Embrace the Smallest
For Sunday, September 20, 2015, 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time Long before he became the cardinal archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan was the rector of the North American College in Rome. He used to give regular talks to the seminarians, which were collected in a very good book called Priests for the Third Millennium. In […]
Who Do You Say that I Am?
For Sunday, September 13, 2015, 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time A new Pew Forum Study looking at the views of American Catholics on family life, sexuality, and Catholic identity has concluded that 45% of Americans are Catholic or are “connected to Catholicism.” It gauged people’s views of the topics mentioned, but in some ways, the figure […]
The Dream of the Kingdom
For Sunday, September 6, 2015, 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Last Saturday evening, at Mass in Be’er Sheva, Israel, the young Polish pastor asked a strange question, “How do you get here?” His answer, too, was strange, “Go to the end of the world and turn left!” He proceeded to remind the ten of us in […]
Dialogue at the Table
For Sunday, August 30, 2015, 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Over the past several years, we have heard the term “cafeteria Catholic” employed in a variety of ways. In more conservative circles, it is largely viewed through negative lenses referring to individuals who want to pick and choose the type of “Catholicism” that suits them, thus […]
There Is Love
For Sunday, August 23, 2015, 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time In the years that I was involved in liturgy planning for weddings, engaged couples almost invariably wanted to include a secular song as part of the ceremony. Often it would have been a song they heard on their first date, one they may have danced to, […]
Bread that Satisfies Our Hunger for Peace
For Sunday, August 16, 2015, 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time When it comes to anniversaries, this August has been particularly poignant. Within a few days of each other, we’ve noted the seventieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan, the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the […]
Faith Should Always Trump Politics
For Sunday, August 9, 2015, 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Presidential election politics are heating up and, unbelievably, the election is over a year away! It would be easy to become overloaded as this period of time passes by. As I am writing this, I think at least twenty-four people are running for President of the […]
Hunger in the Desert
For Sunday, August 2, 2015, 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time There it is! Right outside my window. I’m here in the Negev Desert of Israel. It’s possible that Moses and the chosen people walked in this area a few thousand years ago. Right now at 4:30 PM, the temperature is 103.6 degrees in the shade. Just […]
Enough to Go Around
For Sunday, July 26, 2015, 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Is there enough to go around? Living in an industrialized nation, it can be easy to forget how much poverty there is in our world. With all the advances in technology over the past century, we might even be deluded into thinking that most people lead […]
Getting Away from It All
For Sunday, July 19, 2015, 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time At a time when you would think a lot of Americans are heading for the beach or the campground for vacation, more of us may actually be staying home. A survey last January found an astonishing forty-two percent of workers didn’t take a single vacation day in […]
Gospel Relationships
For Sunday, July 12, 2015, 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time Every day we become aware of circumstances and issues that perk the interest of Christian consciousness. Whether they are issues surrounding human life, political agendas, morality, or our responsibility to the earth, we must realize that the Gospel has much more to do with how we […]
Bearing Witness to an Unpopular Message
For Sunday, July 5, 2015, 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time I remember a time when the world was changing very rapidly indeed. It was the late 80s and much of the change was centralized in Europe with the Solidarity movement in Poland, Perestroika and Glasnost in Russia, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The change was […]