-
Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin
Today's readings [display_podcast] 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.…
-
Fifteenth Sunday: Rite of Acceptance into the Order of Catechumens
This was the alternate homily that I gave at 10:45 Mass, during which we accepted a young man into the Order of Catechumens. In the ancient Church, there were several so-called orders within the assembly. The main group or order was, of course, the believers. These had been baptized and had come to accept…
-
Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Today's readings [display_podcast] This isn’t a rural, agricultural area – although of course, it once was. And your preacher today is a city and suburb boy, so some of the rural and agricultural themes of today’s Scripture readings threaten to pass us by. And that would be too bad, because these themes are at the…
-
Saturday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today's readings There’s an old saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And that’s fine, as far as it goes. But the danger is that sometimes we get so attached to that principle that we fail to recognize when something is, in fact, broke. That’s what the prophet Amos has been complaining about, isn’t…
-
St. Thomas the Apostle
Today's readings [display_podcast] You know, sometimes I think we don’t know what we believe until we’re called upon to explain it. Especially for those of us who are “cradle Catholics” – the ones who were baptized Catholic and have grown up in the faith all our lives. We just accept the things the Church teaches,…
-
Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today's readings [display_podcast] You probably remember, maybe not fondly, the readings we had from the Books of Kings the last couple of weeks. The names were hard to pronounce, and their deeds were hard to hear. Each and every one of the kings was worse than the one who preceded him. How often did we…
-
Friday of the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today's readings “There is something greater than the temple here.” Jesus uses this kind of argument with the Pharisees very often, because they are always missing the significance of what Jesus is doing. They are among those who refuse to see that a man like him could possibly be the Messiah, God’s anointed one,…
-
Friday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time
Today's readings [display_podcast] Today’s readings represent some of the deepest longings of the human heart, and expose one of the deepest wounds of the human heart. The deep wound is the feeling of abandonment that we experience in the midst of trial. Just as the Jews must have felt abandoned by God when the walls…
-
Thursday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time
Today's readings [display_podcast] I read a quote recently that said, more or less, that you can have a relationship with anyone, but you have intimacy with relatively few people. The evangelical call for everyone to have a relationship with Jesus Christ is, in fact, lacking. If salvation were something magical that came about as the…
You must be logged in to post a comment.