Catholic Preaching Father Roger Landry

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Vigil

May 4, 2024

 

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The following text guided the homily: 



* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into what I think may be perhaps the most consequential conversation of all time, in the Risen Lord Jesus’ words to the apostles that constitute our Gospel passage this Sunday.

* Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us. Since God is love, he wishes to bring us into that communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.

* We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a Catholic high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double-windsor knot perfect, with every hair shampooed and combed or gelled in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. But what was going on was crystal clear. They had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. If this is what can happen with a teenage crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when we realize that God loves us permanently and begin to live in that love? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in someone’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?”

* In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in romantic relationships especially marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, who exists in a loving communion of persons. If we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves. That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him.

* But the consequential conversation with Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and from his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we don’t think we’re worthy of it,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph’s Men’s Retreat

Malvern Retreat House, Malvern, Pennsylvania

Feast of SS. Philip and James

May 3, 2024

1 Cor 15:1-8, Ps 19, Jn 14:6-14



 

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The following text guided the homily: 



* Today we celebrate the feast of two apostles together, Saints Philip and James the Lesser, at the beginning of our retreat on Manly Love for the Eucharistic Jesus. These two Galileans had a manly love for Jesus in life. They were willing to leave everything behind to follow him for three years in his public ministry. They were with Jesus in the Upper Room when he startled them by taking bread and wine into his hands and totally transforming it into himself, saying, “Take and eat. This is my Body,” and “Take and drink. This chalice is the new covenant in my blood.” After their betrayal later on Holy Thursday, they valiantly came back and were together with the other eight apostles — minus Thomas — when Jesus appeared to them in the Upper Room on Easter Sunday. They were present in the same Upper Room 50 days later when the Holy Spirit came down upon them as a strong driving wind and as tongues of fire, so that the Holy Spirit could with strong gusts send them across the then known world to proclaim the Gospel with ardor. And they were those who not only were the living echoes of the words or works of Christ in the first decades of Christianity, but they were the ones who celebrated the Eucharist in Christ’s memory and ordained the first generations of priests and bishops to nourish the Church and bring it into holy communion. They were men whose love for Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, in his public ministry and his passion, death and resurrection translated into their love for the same Jesus, the Word made flesh, under the sacramental appearances of bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist. We have much to learn from them, but I’d like tonight to focus on three lessons we can learn from them about the Eucharistic reality of our life.

* The first is about the way the Holy Eucharist is both an expression and cause of the Church’s communion that is at the source of the Church’s being and mission. Many have asked over the course of time why we celebrate the apostles Philip and James together. The primary reason is historical, because their relics were brought to the Church of the Holy Apostles (Dodici Apostoli) and buried there together in the ninth century. Since we have prayed for them together at Mass on the anniversary of their translation. This is similar to the reason why, for example, we celebrate on October 28 the feast of Saint Simon and Jude, because their relics are interred together in the Basilica of St. Peter under the tabernacle at the altar of St. Joseph in the southern transept. While it would certainly be fitting for us to celebrate Saints Philip and James individually, as we do the other eight apostles (including St. Matthias who took Judas’ place), there is a certain fittingness to fête them jointly, since when Jesus initially sent out the twelve to proclaim his kingdom by words and deeds, he sent them out in pairs. It’s quite possible that Philip and James were at one time explicit partners in the proclamation of the Gospel and hence their feast is an opportunity for us to examine something that perhaps we as Christians don’t ponder enough: who are our partners in the proclamation of the Gospel? If it’s important for police officers to have partners on whom they can depend, how much more important is it for those called to proclaim the Gospel, not only so that we can have each other’s back,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Feast of SS. Philip and James, Apostles

May 3, 2024

1 Cor 15:1-8, Ps 19, Jn 14:6-14

 

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The following points were pondered in the homily: 



