rabbi who knew a lot but as a “Good Teacher,” whose whole bearing intrigued him to approach and ask about the way he should live in order to live for ever. He also recognized that, despite all his material wealth, despite even his moral goodness, there was something missing in his life. His heart yearned for more. He knew he was called to something greater. The life God intends for us consists, he realized, in so much more than merely not breaking the Decalogue. And so he asked in St. Matthew’s account of the same scene, “What do I lack?” Jesus looked at him with love and gave him the challenging, brutally honest, direct answer to his question, “You lack one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me!” It was a highly paradoxical answer. What he lacked was precisely thathe had too much. He lacked total detachment from substitutes so that he could attach himself to the Absolute. He had previously lived a good life, but Jesus was now calling him to greatness. “If you wish to be perfect,” Jesus indicated. He already had some faith in Jesus as a “good Teacher” who was reflecting the goodness of God alone, but Jesus was now calling him to an upgrade in faith, a total commitment. He had previously kept the “second tablet” of the Ten Commandments, all about love of neighbor, but now Jesus was calling him to a much more radical following of both tablets of Decalogue: to love his neighbor to the point of using all his possessions to care for them and to loving God to the point of accounting him more valuable than all his stuff and following him on the path of total self-giving love.
* Therese of Lisieux, whose feast we celebrated at the beginning of this month, taught that we grow in the spiritual life by subtraction, not by addition. When a novice once sighed in her presence, saying, “When I think of everything I still have to acquire!,” the Little Flower replied, “You mean, tolose! … You are wanting to climb a great mountain and the good God is trying to make you descend it; he is waiting for you at the bottom in the fertile valley of humility.” The Rich Young Man needed to learn this lesson, how to grow through subtraction, how to become great through humility and dependence on God, how to have it all through giving oneself away. Unfortunately, he wasn’t ready for the challenge that spiritual perfection requires because he had so many possessions that owned him. He looked at the path of holiness as something he could add on to what he already had, whereas it was an emptying precisely so that Christ could fill him. The Lord is always asking us to let go of many of his gifts in order through using them for others to help us to recognize that the greatest gift of all is the divine Giver....

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Pope St. John XXIII
October 11, 2024
Gal 3:7-14, Ps 111, Lk 11:15-26
 
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 Gospel was the first Gospel I ever had the privilege to proclaim and today’s readings were the first ones about which I ever preached, 26 years ago (October 9 that year), the day after I was ordained a deacon. I’ve always thought that God was very good to me in giving me these readings because they’re not particularly easy to preach on, and so from the first time I ever had the chance to act on what I was instructed at my diaconal ordination, to “Believe what you read [and] teach what you believe,” I had to do so explicitly with far greater dependence on God, far greater cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Whenever I have had the chance to proclaim and preach, therefore, on the readings of the 27th Friday of Ordinary Time, Year II, it always reminds me of the summons God gives to turn to him for light! With that help, I’d like to focus on two huge lessons from today’s readings and then tie them to the saint the Church remembers today, Pope St. John XXIII.
* The first lesson is about faith. In today’s reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the apostle talks to us about faith, saying that those who have faith are children of Abraham. St. Paul was writing this to the Christians he had evangelized on his first and second journeys, but whose faith had then been reprogrammed by Judaizing Christians coming from Jerusalem, those who thought that in order to be a good Christian, you first had to be a perfect Jew. They didn’t realize that the Mosaic Law was a gift to prepare God’s people for the advent of the Messiah, who would bring the law to perfection. St. Paul will call the Mosaic Law, as we’ll see tomorrow, a pedagogue or tutor, someone who at his time would travel with a student to class before the master or professor, and then, after class, go over all of the lessons. St. Paul was stressing throughout this letter as well as his letter to the Romans that we are saved by God through faith: salvation is God’s work that we receive through the gift of faith. The Judaizers, like the Pharisees of which he once was one, thought we were saved by our actions of fidelity to God’s law. We Christians know that we’re judged by our actions, but not saved by them. The big takeaway, however, is not just why the Judaizing Christians were wrong. The great takeaway is how we’re supposed to live. We’re supposed to live by faith, just like Abraham. We’re constantly being asked by God to make journeys of faith like Abraham did at 75, leaving Ur of the Chaldeans, his security, his life as he knew it until then and journey to a place God would show him. God didn’t tell him the destination, but Abraham trusted in him enough to go. God promised that he would become the father of many nations and showed him the stars of the sky as a confirmation of how many descendants he’d have, but the text of Genesis is clear that he was asked to look into the heavens when the sky was blue, not dark, because dusk came afterward. Abraham knew the stars were there, but couldn’t see them, which is a good image of what faith means, a certainty without seeing with worldly eyes. He didn’t know that he would have to wait 25 years for the fulfillment of that promise, but he continued to believe. He didn’t realize that he would be asked to sacrifice the fulfillment of that promise, Isaac, 13 years after his birth, but he did so with incredible faith, knowing,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
IESE Business School, New York City
Leonine Forum New York City Chapter
October 10, 2024
Gal 3:1-5, Lk 1:69-75, Lk 11:5-13
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.10.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he began by teaching them that the secret of prayer is to approach God as a loving Father. Once we do, almost everything flows. We begin to seek the glory and sanctification of his name, the building of his kingdom and the doing of his will not only because we love Him but also because we know that, as his sons and daughters, we share that name, are heirs of that kingdom, and his will is to help us to become saints. Once we relate to him as a Loving Father than we trust in his providence to give us each day what we need and in his mercy to forgive us when we err because he loves us more than he detests the sins that hurt us and wound our relationship with him. When we relate to him as a Loving Father we trust him not to put us in a position in which we’ll fail the ultimate test but to challenge us and help us to meet those challenges that are beyond what we think are possible.
* Today Jesus continues his responding to our request to teach us how to pray by illustrating for us how to persevere in prayer. He gives us a parable based on middle eastern customs of hospitality. Especially during the summer months when the sun is most brutal, many Jews would travel at night and so it was not unheard of that a guest would arrive at your home — in the days before not only phones, texts and emails but also before a postal system that was affordable and efficient — unannounced at night, famished after a long journey. Because bread was baked normally in the morning, it’s possible that all the bread had already been eaten. That’s why you’d go to your neighbors to ask if they had anything to share. The second thing to understand about middle eastern culture is that their doors were open all day long but when they were shut and locked, that meant that the entire family and all their animals had gone to bed. They’d sleep together in an interior part of the house to stay warm during the typical middle eastern radiational cooling at night. To get up to answer the door when a neighbor was knocking at midnight meant that one would likely be stepping on one’s children, one’s animals and waking everyone up. It’s understandable that one would want to wait to share bread until the morning. But Jesus says that because of the perseverance of the neighbor, “I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence.” Jesus mentions this as a lesson in prayer precisely in order to contrast that motivation with one of God. He was saying, “If a neighbor would eventually give in because of harassment, think about how God will respond out of love?” That led Jesus to say, “I tell you, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives, everyone who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened.” Notice that he doesn’t say that one will receive, find or have the door opened immediately. He also doesn’t say that one will receive and find exactly what one expected to find. But he does promise God will respond, precisely because God is a loving Father who always responds first and foremost by giving himself. That’s why Jesus said, “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Clergy Days for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia
St. Helen Church, Blue Bell Pennsylvania
October 10, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of the first of two clergy days, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.10.24_Missionary_Dimension_of_Priestly_Eucharistic_Life_1.mp3
 
To download a PDF of the slides of the presentation, please click below: 
Missionary Dimension of Priestly Eucharistic Life

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Corpus Christi Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Henry Newman
October 9, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.9.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we pondered the example of Mary of Bethany sitting at Jesus’ feet, allowing him to feed her. She had chosen the better part and the one thing necessary, the activity more important than all others. Today we see Jesus sitting at the feet of his Father in prayer. His example of prayer led the disciples to ask him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples.” Jesus had already taught them much about prayer by his parables describing the need to pray with perseverance, patience, humility, purity of intention, faith, without show and in his name. He had taught them much by his example of prayer, constantly going out at night or early in the morning to pray. But they were asking for some direct instruction, for Jesus to open up to them the mystery of intimacy with God.
* It’s noteworthy that Jesus didn’t reply to their request by teaching them a posture of prayer, telling them to kneel, close their eyes and fold their hands. He didn’t instruct them to go through breathing exercises or other techniques to empty themselves of distractions. He didn’t indicate how to listen to God, like Eli taught Samuel to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” He didn’t give them a meditation method. He didn’t even given them a formula of vocal prayer, something seen by the fact that Luke’s rendition of the Lord’s Prayer is different from Matthew’s, a sign that Jesus wasn’t passing out “magic words” as much as trying to pass on an attitude, a whole approach to prayer; he wasn’t imparting a quid ores (a what you are to say when you pray) but a qualis ores (a who you are as you pray), as St. Augustine was wont to say. And what was that approach?
* Everything can be summarized by the first word he taught them: Abba! He taught them to turn not to some cosmic life-force way out in the heavens, or to some slavemaster or judge or apathetic Creator, but to a “Father.” This is the open secret to what Jesus teaches us about prayer. We see his own prayers: “I give you praise, Father, … for having revealed these things to the merest of children.” “I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me.” “Father, glorify your name!” “Father, take this chalice away from me!” “Father, forgive them!” “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.” Jesus’ prayers were all to the Father, to whom he turned with great trust and love. In teaching us how to pray, Jesus was trying to form us to enter into his own divine filiation and to pray with loving confidence. He told us in the Sermon on the Plain that if earthly parents aren’t sadists but know how to give good things to their children, so God the Father won’t give us a stone when we ask for bread, or a poisonous eel when we ask for fish, but will give himself — the Holy Spirit — no matter what we ask for. To pray as Jesus taught is to enter into that relationship of love with the Father. Everything else Jesus taught us about prayer flows from that.
* He instructs us to pray, “Hallowed by thy name,” and “Thy Kingdom come,” which means that we are seeking God’s glory not our own, his kingdom not ours. St. Matthew’s inclusion of Jesus’ words “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is just a magnification of seeking God’s kingdom and the glory of his name. Jesus is helping us to remember that prayer should first be about God, not about ourselves.
* But precisely because prayer is about God and he loves and car...

Fr. Roger Landry, Marina Frattaroli and Zoe Dongas
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine, Washington Heights, New York
Presentation on the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage
October 8, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording featuring the introduction by Julia Attaway, Director of the Cabrini Shrine, Fr. Roger Landry, Marina Frattaroli and Zoe Dongas from the Seton Route perpetual pilgrims, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.8.24_Landry_Frattaroli_Dongas_On_The_Road_With_Jesus.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 8, 2024
Gal 1:13-24, Ps 139, Lk 10:38-42
 
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: 

* Yesterday Jesus gave us the Parable of the Good Samaritan, praising the one who made the effort to take care of another in contrast to those who did nothing. In several other places in the Gospel he praised service of others: he said that he himself had come among us as one who serves (Lk 22:27); he washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper and told them to do the same (Jn 13:12-14); he promised to gird himself with an apron and wait on those at the heavenly banquet (Lk 12:37); and he said that the greatest among us would be the one who serves the rest (Mt 23:11). And so in today’s Gospel, Jesus was clearly not castigating Martha for her loving service. What he was saying to her, however, was that none of those efforts was strictly-speaking essential, that therefore there was no reason to get worked about them, and that there was something more important, something that Mary realized and that Martha as yet hadn’t.
* Both Martha and Mary loved Jesus very much. As an expression of that love, Martha worked very hard to prepare a meal for him, something that was much more time-consuming in the ancient world without stoves, or refrigerators, or blenders or ready-made cooking supplies than it is today. She likely also cleaned her house, which, too, was much more challenging in the age before vacuum cleaners, running water, and so forth. It’s natural that she would have been exasperated doing all of this work while her sister Mary seemed to be doing nothing. After she complained to Jesus, however, Jesus corrected not Mary but Martha, telling her that she was anxious and concerned about many small things but only one was necessary. Mary had chosen the better part, the one thing necessary — Jesus himself — and it was not going to be taken away from her to focus on relatively less important things. What Mary grasped that Martha didn’t is that Jesus had come to their home primarily to feed and not to be fed, to serve rather than to be served, and it was Mary who understood this and sat at his feet as he not only fed her with the nourishment of his word and presence but cleaned her interior house by his own purity.  The welcome he sought most was their time, their friendship, their love, their open ears and receptive hearts. Mary intuitively grasped this and sat at Jesus’ feet listening to him as if nothing in the rest of the world really mattered — because, in fact, Jesus implies, nothing in the rest of the world really does matter anywhere near as much. Jesus once said in a parable, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Mt 13:45-46). Jesus was for Mary that pearl of great price more valuable than everything else in the jewelry collection of her life. Mary showed how much she understood the practical consequences of Jesus’ value when he and his apostles visited their home again, about a week before his death. St. John gives us the scene: “Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served [some things never change!], and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (Jn 12:1-8).

