Category: Sunday Homilies

I am of more or less half Croatian and half Irish ancestry, with perhaps a little bit of German stock added in way back. This year the second Sunday of Lent happens to fall on the seventeenth of March, the feast of Saint Patrick, and so naturally my Irish side (and eyes) are smiling today. […]

LK 4:1-13 The Gospel of the temptations of Jesus in the desert should be looked at alongside of the Old Testament accounts of the Israelites in the Desert.  Moses led the Israelites for forty years in the desert as they prepared to enter the Promised Land.  During this time there were periods when they grumbled […]

March 3, 2019 Between Lent, which begins this Wednesday, the long Easter season, and the special feasts of the Pentecost, the Most Holy Trinity, and Corpus Christi, we celebrate today the final Sunday of Ordinary Time until the end of June.  The Church sets us off on our journey through the most important seasons of […]

Gospel LK 6:27-38 This Gospel takes place immediately after Jesus was on a mountain to pray and then chose twelve from among his disciples to be apostles. Together they came down the mountain and began to minister to the crowds who were waiting for Jesus.  It is here that he gives what is known as […]

Two Sundays ago we heard a reading from the great prophet Jeremiah, describing his prophetic calling; today we hear from him again, though this time in a moment when he is enduring a crisis of faith in his fellow man—both his countrymen and the foreigners to whom they turned for assistance.  It is helpful to […]

Readings 1 IS 6:1-2A, 3-8, 2 1 COR 15:1-11, Gospel LK 5:1-11 How do we respond when God asks us to do a seemingly impossible task?  We can learn a lesson from the Old Testament and Gospel readings for today.  Isaiah has a vision of the Lord in which the angels cry out “Holy, Holy, […]

By good fortune the first Sunday in February this year falls on the third day of the month, which happens to be the feast day of Saint Blase. Blase (also spelled Blaise) has been and remains a figure far more popular in the United States and beyond than one might have estimated given his geographical […]

I Corinthians 12: 12 – 30, Gospel –Luke 1: 1 – 4; 4: 14 – 21 It is common that shortly after a man is ordained to the priesthood he returns to his home parish to celebrate his First Mass, or Mass of Thanksgiving.  There he is in the Church he grew up in and […]

Although the Church’s annual cycle of worship began with Advent, some six weeks ago, today’s readings re-launch the Church into the “ordinary time” of the year following our celebration of the Advent and Christmas seasons. They do so on a note of joyful missionary zeal: the first reading from Isaiah conveys a sense of the […]

Isaiah 42: 1 – 4, 6 – 7, Gospel – Luke 3: 15 – 1621 – 22 According to the Church’s Liturgical Calendar today’s Feast of the Baptism of the Lord marks the end of the Christmas Season.  Unfortunately our culture has us celebrating Christmas months before December 25th and then ending it abruptly on […]