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Saturday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings It’s dangerous to be a prophet. It’s dangerous because nobody wants to really hear the truth. Both Jeremiah and Saint John the Baptist find that out very clearly in today’s Scripture readings. Both of them insisted on proclaiming the truth, and both of them ultimately paid for it with their lives, although Jeremiah…
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Saint Ignatius of Loyola
Today’s readings St. Ignatius was all set to accomplish great things in the military when his leg was badly injured by a canon ball. As he was convalescing, he asked for romantic novels to read. But nothing like that was available, so he had to settle for books on the life of Christ and the…
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The Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings You’ve probably heard me say that these summer weeks of Ordinary Time give us a wonderful look at how to live the Christian Life. I always say that the Scriptures give us a kind of “Discipleship Toolbox” that helps us to know what we are supposed to be about and how we are…
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Saints Joachim and Anne, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Today’s readings We don’t know much, well anything really, about Saints Joachim and Anne. Even in the Gospels where the ancestry of Jesus is traced, nothing is really said about Mary’s family, so we don’t have names that tell us anything about who Mary’s parents were. Their names themselves are really sourced by legend written…
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Saint James, Apostle
Today’s readings “Can you drink the chalice of which I am going to drink?” What does that even mean for us? We know what Jesus’ chalice was like: it led him through sorrow, and abandonment, and ultimately to the cross. If we have ever been in a situation in which we have felt intense grief,…
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Thursday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings We’ve just had this Gospel reading in the Sunday readings in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d touch on a few verses that I didn’t go into in that homily. And these are some of the most powerful words in Scripture for me, and always a challenge for me: “But…
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Saint Mary Magdalene
Today’s readings Today’s feast of St. Mary Magdalene is a good opportunity to set the record straight. Mary Magdalene was not the woman caught in adultery, nor was she the unnamed “sinful woman” who anointed the feet of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. That said, she is the woman from whom Jesus expelled seven demons, also…
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The Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings I think we’d all admit this has been a bit of a rough week. We have heard of escalating tensions in the middle east, and very dangerous issues in the Russia/Ukraine situation. Then a plane was shot down over the Ukraine, killing almost 300 people. This week, we also heard of the death…
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Thursday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s readings Today’s Scripture readings have some “sound bytes” that I have found most meaningful in my prayer life. Isaiah’s profession of faith today says, “For it is you who have accomplished all we have done.” What a beautiful thing for us to remember. This one statement, if we integrate it into our prayer life,…
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Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin
Today’s readings Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 to a Christian Algonquin woman. Her parents died in a smallpox epidemic – which left Kateri herself disfigured and half blind – when she was just four years old. She went to live with her uncle who succeeded her own father as chief of the clan.…
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