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
October 7, 2024
Gal 1:6-12, Ps 111, Lk 10:25-37
 
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 as we celebrate the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary, I can’t help but ponder Michelangelo’s image of the Rosary in his famous Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. He depicts it as a lifeline lifting the children of God up to Jesus’ eternal right. By means of the Holy Rosary, we enter into the contemplation of the life of Christ through the contemplative perspective of Mary herself, so that we may “imitate what [the mysteries] contain and obtain what they promise.” They promise ultimately union with her Son, a union that is meant to last forever. They seek to help us, as we pray in the Salve Regina to conclude the Rosary, come, “after this our exile,” to behold “the blessed fruit of [Mary’s] womb.” They ultimately are meant to lift us up to heaven.
* Today in the Gospel, Jesus describes the path to heaven. A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe what he thinks the answer is from his study of the law. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus gave elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized that the struggle for this scribe would be to practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere curiosity, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line. The scribe wanted to be justified in not loving certain of his neighbors. That’s why Jesus told him the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach him who really loves his neighbor, before adding, “Go and do the same.”
* Jesus changed the way that he looked at loving his neighbor from “objectively” seeking to define who was and was not his neighbor that he should treat with love, to “subjectively” becoming a neighbor to everyone, to being willing to love and treat with mercy whoever one meets. St. John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility that a human being is someone to whom the only worthy response is love. That’s what it means to become a neighbor: a person who sees everyone as someone to whom one should show love and mercy, someone who recognizes everyone is in his neighborhood. This is what Jesus did to us, drawing close to us when we were dying, left in a ditch, mugged by the evil one, left for dead. He bound our wounds, carried us on his shoulders, poured his precious blood into us, brought us to the inn of the Church and promised to repay everyone who is kind to us at his second coming. And he as a Good Samaritan continues to come to us...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 6, 2024
Gen 2:18-24, Ps 128, Heb 2:9-11, Mk 10:2-16
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* We are experiencing today a crisis of loneliness. Last year, the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy, wrote a stunning report entitled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, in which he said that social isolation and loneliness are among the biggest health concerns facing the country. He stated that many are going through life alone, thinking they have to shoulder all life’s burdens by themselves, and that if they die, most or no one will ever notice. Before Covid, he said, 50 percent of Americans reported regular loneliness and Covic made it worse. He wrote, “Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling — it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.” As a society, he urged, we must make the same investments in addressing social connection as we do in tackling the problems of tobacco use, obesity and addiction. If we don’t, he said, “we will pay an ever-increasing price in the form of our individual and collective health and well-being. And we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.” That’s because, he said, “social connection is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water and shelter.”
* Social connection is a fundamental human need because we have been made in the image and likeness of God. That’s why what God reveals to us in today’s readings is so important and why, when our society fails to take these truths seriously, and structure our lives on them, we can’t help but hurt ourselves, in the various ways that Dr. Murthy notes and in many others.
* In today’s first reading from the Book of Genesis, we read that after God had created the heavens and the earth and all in it, after he had pronounced that “it was good… it was good … it was good … it was good … it was good … it was good” and with the creation of the human person, “it was very good,” he finally thundered, “It is not good for man to be alone!” It is not good for the human person to be isolated. It is contrary to our nature, having been made in the image and likeness of God who is a loving communion of persons. God said this truth about the evil of loneliness, however, only after man had come to the same conclusion. Adam was created on perfect terms with God, he had named all of creation, but something was missing, and he knew it. God was too far above him; the animals were too far below him. In order to experience the joy of living, in order to become and behave fully human, he needed a fitting partner. To remove his existential loneliness, God could have easily cloned him an identical twin. He could have just created another guy for him to hang out with. But the suitable partner God knew Adam needed was a wife. After Eve was created, we see Adam rejoice for the first time. He clung to her and, as we read, they became one flesh. They began to live in a communion of persons, in love,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
October 5, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, when we will be eyewitnesses of and participants in the dialogue Jesus had with the Pharisees, when they approached him and asked him a question about marriage. We are now living in an age in which many experts say that the greatest vocations crisis facing the Church is not to the priesthood or to religious life but to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Many young people no longer sense a divine calling, or even naturally aspire, to marriage and to family. Far fewer are getting married. Those who do are having much smaller families. Both the Church and many of our societies are struggling as a result. St. John Paul II once said that the future of humanity passes by way of the family and the marriage and family crisis is threatening civilization. That’s why Jesus’ words about marriage this Sunday are so important and urgent.
* When the Pharisees approached Jesus to ask him about marriage, it wasn’t a question to learn or even of curiosity. St. Mark tells us, “They were testing him.” They were in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing. To ask Jesus about the lawfulness of marriage and of divorce there was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had already been killed by Herod Antipas. John had told Herod that it was not lawful for him to be married to the wife of his brother Philip, not just because this incest by affinity was contrary to God’s plan but because marrying another person’s wife certainly was. Herod thought that Jesus was John risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage and divorce was to invite him to criticize the same king and potentially suffer the same consequence.
* Jesus responded not only by citing the Book of Genesis, but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were at the dawn of creation. “In the beginning,” Genesis teaches, “God created man in his image and likeness; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Man is most fully in God’s image and likeness when he is united to the woman in a communion of persons in love. Just as in God, the mutual love of the Father and the Son eternally generated the Holy Spirit, so the mutual love of husband and wife can generate a third person, who is both a living fruit of their love and a means for that love to grow. In God’s plan, marriage is a singular sign and participation in God’s image and likeness. “Therefore, what God has joined together,” Jesus adds, “no human being must separate.” Marriage is part of God’s wisdom from the beginning to bring us into the loving union of the Trinity.
* In recent years, however, we know that the wisdom of God’s plan with regard to marriage and divorce been getting challenged from both inside and outside the Church. Many have begun to question openly whether God’s plan for marriage, taught courageously and consistently by the Church since Christ founded her, is true and relevant. These doubts or confusions about marriage are fraught with enormous consequences: for since God designed marriage to help us to discover who we are in his image and likeness and to reflect by analogy God’s own relationship with his people,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi
October 4, 2024
Job 38:1.12-21;40:3-5, Ps 139, Lk 10:13-16
 
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: 

* “Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way.”  Today the Lord responds to that prayer for guidance we repeated several times in the Responsorial Psalm. He does so, first, by calling us back to the way through the gift of conversion, which is what we encounter in the Gospel, in the Lord’s conversation with Job in the first reading, and in the feast of the great saint we celebrate today, Francis of Assisi. He does so continuously and definitively now for us as Jesus calls us to follow him who is the Way, beckoning us to receive his work, words and will, and responding to him with reverence, faith and perseverance. And then he seeks to transform us so that we can be his heralds trying to help others get onto that narrow way that leads to everlasting life.
* In the Gospel, Jesus reproves Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum for their failure to respond profoundly to all that he did among them, saying that if what he did in those cities had been done in the debauched pagan cities of Tyre and Sidon — and, according to a similar passage in St. Matthew,  in Sodom and Gomorrah — the inhabitants would all have repented. He didn’t find, however, profound conversion in the three cities of Galilee and threatened that they would go to Hell rather than be exalted. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, which is either a more detailed account of the same words or the description of a similar scene, Jesus said that the Queen of Sheba had come 1600 miles to hear Solomon’s wisdom, and the Ninevites had repented immediately at the preaching of Jonah, but there was a greater than Solomon and Jonah among them, and yet they hadn’t received the wisdom and repented. They didn’t recognize who was among them.
* This is something God taught Job in today’s first reading. After Job finally succumbed to his grief and to his physical suffering and began to question God’s wisdom and goodness, God spoke to him reminding him that he was the commander of the morning, who holds the ends of the earth, who has entered the depths of the sea and knows the breadth of the earth. God almost seems to joke with Job asking how old he is compared to God himself. Job, having heard God speak, responded with humility, putting his hand over his mouth and listening to what God had said verbally and through his works, rather than seeking to lecture God. He converted profoundly and returned to the type of holiness that God had ascribed to him at the beginning when the devil wanted to test him.
* Job’s conversion and the conversion to which the Lord summons those in Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum, and New York City,  brings us to the Alleluia verse and the end of today’s Gospel. “If today you hear [God’s] voice,” we sang, “harden not your hearts” (Ps 95). Jesus described the spiritual hardening of the arteries at the end of today’s Gospel in terms of what happens to him and what will likewise happen to us. Either God’s word will be received or rejected.  “Whoever listens to you listens to me,” Jesus says. “Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” Jesus is calling all of us to ponder whether we really listen to him or reject him, especially as he speaks to us through his emissaries, the apostles, their successors and others, and as he speaks to us through the evangelists and apostles who have been the Holy Spirit’s instruments to give us God’s...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Mother Theodore Guerin
October 3, 2024
Job 19:21-27, Ps 27, Lk 10:1-12
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.3.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* On Tuesday, we pondered the fulcrum of St. Luke’s Gospel (Lk 9:51), in which we read how Jesus fixed his face on Jerusalem, on Calvary, on his redemptive passion, and how everything thereafter in St. Luke’s Gospel is meant to be understood with that focus in mind, a focus he wants us to share. That’s what grounds today’s commission of the 72 to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom. Jesus was heading toward his coronation (with thorns). They were to be the heralds of the Kingdom, which means that that King is present, the King is alive, the King provides, the King brings peace. All of the instructions Jesus gives come with that in mind. There’s an urgency to the task: they’re to pray for fellow laborers for the harvest, because the harvest is ripe; they’re to greet no one along the way, but be focused on completing their mission; they’re being sent not as assassins but as lambs, to announce meekly to the freedom of others, rather than compel them; they’re to show their trust in God’s providence by not taking money, a sack of food, a second pair of sandals; they’re to announce the peace that the Prince of Peace has brought through the forgiveness of sins; they’re to eat whatever is set before them, whether served by Pharisees or by publicans, whether kosher or not, because the King created it all and it’s not a forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; they’re to stay in the same place, grateful to God and to their hosts, and not looking for a better one; they’re to cure the sick as a sign of the cure of the soul that the King is bringing about. All of these flow from a living relationship with the King who would sacrifice all for us.
* We see the same relationship with a living King in Job. After his friends failed to persuade him that his sufferings were a result of sin, after his arguments likewise failed to persuade them, as he was experiencing profound pain and sorrow, he made an extraordinary profession of faith: Even should he die and return to the dust from which he came, he said, “I know that my Vindicator lives and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust.” He knew that his Redeemer, God, is alive and would live on after his death — and not only that but “I myself shall see Him … with my own eyes … from my flesh,” something that filled his inmost being with longing. As body was in agony, his innards were longing not for “relief” but for his Redeemer!
* That type of faith, trust and love in the living Lord, the Redeemer of the human person, is what characterized the faith of St. Mother Theodore Guerin, the foundress of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, who was baptized on this day back in 1798 in France. (She died on May 14 in 1856, but May 14 is the Feast of St. Matthias and so the Church celebrates the day of her baptism). As a young girl she distinguished herself by her love for God and those God had made her neighbor. When she made her first communion at the age of 10, she confided to the priest that she was being called to religious life, but after her father was murdered by bandits when she was 15, she cared for her mother for the next ten years. Her mother didn’t want her to leave her side and young Anne-Therese (her baptismal name) was patient and kind with her. Eventually, seeing her daughter’s devotion, Isabelle Guerin permitted her daughter to follow her vocation.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Memorial of the Guardian Angels
October 2, 2024
Ex 23:20-23, Ps 90, Mt 18:1-5.10
 
