Last month, I gave a sermon on Good Shepherd Sunday on how to raise good future priests – future good shepherds. You might recall that one of the points I offered on how to encourage our sons to consider a priestly vocation was raising them to have reverence for the Eucharist. Since today is Corpus […]

“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13). Heaven is all about love. St. Paul tells us, “So faith, hope, love abide, […]

What does it mean to love someone? It is hard to capture in English what Christ is asking Peter in the Gospel today. Greek, the language in which St. John composed his Gospel, has many words for love, two of which John employs here – “agape” and “philia.” “Philia” is a love of deep friendship, […]

“For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” St. Paul writes today about a radical transformation of the human person. God allowed his Son to “become sin” for us – taking on the greatest effect of sin, that […]

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. … Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” The people listening to our Lord must have been shocked to hear Him say these words. St. Luke tells us that, “the eyes of all […]

Over the course of the year, through the Church’s different celebrations, we get to live the entire earthly life of our Lord. Actually, we really do so in a matter of five months between Christmas and the Ascension. After Christmas, we fast-forwarded to when He was 12 years old for the finding in the Temple, […]

Why do you all think that Christmas is such a big deal? We can imagine this question being posed by someone who doesn’t know much about Christianity – maybe someone from China, Iran, or North Korea. But that same question would actually be posed to us by the earliest Christians themselves! To them, today’s feast […]

Most of us are probably familiar with the word “liturgy.” It refers to any public worship of the Church. Normally that means the Holy Mass, but all the sacraments have their liturgies – their official rites that they must follow (the words of absolution pronounced by the priest, the prayers said at a baptism, etc.). […]