Mediocrity will not suffice

“You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped.” If anyone ever fears to address the Lord openly and honestly, let him observe the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who speaks to the Lord extraordinarily candidly. Jeremiah is not happy. He decries the Lord for duping him because he is embarrassed. He has […]

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The liberating power of dogma

Napoleon Bonaparte, the anti-Catholic emperor of France in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, once told a French cardinal, “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we … have done our best to destroy the church […]

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Spiritual Entrepreneurship

It is time to leave everything behind. This is the Lord’s calling to us in the Gospel today: to risk everything to follow Him. He presents us with the image of the merchant who sells everything that he has in order to obtain the pearl of great price, and in doing so, Christ is calling […]

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God only needs a little seed

Two weeks in a row now, the Gospel has ended with this haunting phrase, “Whoever has ears ought to hear.” So what are we supposed to hear? Each of the past two weeks we have heard a long and complicated parable in which our Lord explains what the Kingdom of Heaven is all about. Last […]

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Proclaim from the Housetops

Our Lord has given us a mandate: what we have heard here, whispered among believers, we are to go out and proclaim on the housetops, to announce to the world. This mandate is not just given to missionaries or priests; it is for everyone. Each one of us, baptized as sons and daughters of God, […]

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Hambre Espiritual

“Recuerda el camino que el Señor, tu Dios, te ha hecho recorrer estos cuarenta años por el desierto … Él te afligió, haciéndote pasar hambre, y después te alimentó con el maná, que ni tú ni tus padres conocían.” En el nombre del Padre y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo. En estas líneas de […]

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Being Spiritually Full

“Remember how for forty years now the LORD, your God, has directed all your journeying in the desert … He … let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your fathers.” In these lines from the first reading, Moses is reminding the Israelite people of […]

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