To listen to the audio recording of this homily, please click here: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.2.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* What an incredible gift it is that God has sent an angel before us, as we read in the Book of Exodus, to guard us on the way and bring us to the place he has prepared! At the beginning of Mass we prayed that God who is pleased to send his holy Angels to guard us, may hear our supplication that we may “always be defended by their protection and rejoice eternally in their company.” It’s to that eternal, celestial company to which God has sent them to guide us.
* The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “The whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels. … In her liturgy, the Church joins with the angels to adore the thrice-holy God. She invokes their assistance. … From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. ‘Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life’ (St. Basil the Great). Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God” (CCC 334-336).
* The reality we have to confront, however, is that many of us are oblivious in day-to-day life to the presence of our guardian angels. This is a larger problem of scientism, or the rationalistic, materialistic understanding that the only thing we can know we can observe with our senses or with scientific instruments. And so many of us go about our life without an awareness of the supernatural realm, of angels on the one hand, of the devil and his fallen angels on the other. While we theoretically believe they exist or at least could exist, we live as if they don’t. Today’s feast is an opportunity for us to open up to the truth that reality is much broader than we ordinarily think and begin to live it better in all its practical circumstances.
* Today God tells the Israelites about the angel sent to guard them: “Be attentive to him and heed his voice. Do not rebel against him. … If you heed his voice and carry out all I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes.” God calls us to acknowledge that he has sent his angel in front of us, to be attentive to him, to heed his voice, and to carry out all he tells us through him. But how we do that? None of us wants to disobey what God commands us through them, but how can we follow someone we cannot see, how can we heed someone whose voice doesn’t register on a decibel meter, how can we can we observe commands that are not communicated in ways that up until this point at least we haven’t been able to perceive?
* The first thing we need to be is to be aware of our guardian angel’s presence. To acknowledge him. To recognize we’re not alone. Even if we can’t perceive him with our five senses, to recognize that he is nevertheless there as the biggest supporter we’ve ever had, seeking to help us.
* Second we need trustingly to ask for his help. Today we can ponder how to do that with regard to certain fundamental aspects of our life.

* First, with regard to our prayer. We can pray to our guardian angel. There’s a great prayer that many of us learned as children that we should pray with fervor. It’s based on what we ponder in Sacred Scripture today: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to Whom His love commits me here, ever this day be at my side to light and guard to rule and guide. Amen.” We can also rely on his prayers for us before God’s throne,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Twenty-Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Doctor of the Church
October 1, 2024
Job 3:1-3.11-17.20-23, Ps 88, Lk 9:51-56
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.1.24_Homily_1.mp3
 
The following points were attempted in the email: 

* Yesterday in the Gospel Jesus spoke to us about the path to greatness in receiving little children — those who can’t repay — in his name and in so doing, receive him and God the Father who sent him. We were able to focus on the general spirituality of receptivity to all God gives, including to suffering, to the gifts given to others, and to the Word of God. Today we confront the reality that, rather than being received, Jesus is often rejected, not just in the person of children not received, but straight out, something that sheds light not just on our relationship with him but on the fact that often we, too, will be and feel rejected.
* St. Luke tells us that Jesus had “resolutely determined” or literally “fixed his face” on Jerusalem to complete his salvific mission, which is really the fulcrum of his entire Gospel. Before he would do that, however, he was going to try to include the Samaritans more intimately in that saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” But because Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above their receiving their Savior! And when the Boanerges brothers — the Sons of Thunder, John and James — sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John. The failure of both the Samaritans and the sons of Zebedee teaches us a valuable lessons: many times we can put our own grievances, our own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. We can take our eyes off of Jesus and off of where Jesus has set his eyes. We can put conditions on God’s saving work, like the Samaritans tried: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. We see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten, scourged and murdered. Still today many do not want to embrace Jesus’ determined vision about the way he wishes to be with us, united with us on the path of sacrificial love we call the way of the Cross. They seek Christ without the Cross, a Christianity without suffering, The Cross remains a scandal and a folly for many today, just as it was for many at the time of the apostles. What happened in Samaria in today’s Gospel is simply one more illustration of what St. John described in the prologue to his Gospel, that Jesus “came to his own and his own received him not.”
* Sometimes we, too, can feel rejected, abandoned,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church
September 30, 2024
Job 1:6-22, Ps 17, Lk 9:46-50
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s Gospel reading from St. Luke incorporates the passages we have had a chance to ponder at Sunday Mass yesterday and a week ago, both about the path to greatness as well as how we should respond, not with jealousy or defensiveness but joy and delight when others are doing great things for God. These considerations are important for young people at a great university, because this is an environment in which one finds, as expected, a lot of ambition. The Lord doesn’t seek to eliminate human ambition — he’s instilled within us a desire for greatness! — but to purify it. Today in the Gospel, immediately after he told his disciples a second time of the betrayal, suffering and death he would endure, he overhears the disciples speaking not with compassion or concern toward him but with self-interest concerning which of them was the greatest. He takes advantage of what could have been a tremendously awkward moment by describing for them an essential condition for greatness. He says, “The one who is least among all of you is the one who is the greatest,” and he illustrated the means to be the least. He took a child, placed the child by his side, and said, “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” We become the least — and therefore paradoxically grow in Christian greatness — by receiving children and, in receiving them, receiving Christ and God the Father. Greatness is shown ultimately by receiving God, and one of the greatest ways God is received is through receiving with love, with purity, with sacrifice, those whom God sends. The reason why Jesus likely describing receiving children is because children couldn’t repay, they couldn’t engage in a quid pro quo, they couldn’t likely even say thanks. In highlighting such a child, Jesus was saying, as he did elsewhere, that the greatest would be the one who serves the rest, the one who would care for others not expecting anything in return. It’s a powerful rebuttal to the way that they were jockeying for position as the greatest in worldly categories. They were trying to get something out of their discipleship and apostolate, their friendship, with Jesus. Jesus wanted to help them see that greatness comes from receiving God — including receiving his passion, death and resurrection! — and not trying to “get” anything, but rather to “receive” and to “give.” God will never cease to try to make us great by sending us people to love, and in caring for them, we express our love for God, and the more we love God in this way, the greater we become.
* That’s what connects the first part of this Gospel to the second. There’s a very curious phrase. After Jesus talks about receiving a child, St. Luke tells us, “The John said in reply,” and described the situation that we encountered in yesterday’s Gospel at Sunday Mass, the apostles’ catching red-handed someone doing exorcisms in Jesus’ name and trying to stop him. The “in reply” is mysterious. How the two were connected for St. John is unclear. Perhaps John thought that this unaffiliated exorcist was trying to become great and famous through working unauthorized exorcisms in Jesus’ name. But it likely flowed from jealousy. Worldly desires for greatness always involve wan...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
September 29, 2024
Numbers 11:25-29, Ps 19, James 5:1-6, Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48
 
 
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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Sometimes we can approach the things of the faith as if they’re complicated. Especially when we’re young, trying to discern why God made us and what is the special task he has before us, we can believe we have to work very hard to try to decipher what God is asking. When we hear the Word of God at Mass, for example, we can sometimes labor to determine its principal message and how to apply it to our life. But I believe that everything God tells us can be broken down as a two-fold summons: to be a devout disciple and an ardent apostle. The Lord wants to help us grow in our communion with him and to prepare us to help others grow in communion with him, too. He wants to strengthen us in personal holiness and equip us to continue his saving mission. This Sunday’s readings are no exception. In them, God is reminding us, first, that he wants all hands on deck, that he desires to incorporate everyone’s efforts into channeling his grace into the world; and, second, that he wants us fully on board, not partially, uniting ourselves wholly to him so that we might indeed be effective instruments to draw people to communion with him rather than drive them away. In these readings, he is pouring out wisdom on us not only how to live well the gift of our time at Columbia, but also to order our life toward its fundamental two-fold purpose. As we prayed in the Psalm, what the Lord teaches us is perfect, refreshes the soul, true and trustworthy, wise and just, pure and enduring. Let’s, therefore, let God’s word this afternoon to renew us as followers of Christ and as fishers of men.
* In today’s Gospel, we encounter a big contrast and a huge surprise. The contrast is between those who are working for God and those who are not. As Jesus says, some are “for” Him; others are “against” Him. The surprise is that those who seem to be working for the Lord in fact might not be, and those who seem not to be laboring with and for Him in fact may be. Insofar as all of us are here at Mass because we desire to be working for the Lord, because all of us want to hear him one day say to us, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” we need to examine what the Lord Jesus says today and see whether we are really on his side.
* In tonight’s Liturgy of the Word, we see that sometimes those on the Lord’s team aren’t wearing the team uniforms and those who bear the team colors are often not actually helping the team win. In the first reading, Eldad and Medad were not present in the desert tent with the other 68 elders chosen to prophesy in the name of the Lord to the Israelites when the Spirit of God descended upon them. But the Lord filled them with his Spirit anyway and they began to proclaim God’s word throughout the camp. The still young and immature Joshua, who would become Moses’ successor, objected with panic, “Moses, stop them!” Let’s not miss what Joshua was doing. He wanted to have them stop preaching about the Lord! He wanted them not to cooperate with the Spirit! He preferred that the people not hear about God than about Eldad and Medad do it! We have to ask: who was working for the Lord here and who was not? Moses told Joshua there was no reason to be jealous. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!,” he exclaimed. And by all he meant all. God wants us all to proclaim him, to spread his truth, to invite all others into the circle of his incredible love.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
September 29, 2024
Numbers 11:25-29, Ps 19, James 5:1-6, Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* We encounter in today’s Gospel a big contrast and a huge surprise. The contrast is between those who are working for God and those who are not. As the Lord says, some are “for” Him; some are “against” Him. The surprise is that those who seem to be working for the Lord in fact might not be, and those who seem not to be laboring with and for Him in fact may be. Insofar as all desire to be working for the Lord, all of us want to hear him one day say to us, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” we need to examine what the Lord Jesus says today and apply it to our own life and actions, to see whether we indeed are working for him or against him.
* We start with God’s collaborators. God wants all of us on his team, working for him and his kingdom. In the first reading, Moses says, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” The Lord wants all of us to proclaim him, to spread his truth, to invite all others into the circle of his incredible love. He’s said this to us in many ways. His last words before ascending to the Father were “Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News!” (Mk 16:15). He called us to be the Light of the World, reflecting the light of his truth and the warmth of his love to each one we meet (Mt 5:14). He said that those who are great in his kingdom “will keep my words and teach others to do the same” (Mt 5:19). Announcing the Gospel, as Jesus told us, is not just saying, “Lord, Lord,” but “doing God’s will” (Mt 7:21) and he wants to help us to seek, find, treasure and do his will to make disciples of all nations.
* What we see in today’s readings is that sometimes those on the Lord’s team aren’t wearing the team uniforms and those who bear the team colors are often not actually helping the team win. In the first reading today, Eldad and Medad were not among the original seventy elders chosen to prophesy in the name of the Lord to the Israelites. But the Lord filled them with his Spirit and they began to proclaim God’s word throughout the camp. The still young and immature Joshua, who would become Moses’ successor, objected with panic, “Moses, stop them!” Imagine: Joshua wanted to have them stop preaching about the Lord! Who was working for the Lord here and who was not? Moses told Joshua there was no reason to be jealous. God, he stated, wants all to be prophets, and regularly works outside of our cozy parameters. Even those we think are not the ones chosen by the Lord to be his ambassadors might in fact be important emissaries and coworkers in the end.
* We learn the same lesson from the Gospel. Soon after the failure of the disciples to cast out a demon from a young boy (while the Lord was being transfigured before Peter, James and John on the mountain) and after the Lord had castigated their generation for its lack of faith, the disciples caught someone who wasn’t among their number casting out demons in Jesus’ name. St. John told Jesus that he and the other disciples had tried to stop him. Who was working for the Lord in this Gospel scene and who was against him? It’s a particularly poignant question on this feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, whom we invoke to cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. The disciples were the ones who were supposed to be the Lord’s collaborators, but like Joshua 13 centuries before, they still hadn’t figured out God’s ways.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
September 28, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, in which we will enter into a dramatic dialogue in which Saint John tells Jesus that the apostles saw someone driving out demons in his name and they tried to stop him, because he was not one of their number. Jesus replied that they shouldn’t stop him, because no one who performs a mighty deed in his name can at the same time speak ill of him. This Gospel is a fulfillment of what the Church will hear in the first reading, when two men, Eldad and Medad, were prophesying in the camp and Joshua implored Moses to stop them. Moses replied, “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets! Would that the Lord might bestow his spirit on them all!” The unmistakable conclusion of both passages is that God wants all of us to be spreading our faith, to recognize that he calls us to be missionaries, to speak of him to others and seek to help others to come to friendship with him, to build their life with him.
* I’d like to spend our time, however, on Jesus’ reply to the zealous young St. John. He gives him and all of us an important principle: “Whoever is not against us is for us.” We live in a society hyper-polarized by politics and a Church rent with so many tragic divisions. Jesus by this phrase first admits reality: some are indeed “for” him and others are “against” him. We know that eleven of the twelve apostles were for him, that Mary and Joseph were for him, that Mary Magdalene, Susanna and Joanna, the Centurion, the Syro-Phoenician woman, so many of those Jesus whom Jesus had healed who couldn’t stop talking about him even when he asked them not to, were clearly on his side. But we also know that there were many who were actively “against” Jesus, like Satan in the desert, some of the Scribes and Pharisees during Jesus’ public ministry, Herod the Great at Jesus’ birth, Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas at Jesus’ death, even, for a very short time, St. Peter, whom Christ called Satan and told to get behind him when he rejected the possibility that the Lord would suffer.
* Yet, despite that reality of division that not only Jesus faced but because the disciple is never greater than the teacher, all his disciples will to some degree also face, the Lord underlines a principle by which he wants us, his followers, to live: “Whoever is not against us is for us.” There’s a temptation among many serious believers to focus so much on what distinguishes us from others that we lose what unites us. As we and others focus on those differences, we can pull ourselves and push others away. Often in our relations with others, we begin with what we criticize rather than what we admire. We fault others for what they don’t get right rather than commence with what they do. We see this tendency in the Gospel with many of the Pharisees, literally the “separated ones.” They were constantly distinguishing themselves from others that they really lost all capacity to unite. Like one of their number in Jesus’ parable about prayer, they gave thanks that they were not like others who are guilty of various types of notorious sins. Jesus wants us to recognize in others those parts that are united with him and not to stop them. Don’t forget that in the Gospel, St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Vincent de Paul
September 27, 2024
Eccl 3:1-11, Ps 144, Lk 9:18-22
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s first reading, the sacred author of Ecclesiastes says that there’s a time, a “kairos,” for everything under the heavens, and lists several of them. He shows time more or less as the undulating waves of opposites, from night to day, without end, without direction, almost in a circle of endless repetition. This is what life may seem to those who live their life without God: everything can seem pointless, where the human person accomplishes nothing from all his labors and sufferings in life, a vanity of vanity. But the author then shifts gears and says that God “has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering.” God has placed his eternal self within us in a way that far exceeds our knowledge or comprehension. That’s one of the reasons why Ecclesiastes is within the canon of Sacred Scripture because, through all its pessimism and cynicism of a life without God, there’s a recognition of a yearning within, a cor inquietum or restless heart like Augustine, for something lasting, meaningful, indeed eternal. It’s a longing for God and the things of God. That longing was fulfilled with the appearance of Jesus as the Messiah of God in the “fullness of time,” as St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Galatians.
* We see in some sense the revelation of that deep inner longing in today’s Gospel. Jesus asked a question about what the people were saying about him not because he was curious but because he wanted to lead them on a journey of faith to recognize that the long-awaited time had really come. After Peter, however, moved by God the Father, had courageously confessed his faith in Christ, Jesus announced the type of Messiah he would be and how that fullness of time would be manifested: he would suffer and die in order to bring us salvation, he would summon us to be co-redeemers with him precisely through entering into his suffering, his death, and his resurrection. This is the Messiah we are called in every time and in eternity to confess. In his Passion, we have a shift from death to life, from darkness to light, from sin to salvation, but one that is not cyclical but ultimately linear. There is a time to die but also a time to rise and the advantage that comes from all this toil is eternal reward. This happens, as the Psalm indicates, when we build our life on God as our rock, mercy, fortress, stronghold, deliverer and trustworthy shield. Even though man’s life is like a breadth and his days on earth like a passing shadow, the Lord notices him and takes thought of him, and comes to make his days not a passing shadow but an eternal life. There is indeed “an appointed time for everything,” but in birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing, rending and sowing, silence and speech, God’s grace is given to unite those moments to God so that they may all enhance the way we build our life on God as a stable, secure Rock and thereby confess him to be the long awaited Messiah and Savior, the “same yesterday, today and forever.”
* Someone who confessed Christ and who lived constantly aware that it was the acceptable time to recognize and love him when he was poor, hungry, thirsty, naked, on the move, imprisoned or sick is the great saint the Church celebrates today: St. Vincent de Paul (1580-1660). His early years were a time of both acceptance and rejection.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum New York Chapter
IESE Business School, Manhattan
September 26, 2024
 
