St. Paul has made a spectacular claim in this Sunday’s second reading: There is something lacking in Christ’s sufferings. How could this be? How could Christ’s suffering on the Cross be lacking anything? Where could we possibly find a better example of a complete gift of self, a total outpouring of love? What more perfect […]
Read more "What is lacking in Christ’s suffering?"A soldier sent behind enemy lines into heavily occupied territory is not normally sent unprepared. Yet our Lord says to the 72 disciples He sends on mission in today’s Gospel, “I am sending you like lambs among wolves. Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals.” That is, he literally sends them on a journey […]
Read more "Sent as Lambs Among Wolves"Cari fratelli e sorelle, ormai siamo arrivati al mese di Novembre e, avvicinandoci alla fine del anno liturgico, la Santa Madre Chiesa, per mezzo della Santa Liturgia, ci mette nella contemplazione delle cose ultime. Ed è così che la domenica scorsa abbiamo contemplato Cristo Re, chi regna sopra la patria celeste. In tale festa abbiamo […]
Read more "The Saints Shine with the Splendor of Christ"The Sacred Liturgy sets before us a difficult theme today: the accomplishment of God’s will in the face of suffering and adversity. It is a particular feature of the ancient Roman liturgy that all of the texts of the Mass are chosen for each other and fit together. The entrance antiphon, or introit, which has […]
Read more "Forgiveness and the Problem of Evil"Most of us have probably had the experience of dealing with someone who is annoyingly nitpicky, who insists on fussing over unimportant details to the degree that it’s impossible to get anything done. Maybe it’s the person who insists on correcting every little detail while you’re speaking so that it’s impossible to have a conversation. […]
Read more "Humbly Welcoming God’s Word"We have been reading at Sunday Mass for the past five weeks from the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, our Lord’s famed Bread of Life discourse. It is perhaps the most important chapter in St. John’s account of our Lord’s public ministry, because in it He lays the groundwork for the Church’s faith in […]
Read more "Following Jesus by Receiving Him in Holy Communion"Probably none of us here know what it is like to feel starvation, to have gone days without food and to feel the life going out of us. It is likely, though, that each of us have had some taste of this at times in our lives by experiencing severe hunger because of an illness, […]
Read more "Going Without Meals: The necessity of frequent communion"Today’s Gospel passage is a very important one for our day and age, in which our Lord defends and reinstates in the original order of creation in which the marriage bond is indissoluble. These words of our Lord, “from the beginning it was not so,” inspired the teaching of St. John Paul II on marriage […]
Read more "Marriage and the Celibate State"Today’s Gospel passage speaks of the importance of forgiveness. When Peter suggests that we should forgive our brother seven times, he is suggesting that we should forgive many times. However, our Lord has even bigger plans. When He says that we should forgive seventy times seven times, the meaning is that we should always forgive […]
Read more "God Always Forgives"When someone does something that offends you, how do you react? Do you give in to gossiping and complaining about that person, or do you go directly to him and try to work through the problem. In today’s Gospel, our Lord tells us that if someone sins against us we should give to him and […]
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