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Leonine Forum 2024 Christian Anthropology Man in the Modern World

 
 

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Cosmas and Damian, Martyrs
September 26, 2024
Eccl 1:2-11, Ps 90, Lk 9:7-9
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we begin three days pondering the Book of Ecclesiastes, a book with an oversized recognition in popular culture because of the Byrds’ 1965 hit, “Turn!, Turn!, Turn!,” which went to #1 on the Billboard Charts. There has been debate over the course of time as to whether this book is inspired and therefore whether it should be part of Sacred Scripture. Is everything a “vanity of vanities?” Is there “nothing new under the sun?” Does man “profit nothing” from all his labor? Is everything just cyclical, where what has been will recur and what has been done will be done again? Is there no remembrance of men of old and no hope that others will remember us? The Christian faith is ready to reject what these questions imply, but before we do, we should ask again why the Church would consider this text nevertheless inspired. The fundamental reason is because it shows the meaningless of a life without reference to God and eternal life and shows the longing of all created reality for the radical newness that the kingdom of God will bring.
* St. Paul talked about this vanity of a life without the Risen Christ in a passage we had a week ago at daily Mass: “For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.” The Exultet each Easter proclaims the same truth: “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed!” Jesus himself mentions it in the image of building an earthly grain bin, or in placing our treasure in the things of this world, or in trying to take our possessions through the eye of the needle.
* We see an image of the vanity of earthly life and the newness that happened with the resurrection in today’s Gospel, where there are several references to raising from the dead. The paranoid Herod Antipas worried that Jesus was John the Baptist or one of the other prophets risen from the dead, but for him and for the people of his day, to be risen basically meant resuscitated, only to die anew. If John were really resuscitated, the Herod could just chop off his head again at a lustful whim. But Jesus’ resurrection really was something new, something that gave meaning to suffering, crucifixion and death. It was truly a new life that gave all things meaning. In response to Ecclesiastes’ pessimism that we can never really say truthfully, “See this is new!,” Christ, risen from the dead, says in Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new!” We sing about this newness at the Easter Vigil in the Praeconium: “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed!” But we have been redeemed. We have been raised! We have been made new through baptism and now live, as St. Paul says in the eighth reading at the Easter Vigil, newness of life (Rom 6:4).
* Today the Church celebrates the feast of SS. Cosmas and Damian, twin brothers who show us the meaningfulness of a Christian life lived together with the Risen Christ who makes all things new. They were doctors and eventually martyrs under Diocletian. They were called anargyroi, “penniless ones,” or “non-mercenaries,” because they never charged for their medical services at a time when many doctors were charlatans taking people’s e...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
September 25, 2024
Prov 30:5-9, Ps 119, Lk 9:1-6
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus sends out the Apostles to “proclaim the Kingdom of God” by word and deed. In the first reading from the Book of Proverbs we see two essential elements for that proclamation in every age. The credibility of the messenger depend on them.
* In the first reading today, the third and last time we will hear from the Book of Proverbs at daily Mass in the entire two-year daily Mass lectionary, the sage who prays turns to God and begs, “Two things I ask of you, deny them not to me.” The first is truthfulness: “Put falsehood and lying far from me.” This is echoed in the Psalm when we pray, “Remove from me the way of falsehood, and favor me with your law” and “Falsehood I hate and abhor.” Earlier in the passage we have an allusion to Eve, when Proverbs says, “Add nothing to his words, lest he reprove you and you will be exposed as a deceiver.” That was at the root of Eve’s sin. She added to the word of God, who had instructed her and Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil, but as we see in Genesis, when she told the Serpent what God had commanded, she added, “and neither shall you touch it.” That happened because either she wasn’t paying close attention or was an embellisher. In either case she failed to appreciate the importance of each word God had said and didn’t say. She failed to recognize that “every word of God is tested.” When Christ sends us out he sends us out to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is at hand, he sends us as disciples of the One who “came to give witness to the Truth,” of Him who ultimately is the Truth. His Kingdom is a kingdom of truth, of light, of saying “yes” when we mean “yes” and “no” when we mean “no.” Jesus praised Nathanael for being “an Israelite without guile,” and he wants us all to be without guile. The devil is the “father of lies,” who always wants to get us to add or subtract to God’s word, to do anything except live off of every word that comes from the Father’s mouth. The credibility of the proclamation of the Gospel is shot when people doubt the truthfulness of the messenger. Those who announce the Kingdom of God must demonstrate total transparency and verifiable truthfulness. They must be icons of Christ the Truth incarnate. Otherwise no one may believe anything they say, including the Gospel. This is one of the reasons why the whole Church must pray, “Put falsehood and lying far from me.”
* The second thing that the sage asks is, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; provide me only the food I need, lest, being full, I deny you, saying, ‘Who is the Lord?,’ or, being in want, I steal and profane the name of my God.” The request is for a total trust in God’s providence, for we cannot serve both God and mammon. If we have more than we need, the trust we need to have in God’s care can disappear as we place our faith, hope and love in mammon and what mammon can obtain. But he’s also not asking for destitution, for nothing whatsoever. He’s asking us for what Jesus taught us to pray: “Give us today our daily bread.” Jesus is describing that trust in God’s providence necessary in those who proclaim God’s kingdom when he instructs the apostles in today’s Gospel, “Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.” They needed to proclaim by how they dressed, walked,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Our Lady of Mercy
September 24, 2024
Prov 21:1-6.10-13, Ps 119, Lk 8:19-21
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Last Saturday, if we didn’t have the proper Gospel for the Feast of St. Matthew of the Apostle, we would have heard Jesus preach to us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, which is a means by which to assess our receptivity and responsiveness to Christ’s words and work in our life. Today we see a beautiful illustration of that parable in the reference to Jesus’ mother, who not only conceived the Word-made-flesh in her womb, but conceived the Word of God in faith. When the people told Jesus that his mother and his relatives (there’s no separate word in Aramaic and Hebrew to distinguish siblings from cousins) were outside wishing to see him, he replied, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” This was not a violation of the fourth commandment or a denigration of his mother, but, like we’ll hear later in St. Luke’s Gospel in the scene of the anonymous woman from the crowd blessing the mother who bore and nursed him, Jesus was giving the real secret to his mother’s greatness: she was the first of all those who would “hear the word of God and act on it,” someone whose whole life developed secundum verbum tuum,  in accordance with God’s word. Jesus came from heaven to earth to found a family and that family would be constituted by loving obedience to God’s will, in communion with Jesus’ obedience. St. John in his prologue focused on the connection between these two realities as well: that Jesus came unto his own, but his own did not receive him, but to those who did receive him, he gave power to become children of God. As we accept Jesus by his own grace, like Mary did, he constitutes and confirms us as children of God.
* So the first thing we need to ponder today is how we hear and act on the word of God. In Hebrew there is no distinction between “hear” and “obey.” It’s the same word. To hear God is to will to obey him. To listen to him and then to question the truthfulness or goodness or helpfulness of what he says would be contradictory. There wasn’t fully developed by this time St. Paul’s later distinction about the difficulty of doing the good — of not doing the good we desire or not avoiding the sin we detest (Rom 7:19) — but I think it’s still helpful for us to have an attitude that when we listen to God’s word, we listen to it as words to be done. That’s what it means to receive the word on good and fruitful soil. That’s what it means to hear the word of God and obey it.
* In the Psalm today, we see the attitude we should have before God’s word: We want to walk in the Lord’s law, to understand the way of his precepts, to meditate on his wondrous deeds, to choose the way of truth, to observe his law and keep it with all our heart, to delight in the path of God’s commands and to keep his law continually. This is a life without blame, we say at the beginning of the Psalm. This is the path on which God himself wants to guide us. God’s word is the GPS of our life, and so much more.
* In the first reading — the second of only three days in two years in which the Church ponders the Book of Proverbs — I’d like to focus on two of the most relevant pearls of wisdom. The first is, “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” The way we please the Lord most is not by “knowing” but by “doing” what is right and just,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina
September 23, 2024
Prov 3:27-34, Ps 15, Lk 8:16-18
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s Gospel, from the passage immediately after Jesus gave us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed (which we would have heard on Saturday if we didn’t have the proper Gospel for the Memorial of St. Matthew), can be summarized by Jesus’ words, “Take care how you hear.” It points to an approach to the entire spiritual life, introduces us to the importance of today’s liturgy of the Lord, and summarizes one of the things that made today’s saint so great. So let’s examine the three images Jesus gives us that can help us to determine whether we’re receiving his Word and Him on good soil:

* He tells us, “No one who lights a lamp conceals it with a vessel or sets it under a bed; rather, he places it on a lamp stand so that those who enter may see the light.” In other words, if we’re listening correctly, we’re hearing what he seeks to implant as “words to be done.” It’s not supposed to remain hidden or private, but is meant to illumine the world. If we’re not listening with this apostolic dimension, we’re not going to bear abundant fruit.
* He adds, “There is nothing hidden that will not become visible, and nothing secret that will not be known and come to light.” Jesus tells us that even though sometimes we can fake as if we’re paying close attention, our going through the exterior motions will eventually be exposed. Likewise if we’re fighting to give our full wits to his words, even if we’re struggling to comprehend or live them, that effort, too, will be known.
* He then concludes, “To anyone who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he seems to have will be taken away.” This is a law of physical exercise, musical growth, and intellectual progress: we use it or we lose it. To the one who gives the word both ears as well as the mind and the heart, he will become more and more fruitful; but to the one who is not really hanging on every word, he’ll lose eventually even that superficial adherence.


* A great means by which we can look at whether we’re listening with these qualities is by turning to today’s first reading, which is one of only three day in two years we have passages from the Book of Proverbs. It can help us to see whether we’re really living by the word of God in deeds, because all of these Proverbs are anticipations of what we regularly hear in the Gospel.

* The Book of Proverbs first tells us, “Refuse no one the good on which he has a claim when it is in your power to do it for him. Say not to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give,’ when you can give at once.” This means that we should listen with alacrity to God when he speaks to us through others. If we think we can delay, then we won’t be prompt in our discipleship, like the first disciples were in leaving their boats immediately to follow Jesus. This is ultimately a version of the “Silver Rule,” not to do unto others what we don’t want to happen to us. It’s also an application of St. James’ commentary on the Sermon on the Mount that we have to care for the brother we see rather than blow him off saying we’ll pray for him and “good luck.”
* Next Proverbs tells us, “Plot no evil against your neighbor, against one who lives at peace with you. Quarrel not with a man without cause, with one who has done you no harm.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 22, 2024
Wis 2:12.17-20, Ps 54, James 3:16-4:3, Mk 9:30-37
 
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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* We are made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, he has created us to be great. This is expressed powerfully at the beginning of Eucharistic Prayer IV, in which the Church prays, “We give you praise, Father most holy, for you are great and you have fashioned all your works in wisdom and in love. You formed man in your own image and entrusted the whole world to his care, so that in serving you alone, the Creator, he might have dominion over all creatures.” God is great, formed us according to his image, and gave us the world so that we become great like him through serving him and exercising and sharing in his dominion. When God calls us to be holy as he is holy, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as he is perfect, he is summoning us to be, in short, like him, and, therefore, great like he is great.
* The problem for us after the Fall is that this call to spiritual greatness can be diverted or suppressed. The last thing that the evil one wants is for us to become truly like God. He instead wants to tempt us to pretend that we’re gods ourselves or to convince us that we are so corrupted that we would never become like God, so why should we even try. The evil one, in other words, wants to pervert our zeal to become like God or take that zeal away altogether.
* That’s why today’s readings are so important. We see the ugliness of ambition gone bad. We also see how Jesus delineates the way he has come to purify our ambition, so that we might become truly great as he created us to be, redeemed to be, and sent the Holy Spirit to help us to become. This is important for us to grasp because we live in a culture in which so many strive to make the Guinness Book of World Records, sometimes even for the silliest of things, and don’t strive to be inscribed in the eternal hall of fame. Insofar as at Columbia, we are surrounded by many who are ambitious for worldly things — for possessions and worldly riches; for honor, fame, degrees and influence; for pleasure and the things, experiences and even persons who can provide it; and for power and for the exalted positions where it can be exercised — it is so important for us to learn from the Lord how to be truly great. For even if we obtain every form of worldly greatness but lack the greatness to which God calls us, everything we have will ultimately be in vain, but if we fail to achieve what the world thinks is important but become great in what matters to God, then everything will be worth it.
* Let’s begin with ambition for greatness gone bad. We see it on ugly display in today’s Gospel. Last week, as you recall, after Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, Jesus described to him and the apostles the type of Messiah he would be, that he would “suffer greatly, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.” Today, as they were journeying from Caesarea Philippi in the north back to Galilee, Jesus returned to the theme. He stated, “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.” His upcoming betrayal, crucifixion and death were obviously very much on Jesus’ mind and he wanted it clearly on the apostles’ radar, too.Jesus was about to become the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Book of Wisdom from today’s first reading, when he, the Just One,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx, NY
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 22, 2024
Wis 2:12.17-20, Ps 54, James 3:16-4:3, Mk 9:30-37
 
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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Today’s Gospel will hopefully never cease to shock us. Jesus is talking for the second time about his upcoming suffering. We had the first last week, when Jesus, after Peter confessed him to be the Messiah, described what type of Messiah he would be. It’s clear not only how much his upcoming suffering and death were on Jesus’ mind but how much he wanted it on the apostles’ radar. He was about to be betrayed into the hands of those who would mock, scourge, crucify and kill him. He was about to become the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Book of Wisdom from today’s first reading, when some would beset and revile the Just One because in his goodness he was obnoxious to them, because his very being reproached them for their transgressions of the law. Just as the Book of Wisdom foretold, they were going to torture and condemn him to a shameful death, in fact, the most shameful death of all, crucifixion.
* We would have expected, when Jesus was talking about this to his twelve closest friends, who had spent the previous two years with him, that they would have been concerned about him. Instead of paying attention to what he had now emphasized twice with them, instead of consoling him, they started, rather, arguing about which one of them is the greatest. This wasn’t an isolated incident, but a disturbing pattern. Whenever, in fact, Jesus spoke about his upcoming crucifixion, it seemed always to bring out the worst in the apostles.

* As we saw last week, when Jesus told them about it for the first time, St. Peter, the newly named rock, took Jesus aside and tried to rebuke him, earning for himself in return the worst rebuke in the Bible, the name Satan, for trying to lead rather than to follow Jesus, for thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do, for essentially denying that suffering and death, even Jesus’, could be salvific.
* Later, when Jesus would announce yet again that the chief priests and the scribes would condemn him to death, deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked, spit upon, scourge and crucify him, James and John, two of the three closest of the disciples, came up to him and immediately asked him to do whatever they asked. What they wanted was to sit one on his right and the other on his left as he entered his kingdom — oblivious to the fact that those spots were already pre-ordained by the Father for a good and bad thief. Immediately after that chutzpah, the other apostles, recognizing what the sons of Zebedee had done, got indignant at them, not because of the way they were trying to use Jesus, but because they were not gutsy enough themselves to ask for the spots they all openly desired but didn’t have the temerity to request.
* And perhaps the worst example of all occurred during the Last Supper. After Jesus indicated to them, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me,” the apostles got into yet another dispute over which of them was the greatest. Rather than thinking about who would be the despicable traitor about to sell Jesus out, they were more concerned to the point of argumentation about who among them would be numero uno. They did not recognize at the time that, because their flesh was weak, all of them would end up betraying him when he would be arrested. They didn’t recognize that they were alreadybetraying him during the Last Supper.


* To get a sense of the ugliness of the apostles’ egocen...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
September 21, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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 one of the saddest dialogues in the Gospel. Repeating what we heard in last week’s Gospel, Jesus tells the apostles, “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.” Rather than consoling him, they start arguing about which one of them is the greatest. Whenever Jesus spoke about his upcoming crucifixion, it always seemed to bring out the worst in them. We saw last week that when Jesus told them about it for the first time, St. Peter took him aside and tried to rebuke him. On a third occasion, James’ and John’s mother approached and immediately asked Jesus to appoint her two sons to the chief positions in his Messianic reign. If there were ever any greater illustration of the evil of what Saint James will call in this Sunday’s second reading “selfish ambition,” this is it. To get a sense of the ugliness of the apostles’ egocentric jockeying for position, imagine that your father came to you and told you that the doctor had just given him two weeks to live and, instead of consoling him, instead of even caring about him, you immediately shifted your attention to who would get the house or the car, or to ask him before it would be too late to help you get a promotion at work. That’s what was happening in these scenes. It’s sad, ridiculous and rather disgusting.
* 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 excel 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 choose to reward us, with whom we cannot engage in a quid pro quo. A little child 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 return the favor. That’s the type of service we’re called to give. That’s the kind of ambition to which we’re supposed to aspire.
* Sometimes in the Church people are trained to regard all ambition and aspirations to greatness almost as sinful violations of humility, as if every ambition is what Saint James calls “selfish ambition.” But there’s a huge difference between a passion for self-aggrandizement, an ego-indulging hunger for riches, honor and power, or a desire not just to be the best but to be acknowledged as the best, and a holy zeal for the things of God and his kingdom. Saint Paul told us in his first Letter to the Corinthians, “Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts,” and said that they were not things like prophetic gifts, the ability to move mountains, heroic feats of enduring suffering, but faith, hope and especially a charity that is patient, kind, not arrogant or rude.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Cornelius and Cyprian
22nd Anniversary of the death of the Venerable François Xavier Nguyen van Thuan
September 16, 2024
1 Cor 11:17-26.33, Ps 40, Lk 7:1-10
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, we have a chance to focus on the dispositions with which we try to receive the Lord Jesus. We see of some religious leaders who approached Jesus without reverence, more or less as a favor granter. We also see the humility and reverence with which a pagan leader treats Jesus. It provides an opportunity for us to do an examination of conscience as to how we prepare to receive him especially in the Holy Eucharist, something that today’s first reading focuses on and someone whose death the Church remembers today can help us learn how to do better.
* Let’s begin with the Gospel. The Roman centurion loved his slave and was desperate for help. There was no doctor who could help him, but he heard of Jesus the miracle worker. Even though he was a powerful military leader, he didn’t think he was worthy to approach Jesus himself, and so he sent the local Jewish leaders. They were not as humble as he. They approached Jesus and said, “He deserves to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation and he built the synagogue for us.” They were pretending as if the man merited a miracle and that Jesus was somehow obliged But a miracle is always a gift from God. Jesus, nevertheless, humbly went with them. While he was on his way, the Centurion humbly sent word that he didn’t think he was worthy to have Jesus visit his house, but asked simply that Jesus command from where he was the life-threatening illness of his servant to depart. He believed that even at a distance Jesus could command and that even sicknesses would obey, in a way similar to how he commanded soldiers. Jesus was amazed at the man’s faith. He turned to the crowd and said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” Not among the disciples, not among the apostles, not even, it seems, in his Mother had he found faith like that in his power to command at a distance. What an extraordinary witness of trust in the reach of God’s power and love! Jesus normally worked physical miracles as preludes to the greater miracle of faith he desired to give those healed, but in this case, Jesus didn’t need to meet the man to help him grow in faith because his faith was already remarkable.
* Throughout this ongoing Eucharistic Revival and more, the Church wants to help us to grow to have the humility and faith of the Centurion as we prepare to receive the Lord. A few weeks ago I was asked to do a blessing of a new apartment here in New York City. Because I didn’t have a public Mass that day, I asked whether the person would want to have a Mass celebrated there and invite some friends. She eagerly accepted. When it came time for the prayer after the “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb,” the new apartment owner said with devotion, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word and my [soul] shall be healed.” She told me later what an awesome privilege it was for her to receive Jesus literally under the roof of her apartment and, then, before I even had to bring it up, what an even more incredible gift it is to receive him under our palate. The question for us is whether we receive the Lord with worthy dispositions. Do we have awe?

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 15, 2024
Is 50:5-9, Ps 116, James 2:14-18, Mk 8:27-35
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus asks his closest followers two related questions that are among the most important for students and any of us to get right. The first question is, “Who do people say that I am?” The apostles were eager to respond to this poll of what other people were thinking and saying. They informed Jesus that the multitudes were numbering him among the greatest Jewish heroes of all time, like the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, and, more recently, John the Baptist. Some, of course, like many of the Scribes and Pharisees, were of a different opinion. They thought he was a blasphemer, a drunkard, a friend of sinners and even diabolical, working miracles by the power of the prince of demons. Others, like the Romans and their collaborators among the Sadducees and Herodians, thought Jesus was a dangerous man, perhaps a revolutionary. But none of these answers was the right one. Truth is not determined by polls, or by what people believe. Jesus was far greater than Elijah, Jeremiah and John the Baptist. He was greater than Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon. And it wasn’t enough for him to have scores of “fans” and “admirers,” because he hadn’t come into the world to be a celebrity followed by millions but as a savior, and the first step in that salvation was for people to relate to him as he truly was.
* Similarly in our day, there remains great confusion about who Jesus is. Who do people say that Jesus is today? Most everyone knows about him. About 2.5 of the 8 billion people alive profess to be his followers. Muslims think he was just a prophet, like the other famous prophets in Jewish history. Many of the leading Jews, then and now, deem him, their fellow Jew, a heretic, blasphemer and leader of a schismatic sect. Most of the human race considers him a famous moral teacher, alongside Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, certain Hindu gurus, and various figures in own age like Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others. Various secularists, like the ancient Romans, thought he was a maverick rebel. Some regard him, out of dislike for his teaching, as a bad man, a loser, a judgmental misogynist, homophobe and transphobe, proto-Marxist, a pacifist, and rebel. As I mentioned last week, one Columbia professor in Contemporary Civilizations believes Jesus is a psychopath like Hitler or Lenin. Even among Christians, there are many who, rehearsing the Christological heresies of the first centuries, deny or underemphasize Jesus’ divinity or humanity leading to all types of issues at the level of faith and morals.
* That’s why it’s never enough to remain at the level of what others say. It’s never enough for us to consult Wikipedia or ChatGPT. It’s never enough for us even to echo what the Catechism teaches, or the Doctors of the Church, Popes, Bishops, and saints have said, or what our parents, grandparents and godparents have taught us. All of that is helpful, but it’s not sufficient. Just like Jesus does in the Gospel with his first followers, so he wants to do with us: to pass from the informative, “Who do people say that I am?,” to the highly personal and consequential query, “Who do you say that I am?” We Christians are those who profess that Christ is more than just a holy and good man, more than an inspiring prophet who announces ethical, even divine, words and ways. We are the people who confess, with Peter and the Church built on him, who Jesus really is,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 15, 2024
Is 50:5-9, Ps 116, James 2:14-18, Mk 8:27-35
 
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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* There’s great confusion today about who Jesus Christ is. Most everyone knows about him. About 2.5 of the 8.0 billion people alive profess themselves to be his followers. Muslims think he was just a prophet, like the other famous prophets in Jewish history. Many of the leading Jews, then and now, deem him a heretic and a blasphemer. The ancient Romans thought he was a revolutionary. Most people today consider him a famous moral teacher, alongside Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, certain Hindu gurus, and various figures in own age like Ghandi, Martin Luther King and others. Even among Christians, there are many who, rehearsing the Christological heresies of the first centuries, deny or underemphasize Jesus’ divinity or humanity leading to all types of issues at the level of faith and morals. That’s why what Jesus does for his first followers is so important for each of us today. He first surveys, “Who do people say that I am?” and then he asks each of us, “Who do you say that I am?” We are the people who say that Christ is more than just a holy and good man, more than an inspiring prophet who announces ethical, even divine, words and ways. We are the people who confess, with Peter and the Church built on him, who Jesus really is. This is the faith that brings us together: Jesus is not merely the long-awaited Messiah come to set us free, but the Son of God, who not only announces the words of God, but is their Author. Our faith in Christ, however, must be more than something we say on our lips. It must be something we confess by the way we live. And that’s what Jesus today is going to help us to do, because many of us make the same mistakes the people of Jesus’ day, even his followers, did.
* In response to the first question, the poll of what other people were saying, the disciples were eager to respond. They informed Jesus that the people were numbering him among the greatest Jewish heroes of all time, like the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, and, more recently, John the Baptist. But Jesus didn’t stop with those results. First, because it wasn’t enough to rest on what the surveys said, on what others believed, despite the exalted circles into which people were placing Jesus. Second, because the assessments weren’t true. Jesus was far greater than Elijah, Jeremiah and John. He was greater than Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon. Third, because Jesus hadn’t come so that people would merely remain “fans” or “admirers” of him because that would not lead to their salvation; he had come to set them on the path on which he had come into the world to lead them.
* And so he asked the second question, “Who do you say that I am?” At this point, all but one of the disciples remained mute. It was easy to communicate what the crowds were saying, but to put oneself on the line, to make a personal, public confession, required courage and conviction. I’ve always found it somewhat surprising that Nathaniel, or Barthlomew, didn’t speak up. In his first conversation with Jesus, after Jesus said he had seen him under the fig tree, he exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the King of Israel” (Jn 1:49). The latter meant he was the Messiah; the former far more than the Messiah. But this time he timidly kept his mouth shut. Simon Peter, however, put out into the deep. God the Father had led him to recognize that Jesus was indeed much more even than what the others were saying and had ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
September 14, 2024
 
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, when we will eavesdrop and participate in perhaps the most pivotal dialogue in the Gospel, when Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” and “Who do you say that I am?”
* In response to the first question, the poll of what other people were saying, the disciples were eager to reply. They informed him that the people were numbering Jesus among the greatest Jewish heroes of all time, like the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah, and, more recently, John the Baptist. But Jesus wasn’t going to stop at that preliminary question. First, because it wasn’t enough to rest on what the surveys said, to rely on what others believed, despite the exalted circles into which people were placing Jesus. Second, because the assessments weren’t true. Jesus was far greater than Elijah, Jeremiah and John. He was greater than Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon. Third, because Jesus didn’t want those with him merely to remain “fans” or “admirers” of him because that would not set them on the path on which he had come into the world to lead them.
* And so he asked the second question, “Who do you say that I am?” All but one of the disciples remained mute. It was easy to communicate what the surveys said, but to put oneself on the line, to make a personal, public confession, required courage and conviction. I have always been amazed that Nathaniel, a.k.a. Bartholomew, didn’t say anything, since the first time he met Jesus, he cried out that Jesus was the “Son of God” and “King of Israel,” but for some reason now he lacked the chutzpah to say it again. Likewise many of the apostles by this point were trying to jockey to be the greatest in the messianic administration they expected Jesus to inaugurate, but none had the courage to speak up. Simon Peter, however, put out into the deep. God the Father had led him to recognize that Jesus was indeed far greater than what the others were saying, and he had the guts to be the first to say it. “You are the Christ!,” he declared. Christ, the Greek word for Messiah, communicated that Jesus was the long awaited one foretold by all the prophets. In St. Matthew’s version of the scene, he recalls Peter’s also confessing Jesus to be more than the Messiah, but the very own Son of God. To make such an admission was to bring into the foreground a whole series of expectations. The Messiah was to be the one who would bring back the Kingdom of David, who would kick out all foreign powers, who would return Israel to prominence.
* But lest they jump to that confusion, Jesus, as soon as Peter had enunciated his true identity, began to teach them what type of Messiah he would be, how he would inaugurate his kingdom, and how they were share in and announce it. It blew their mind. Rather than uniting the Jews to defeat and expel the Romans, rather than leading the twelve tribes to triumph, he would instead suffer greatly, be rejected by the chief priests, the scribes and the elders and be killed. Jesus told them all of this, St. Mark tells us, “openly,” so that they would know it clearly. To get a sense of their shock, it would be like someone who had just won a Presidential election in his victory speech saying that rather than lead his supporters...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Chrysostom
September 13, 2024
1 Cor 9:16-19.22-27, Ps 84, Lk 6:39-42
 
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:

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us an indication of what he hopes we will become: “When fully trained,” he said, “every disciple will be like his teacher.” Every rabbinical student desired to imitate his rabbi and Jesus wants us to become like him, to love as he has loved, to live as he has lived. The essence of human life and of Christian existence is to become “fully trained.” God provides this training, through his Word, through his Church, even through the suffering he permits. In the Gospel, in the powerful parable of the splinter and the wooden beam, Jesus indicates to us that he wants us paying attention to the ways that we need to grow, to those aspects of our own conduct that still need to be trained, rather than to obsess about others’ faults and flaws, so that we might see clearly, virtuously, charitably and be better trained to help our neighbor.
* St. Paul in the first reading today likewise talks about the training necessary to become saints, to become like Jesus. He makes an analogy to the training of championship athletes. “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win. Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.” We need to learn how to exercise discipline in every way, because discipline literally makes disciples. As disciples of Jesus, we seek not to call our own shots but to live by Jesus’ discipline. In doing so, St. Paul leads the Corinthians and us by example. He says, “Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.” He was taking out his own logs from his life and that’s why he was able to see so clearly to assist others. He was striving to unite himself to Christ crucified so that he could then help others learn how to live in the same way. He wanted everyone to become fully trained disciples through exercising discipline in every way. He made himself “a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible.” He became “all things to all, to save at least some.” His love for others and his recognition of God’s love for them because the driving force of his zeal. He wasn’t doing it for money or for earthly compensation, but because of an interior obligation to share the joy of what he himself had received. “Woe to me,” he says today, “if I do not preach the Gospel!” He recognized he had been given a treasure of which he had been made a steward and sought to pass on free of charge what he himself had received. A Christian spiritual athlete fully formed will have that same holy woe.
* Today we celebrate one such great spiritual athlete who was filled with the same interior woe to share the faith. St. John Chrysostom is the patron saint of preachers because, having been trained to be like Jesus and disciplined to be a faithful disciple, he used his “golden mouth” (literally, Chryso-stom) as a means to train many others. After he was baptized between the age of 18-22 (scholars disagree), he began to live a truly different life ordered to Christ. He was the greatest student of the rhetorician Libanius, who wanted John to succeed him, but instead John left the world for a time to become a better student of Jesus and fill his mind ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. John Paul II National Shrine, Washington, DC
Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society Reunion
Thursday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of the Holy Name of Mary
September 12, 2024
1 Cor 8:1-7.11-13, Ps 139, Lk 6:27-38
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes for us the high standards he has for us as his disciples and apostles. “The measure with which you measure,” he instructs us, “will be measured out to you,” and describes for us the measure to which he wants us to aspire and resolve with his grace to achieve. He calls us to be and behave as “children of the Most High,” to be merciful like God the Father, to do to others first what we would hope to receive, to give rather than seek to receive, to turn the other cheek, to go the second mile, to give not just our winter coats but also our shirts, to love not just those who love us but even those who have made themselves our enemies.
* This is, of course, the standard Jesus himself lived. On Good Friday, we see how he loved those who didn’t love him and blessed those who were cursing him, giving himself to the extreme and pleading to the Father to forgive his executioners, those who were mocking him, and all those whose sins were bringing about his death. When the soldiers of the High Priest or the Roman guards slapped him on one cheek, Jesus could have easily annihilated them by his divine power, but he didn’t fight back, because he loved and didn’t want to harm those who were harming him. When they bid him to carry his Cross on the road to Calvary, he resiliently kept getting up walking the metaphorical second mile. When they stripped him of his cloak, he allowed them to strip him of his tunic as well as his loincloth. In all of this, Jesus, now with a glorious scarred hand, turns and summons us, “Come, follow me!,” calling us to respond to evil with good, cursing with prayer, hatred with love. The word for love he uses is agape, which means unconquerable benevolence: that no matter what others do to us, we keep loving, we don’t descend to others’ hatred by vengeance, but seek to unite the experience to God and to respond with and like God. Jesus is telling us never to stop wishing others well, never to stop doing them good, never to stop praying for them and their conversion, and never to cease asking God to forgive them when they behave in the image of Cain rather than of God.
* This was a standard, of course, to which St. John Paul II sought to live. The most iconic scene of his papacy occurred on December 27, 1983, when he went to Rome’s Rebibbia prison to forgive in person Mehmet Ali Agca, who two-and-a-half years prior had sought to murder him in Saint Peter’s Square. This was what led to the magnanimity and virtue with which he treated even the communists who had made themselves his mortal adversaries and the enemies of the Polish people. This was what led him to treat with Christian love those who opposed the theological reforms of his papacy. And this was the demanding standard to which he, with words and witness, called all of us.
* In 1986, as he was making an apostolic pilgrimage to New Zealand, St. John Paul made clear the moral meaning of our divine filiation gratuitously bestowed on us in baptism. Basing himself on today’s Gospel, he preached to the throngs in Christchurch, “[Jesus] is the Way to the Father. … He teaches us to conduct ourselves as ‘children of our Father in Heaven.’ We do this by following the command of Jesus: ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . .

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Wednesday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 11, 2024
1 Cor 7:25-31, Ps 45, Lk 6:20-26
 
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: 

* On this day on which we mark the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, on which many people boarded planes and went to work at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon like they did every day, not knowing that it would be the last day of their life, St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians and us today are particularly poignant: “I tell you brothers, the time is running out. … The world in its present form is passing away.” The world is in the midst of a “present distress.” These words don’t mean that St. Paul was predicting the imminent end of the world, but rather that he was describing the urgency of reordering our priorities for the eternal rather than the ephemeral because we never know just how short-lived the ephemeral will be. The biggest trick in the devil’s arsenal, if he can’t convince us that he doesn’t exist, is to persuade us that there’s plenty of time “later” for us to get our act together, that there’s no urgency for us to make big choices for God now. Today St. Paul is continuing to teach both us and the Christians in Corinth the path to true wisdom, which is also the path by which we’ll be considered foolish by those who are worldly. But he’s not just indicating the path: he’s also urging us to choose to live by that path.
* There’s no greater illustration of the choice we’re called to make for what’s everlasting instead of what’s evanescent than what Jesus mentions in the Gospel today. This is St. Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, taken from Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain. The fact that there are differences between this version and what Jesus says in Matthew 5-7 in the Sermon on the Mount is a clear sign that Jesus returned to his central messages often and developed different nuances. Rather than the eight beatitudes he proclaimed on the mountain, today in the plain he focuses on four and contrasts them clearly to four “woes.” But his essential teaching remains the same: that the real path to happiness, the way to have life to the full forever, is not just different, but in fact opposed, to what those infected by spiritual worldliness often presume.
* Jesus makes four contrasts today.

* The first is, “Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours,” and “Woe to you are rich, for you have received your consolation.” It is simply revolutionary — not just in Jesus’ age, not just in our era, but in every epoch — to believe that we’ll be happier if we’re poor than if we’re rich. Jesus says that the “rich” are to be pitied because they have already received their consolation in their money and possessions, whereas the poor are blessed because they are therefore able to seek God and his kingdom with hope. Material wealth is what those who live for the present age often believe will bring them happiness, but God’s kingdom is the hope and the treasure of those who know that time is running out and eternity is about to begin. Today many people, including Christians, spend more time nourishing their hope to win the lottery rather than to win heaven through seeking the things that are above, and Jesus says that these people are “woeful” because they think that the monopoly money and temporary houses on Park Avenue are more valuable that the Father’s House and treasure.
* The second is, “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be satisfied,” versus, “Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for Vocations to Religious Life
September 10, 2024
1 Cor 6:1-11, Ps 149, Lk 6:12-19
 
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: 

* On September 10, there’s no liturgical feast or memorial of a saint to celebrate, but, because of my work with the Missionaries of Charity, there’s always been something special to mark, what they call “Foundation Day,” because on September 10, 1946, on a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling to make a retreat, Jesus revealed his thirst to St. Teresa of Calcutta and asked her to found for him the Missionaries of Charity. She always referred to it as her “call within a call,” since she had already responded to her vocation to be a religious of the teaching Sisters of Loreto. It’s  a good day for all of us to focus on the meaning of our Christian calling from baptism to be a saint and a sanctifier, of our call within that call as priests, religious, consecrated, married and whatever particular callings or professions we may have within those secondary vocations. In today’s readings we see several important elements for us to grasp about our Catholic vocation to live in, and our mission to spread, Christ’s kingdom.
* The first lesson is that our vocation, our life, is a direct result of the prayer of the Lord Jesus. We see him at the beginning of the Gospel go up a mountain and spend all night in prayer to his Father. He who is the second Person of the Blessed Trinity was praying all night. What an example about the importance of prayer for us who are not God! Jesus seems to have been praying in discernment about whom he should choose from among his disciples to be his apostles and praying in intercession for those whom he was about to choose. We should never forget that Jesus likewise prays for us. He’s ascended into heaven in order to intercede for us. For that reason, we should never really be afraid of living up to the vocation that God has given us, because just as much as Jesus prayed for the apostles, prayed for Peter that his faith may not fail but that after his conversion he would strengthen his brothers (Lk 22), he prayed to the Father for all those who would hear the Gospel through the work of the Apostles (Jn 17), he prays for us still!
* The second thing we see in this Gospel episode is what he did at dawn. From among his disciples, he selected twelve apostles. It says he “called [them] to himself” and “named [them] Apostles,” another way of saying what St. Mark describes: “he called them to be with him and so that they might be sent out” (Mk 3:14). We come here face-to-face with the mystery of divine election. God calls us all to him, but among all of us he chooses some for more intensely intimate cooperation with him. Out of all people he chose the Jews; out of all the Jews, some became his disciples; out of all those disciples, 12 became apostles; out of all 12, he chose three (Peter, James and John) to be with him in many of the most pivotal moments of his public life (healing the daughter of Jairus, the Transfiguration, the Agony in the Garden); and out of the three, he chose one, Peter, on whom to build his Church. Likewise we can say that Jesus calls all 8 billion alive today to come to the knowledge of the truth, but only 2.5 out of 8 is Christian and only 1.3 of 8 are Catholic. These facts don’t make us better than anyone else, but we should certainly be grateful. And just as the apostles responded to Jesus’ invitation and left other things to be with him and made themselve...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 9, 2024
1 Cor 5:8, Ps 5, Lk 6:6-11
 
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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Jesus’ mission was not just to save and sanctify but to revolutionize, to turn right side up, the way his people had distorted religion, to give us new wineskins to receive new wine. It was to restore true holiness of life, to help us learn how, in an integrated way, to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as Christ would love us. One distortion was, of course, people who took God for granted and didn’t even care about keeping their end of the Covenant, those who would make material possessions, or pleasure, or power and pride their idols. Another, which we encounter in today’s Gospel, was through the changing of religion from within and trying to apply religious zeal not to the worship of the true God but to essentially a man-made idol. The latter distortion was epitomized by the way some of the Scribes and Pharisees treated the Sabbath, making it a day of extraordinary rules about everything they couldn’t do, rather than a day of loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor. The Scribes and the Pharisees went to the Synagogue on the Sabbath, but they really weren’t going to praise God. St. Luke tells us that their main focus was to “watch Jesus closely to see if he would cure on the Sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.” The suffering of the man with the withered hand didn’t matter much to them. St. Luke’s term for this man’s hand was that it had “dried up”: in other words, it had once had life in it but no longer did. One of the apocryphal Gospels in describing this scene said that the man was a mason who had been injured on the job and could no longer work and support himself and his family. But such an injured laborer’s plight didn’t concern the Pharisees at all. Even though they would rescue an animal from a trap on a Sabbath, they wouldn’t care for their fellow man, as if restoring him to health would somehow be offensive to God. So Jesus, reading their hearts, asked the question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” It was a poignant question because he was intending to do good and to save life, and they were intending to do evil and destroy life. What Jesus was doing somehow they found objectionable, but what they were doing — focusing themselves on preventing Jesus’ doing good and then conspiring to plot his demise — was somehow licit to do, not only at all but especially on the Lord’s Day. They didn’t answer Jesus’ question for obvious reasons.
* Jesus then worked his miracle of mercy, not only to do good to the man with the withered hand and restore his livelihood but do good to his objectors and to all of us by showing us the true meaning of the Sabbath and revealing to us God’s desire to make us whole. He had the man with the injured hand come and stand before everyone, the first of the two steps of faith by which the man would cooperate in his own healing. Then he said to the man, in the second step of faith, “Stretch out your hand!” He was telling someone who hadn’t been able to move his hand for who knows how long to make an act of the will and do the impossible. And St. Luke the beloved physician says something beautiful and noteworthy: not “his hand was restored and he did so,” but, “he did so and his hand was restored.” He first extended himself in faith and that was part of his restoration.

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Red Mass, Invoking the Holy Spirit at the Beginning of the Academic Year
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7, Ps 146, James 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* At the beginning of an academic year, it’s routine to celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit in which we ask God the Father together with, and in the name of, Jesus, God the Son, to send us God the Holy Spirit, to guide us throughout the entire year. How much we need the Holy Spirit’s gifts of wisdom, knowledge, understanding and prudence in our academic work, so that we do not merely become smarter but enlightened by the light of God. How much we need the gift of courage in so many personal and communal aspects of campus life. How much we need the gifts of reverence and fear of the Lord in an age in which so many marginalize God and there are so many offenses against those made in his image and likeness in speech, social media and behavior. Since we are not normally able to celebrate Pentecost together because it generally falls after the end of the academic year, we start the academic year by asking the Holy Spirit to come down upon us like he did upon Mary and the first Christians in the Upper Room. We ask him to help teach us how to pray, since we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. We ask him to help us to understand Sacred Scripture better, since he inspired each of its Sacred Authors and also helps us to interpret it aright through the Church. We ask him to help us to recognize the particular gifts, charisms and manifestations of the Spirit he’s given each of us for the common good and move us to use them as he intends. We ask him to help us to learn how to live according to the Spirit, which is a summary of the entire Christian moral life, rather than according to the flesh. We ask him to help us to experience the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-mastery — and live them in such a radiant way that others might want to come to know more deeply the Source of each of them. And we ask him to give us a tongue of fire so that, like the first Christians, we may proclaim the Gospel on campus with ardent love for God and others. As we begin this new year, we ask for all of these gifts as well as for the help we need to live by them.
* Today the Holy Spirit, through all his gifts, wants to help us to enter into the passages of Sacred Scripture with which we have been blessed today and to apply them to our life on campus and beyond. To me there are three essential lessons.
* The first is about the awe and reverence we should have for Jesus. In the Gospel, we get a glimpse of the amazement of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. Many of the Jews by this point were beginning to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah from today’s first reading of how their God would come to save them, opening the eyes of the blind, clearing the ears of the deaf, making cripples leap like deer and making mute people sing. They were beginning to hope that he was the anointed of the Lord through whom, as we prayed in the Psalm,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7, Ps 146, James 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37
 
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 we get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. Many of the Jews by this point were beginning to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah from today’s first reading of how God would come to save them, opening the eyes of the blind, clearing the ears of the deaf, making cripples leap like deer and making mute people sing. They were wondering whether he was the anointed of the Lord whom they praised in today’s Psalm as one who for God would secure justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set captives free, give sight to the blind, raise up those who were bowed down, love the just, protect strangers, sustain orphans and windows, and thwart the way of the wicked.
* Even in pagan terrorities, as we see in today’s Gospel, they were buzzing with what he could do and who he might be. That’s why when Jesus and the apostles journeyed into the pagan terrority of the Decapolis, or ten cities, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, several people brought their deaf and mute friend to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They had high hopes and they were not to be let down. Jesus took the man away from the crowds to prevent him from being objectified by everyone as simply a deaf-mute or, soon, as someone healed, but more importantly to establish a personal relationship with him, so that the first voice he would hear would be Jesus’ own as he spoke to him, and so that the man would not to be disproportionately influenced by the pagan crowd. Once apart, the Lord Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!,” “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Once he started speaking plainly, amazement seized everyone. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
* I would like to pause on this phrase. “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues to do infinite good and do it amazingly well.
* There would be many people at Jesus’ time, however, who would disagree that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer destroying the sabbath and undermining the law of Moses. They would eventually claim that he would be a colossal fa...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
September 7, 2024
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, when we will get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. On the force of this reputation, several true friends brought a man who was deaf and mute to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They were not to be let down. The Lord put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Amazement seized them all. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
* “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues to do so much good and do it amazingly well.
* There would be many people at Jesus’ time who would disagree that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer and would turn out to be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Many of the zealots who were looking to evict the Romans or who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be likewise thought he was a failure. Little could any of these groups fathom what the small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies would do in Jesus name throughout the globe. Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize his teachings and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. They, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, more of these false ideas have been invading the minds of believers, too, and this is a much greater concern.
* If Jesus were to ask us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? In general, I think all of us disciples would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing and does everything well; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But it’s when we turn to specific issues that we ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 6, 2024
1 Cor 4:1-5, Ps 37, Lk 5:33-39
 
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 
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he following points were attempted in the homily: 

* At the beginning of a new academic year, Jesus wants to help us grow in many ways, in wisdom, in virtue, in friendship with him. But we need to focus on how receptive we are to his action and today, with the help of the readings, we have a chance to do that. Four times a year at daily Mass — on the 2nd Monday of Ordinary Time, on the Friday after Ash Wednesday, on the 13th Saturday, and on the 22nd Friday — the Church has us focus on Jesus’ words about feasting and fasting and the parables of the patch and of the wineskins, in which Jesus teaches us about how he wishes us to relate to him. He has come to give us new life but the new life is not a minor revision to our “operating system,” to eliminate some “bugs” in the software; rather it’s a thorough revamp. He wants new skins, not old, to receive the newness he constantly gives. He doesn’t want to patch our old jeans; he wants to clothe us in himself. And he sets up those parables by a discussion on fasting. At the time of Jesus there were three purposes for fasting: reparation for one’s sins and those of others; supplication, or prayer in the body, for some petition; and the desire for authentic self-mastery through the capacity to say “no” to one’s appetite for food and “yes” to some other purpose, developing a moral muscle that can help to say no to other temptations in order faithfully to say yes to God. These purposes flowing from Old Testament times were certainly not bad or immoral. But Jesus today gives thoroughly new purpose: he says the purpose of fasting is to help us hunger for him in his absence and, when his presence is restored, ultimately to learn how to hunger for what he hungers. When he is “ripped away” — the same verb that is used for his arrest in Gethsemane — it is then that he says we will fast. We need to do more than just copy how previous generations fasted. We need more than a minor correction or  “patch.” We need a new hunger. We need a new heart.
* Today the readings specify three “new” ways we need to relate to Christ.
* First, as “friends of the bridal chamber,” which is what is poorly translated in the Gospel as “wedding guests.” Because Jesus the Bridegroom is with us, pouring himself into our life, we must like groomsmen and bridesmaids be full of joy. That’s the first type of wine he wants to pour into us anew. A Christian must be defined by a sense of joy because of the presence of the Bridegroom. To be a Christian is, to some degree, always to be living out the joy we see on wedding days, as groomsmen and bridesmaids, or better, as Bride, as Christ the Bridegroom unites himself to us. Sometimes as Christians we do better at fasting than we do at feasting in the Lord’s presence. We behave as if the Lord is absent more than we live in his presence, pondering in depth what his presence means and making abiding in his presence ever more concrete. Today is an opportunity to receive new wineskins from Christ so that we might live out that spousal mystery of love and the joy to which it leads.
* Second, St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians says we’re called to be “servants of Christ.” The word servant he uses is not diakonos or doulos, the common Greek words for “servant” and “slave” respectively. It’s huperetes, which means the slave who mans the rudder in a big ship, whose doesn’t establish the direction of the boat  — which the captain does — but helps steer the b...

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta
September 5, 2024
1 Cor 3:18-23, Ps 24, Lk 5:1-11
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* On this day on which the Church celebrates the feast of the great Missionary of Charity, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and on which it’s been announced that I have become the new National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, it’s particularly fitting that in today’s Gospel we have Jesus’ famous encounter with Peter, Andrew, James and John in which he sent them out for a miraculous catch of fish as a sign of how he wanted to make these fishermen true fishers of men. The Church has always taken inspiration for her mission of spreading the Gospel from this scene. In his apostolic exhortation to mark the beginning of the third Christian millennium, St. John Paul II adopted Jesus’ words to Peter, “Duc in Altum!,” “Put into the Deep!,” as basically the motto for the third Christian millennium. And so today, as we celebrate Mother Teresa, pray for her sisters and the work of the missions, ask God for his help for me as I prepare to dedicate myself full time to promoting and supporting the work of the missions starting this January, and focus on the missionary identity that flows from Christian Baptism and Confirmation, it’s important to delve into today’s readings, in which we learn the trust that is at the root of putting into the deep.
* In today’s first reading, St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us, “If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool, so as to become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God.” We see an illustration of how God’s wisdom turns human wisdom upside down in today’s Gospel. After having borrowed Peter’s boat as a floating pulpit to preach to the crowds, Jesus tells Peter to take his boat and put out into the deep water, lowering his nets for a catch. Peter had already worked all night and caught nothing. He wasn’t just exhausted but discouraged. The command of the Lord was absurd to anyone experienced in fishing on the Sea of Galilee, where people caught fish in shallow water at night time, not deep water in daylight. It would be as if a fisherman had told Jesus, a carpenter, to drive in nails by holding the head of the hammer and striking the nail with the handle. Peter, however, at the Lord’s word, put out into the deep and caught the biggest catch of his life. The wisdom of this world is indeed foolishness in the God-man’s eyes! That trust in the Lord that led Peter to put out into the deep was meant by the Lord to teach him and Andrew, James and John, about the life of faith and the work of evangelization: even when it seems that fishing-for-men “won’t work,” even when it seems like we’ve tried everything and caught nothing — much like St. Jean de Brébeuf worked for three years in his first wave among the Iroquois and had to return to France without one convert — God can bring extraordinary results.
* We see this truth contrasting God’s wisdom versus worldly wisdom throughout this scene and throughout salvation history. Worldly wisdom would choose a good man rather than one whose first words were “depart from me for I am a sinner,” a rabbi rather than a fisherman, a nobleman rather than someone most considered a nobody. As St. Paul told us last Saturday, however, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise.” If we wish, like Peter, to be Jesus’ followers,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
September 4, 2024
1 Cor 3:1-9, Ps 33, Lk 4:38-44
 
To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* St. Paul in today’s first reading points to the type of spiritual growth he was seeking to help catalyze among the Christians in Corinth, something that indicates the spiritual growth God would like to see in all of us. He began by saying that when he was first evangelizing them, he needed to care for them spiritually the way parents care for newborns because they were still living according to the ways of the world rather than according to the Holy Spirit. “I could not talk to you as spiritual people but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ. I fed you milk, not solid food, because you were unable to take it.” So he went slowly. We pass the faith on according to the capacity of people to understand. When we catechize young children, we don’t give them a copy of the adult Catechism of the Catholic Church. We speak to them very simply about God, about prayer, about charity, about the Bible, about the Sacraments. We “breast feed” them, digesting the truths of the faith and passing these truths on to them in ways they can assimilate. Of course we don’t want them to stay there. Just like a little child passes from milk to Gerber’s to normal food for children to more healthy food and a richer cuisine for growing children and adults, so a similar passage is meant to happen in us spiritually. And St. Paul was saying that that’s what was not happening among the Corinthians. “Indeed you are still not able [to take solid food], even now, because you are still of the flesh.” They were living according to their earthly, fleshy desires, instead of living according to the Spirit. He then says why: “There is jealousy and rivalry among you.” Such things are not manifestations of a life according to God. We’re called to look at each other as brothers and sisters, not as competition, and we’re supposed to be happy to see them grow and thrive, not jealous. When we’re living by the Spirit, we love each other rather than resent each other and we seek communion rather than harbor division.
* St. Paul gets specific about the envy and contention that was dividing the community: Some were saying “I belong to Paul” and others “I belong to Apollos” and later, as we’ll see, “I belong to Cephas” (Peter). St. Paul is clear that that’s the talk and behavior of spiritual infants, siding according to their preferences with “ministers through whom [they] became believers” instead of with the Lord who sent the ministers to them and who caused the growth. They were focusing on earthly likes and dislikes rather than on God, and St. Paul wanted to provoke them by his strong language to grow up. There are many similar issues of living according to the flesh in a childish (rather than childlike) way that afflict the Christians of today. In an age of spiritual consumerism, people are led to focus more on their personal preferences rather than on God when it comes to which Church they attend, which music is their favorite, which pew they want to sit in and more. Many pick and choose among popes, or bishops, or priests, or Church councils, rather than receive with gratitude and follow all the Lord sends. People define themselves less with the Lord than with the instruments of the Lord who most meet their tastes. They define themselves too much with the adjectives they put to their “Catholicism,” normally taken from political categories,

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Pope St. Gregory the Great, Doctor of the Church
September 3, 2024
1 Cor 2:10-16, Ps 145, Lk 4:31-37
 
To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 
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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we meet Jesus teaching in a synagogue. After he was booted and almost killed from the Synagogue in Nazareth where he grew up — which we heard yesterday — he went to Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, where Peter, Andrew, James and John all lived and worked. In Nazareth when he taught, St. Luke tells us all were initially “amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” but eventually doubts entered because they thought they knew him and those doubts quickly passed to rage and homicidal intentions.  Today in Capernaum, St. Luke says that those in the Synagogue “were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority” and later, after he had rebuked a demon, they were “all amazed and said to one another, ‘What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits and they come out!”
* One of the most important aspects of our Christian response in faith is to be amazed and astonished at Jesus and at his words or works. This astonishment is an experience most of us, I hope, had when we first started living by faith, when — for those of us lucky enough to be cradle Christians — our parents read to us from the Bible or from Bible stories and told us that the Bible contains the words of God himself; when we first began to pray and we recognized that God was listening to us with love; when we first discovered that the Eucharist is God and comes down from heaven on the altar, and dwells within the tabernacle, or loves us from the monstrance; when we first started to hear about Jesus’ great miracles, his multiplication of the loaves and fish, his walking on water, his casting out the devil like he does in today’s Gospel, his healing the sick, and his rising from the dead. This is an amazement and astonishment that likewise envelops anyone at the time of our becoming aware of God’s calling us to follow him in a special way like when priests or religious become aware of their call within their baptismal call to holiness. But what can happen over time to every Christian is we can begin to lose our astonishment. The things of God can become routine. We can cease to view with amazement the fact that God has spoken to us in Sacred Scripture, that he listens to us in prayer, that he awaits us with love in the Eucharist wanting to nourish us with the only nourishment worthy of our souls, that he thirsts to forgive us in the Sacrament of his Mercy, that he is risen and alive and seeks to walk with us throughout each day, that he can continue to work great miracles if we approach him with faith and it really is in alignment with what’s best. We can begin to take things for granted, to “domesticate” Jesus, and lose our awe. It’s one of the saddest things that can happen in the life of faith. I think of those priests, religious and “professionally Catholic” lay people who have lost the basic astonishment that accompanies the life of faith, so that they begin to look at the Mass as just some dramatic ceremony, who begin to place tabernacles in “worship spaces” as if they’re placing potted plants, who begin even to use words to describe the Eucharist like “bread” and “cup,” who deconstruct the Word of God as if they’re dissecting a cadaver instead of analyzing a Living Word, who mock the Sacrament of Penance as if it’s just a historical vestige rather than a gift of God we need for salvation....