* Today we celebrate the feast of two apostles together, Saints Philip and James the Lesser. The reason why we celebrate them together is historical, because their relics were brought to the Church of the Holy Apostles (Dodici Apostoli) and buried there together in the ninth century, similar to the reason why we celebrate on October 28 the feast of Saint Simon and Jude, because their relics are interred together in the Basilica of St. Peter. While it would certainly be fitting for us to celebrate them individually, as we do the other eight apostles (including St. Matthias who took Judas’ place), there is a certain fittingness to fête them jointly, since when Jesus initially sent out the twelve to proclaim his kingdom by words and deeds, he sent them out in pairs. It’s quite possible that Philip and James were at one time explicit partners in the proclamation of the Gospel and hence their feast is an opportunity for us to examine something that perhaps we don’t ponder enough: who are our partners in the proclamation of the Gospel? If it’s important for police officers to have partners on whom they can depend, how much more important is it for those called to proclaim the Gospel, not only so that we can have each other’s back, but so that we can more easily put into practice the Gospel we proclaim to others. St. Gregory the Great once commented that the reason why Jesus sent out the apostles to proclaim the Gospel two-by-two even though they could have theoretically covered twice as much ground if he had sent them out individually was so that as they proclaimed the Gospel, they would be able to learn and show how to love one another, how to forgive one another, how to live in communion. So today as we ponder what we need to learn in the Word of God, we can do so in the context of examining how we can proclaim the Gospel better in tandem with others and who are those whom the Lord has put into our lives with whom we can preach. Certainly Christian married couples are sent out two-by-two. But it behooves all of us to look around to see what friendships we can nourish, what bonds we can form, so that we can live the Gospel better and proclaim it more effectively.

* In today’s first reading, St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us about the importance of proclaiming the Gospel. “I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received,” and then he describes for us Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and appearances. To pass on the Gospel was “of first importance,” in other words, the most important thing he could do and they in turn could do. Why? He told them right before, because it is the Gospel that “you indeed received and in which you also stand [and through which] you are also being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.” When we receive the Gospel with faith and hold fast to it, our lives our made secure — we stand in it firmly — and we are being saved through it, always in the present tense. The Gospel places our life on the most solid foundation of all and leads to salvation. How could we not want to share that gift with others? As we collaborate with others in the desire to share the Gospel, we strengthen others on that foundation and ever-present work of redemption.

* But the Gospel is not fundamentally a group of teachings or facts. The kergyma — what St. Paul preached about Jesus’ life, death,

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York, NYThursday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Memorial of St. Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor of the ChurchMay 2, 2024Act 15: 7-21, Ps 96, Jn 15:9-11

 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 



Today in the Gospel Jesus says what I believe are the most important words in the history of the world. We will hear them again on Sunday. These words are important whenever anyone says them, but the fact that God himself said them in the way that he said them, and then put them into his own body language, makes them the most life-changing phrase ever: “I love you,” he tells us. We need to stop and ponder the reality of those words! “I love you.” But then Jesus puts them into a context that ought to astound us: “Just as the Father loves me, I love you.” The Father loves him perfectly, profoundly and intimately — and Jesus tells us that he loves us in that same way. And he doesn’t merely love us “all” in that way, but he loves each of us in that way, as St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “He loved me and gave his life for me” (Gal 2:20).

Grasping this reality is essential not only for the Christian life but for human life. “Man cannot live without love,” St. John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis. “He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” (RH 10). This is true for love in general. We need the love of family, the love of friends, the spousal love of a husband or wife (either human or mystical), the total self-giving love of someone who values us that much. Without it, we’re lost. Many people who don’t experience this love spend their lives looking for it in places they won’t find it. If they haven’t experienced the love of a mom or dad, they often get themselves into trouble seeking that love in relationships that will never truly substitute. If they’ve suffered violence in relationships that should have been loving, often they’ll get involved in lifestyles that will try to reconstruct the love that should have been present in the first place. But it is also true in terms of divine love. There are many people — including many Catholics — who have never really experienced the love of the Lord. Their notion of God is perhaps an angry God, or a distant, negligent God, or a God who is a stern taskmaster making sure they fulfill all their duties lest they be punished, or even an indulgent God who doesn’t care about them enough to concern himself with their self-destructive choices. They haven’t experienced a loving God. Many people are filled with a type of self-pity or self-hatred because they have never experienced God’s love and often don’t believe they are lovable by God or anyone else, that they can never please him, that they’re constantly letting him, themselves and everyone else down. Today Jesus says to them, and to all of us, “I love you … just as my Father loves me!” And he shows them how much he loves them by telling them that he will lay down his life for them out of agapic philia, which we would have had in tomorrow’s continuation of today’s Gospel if it were not the feast of the apostles Philip and James: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He will love them to the extreme of his self-giving.

After Jesus says the most important words in history he then gives us the most important command of the Christian life. “Remain in my love.” As much as he loves us,

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, ManhattanWednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Memorial of St. Joseph the WorkerMay 1, 2024Acts 15:1-6, Ps 122, Jn 15:1-8

 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 



Today we mark the Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, which was instituted 69 years ago in 1955 by Pope Pius XII both to give a spiritual context to “Labor Day” in many European countries as well as a spiritual response to the “May Day” celebrations in communist countries where the meaning of human work and the relationship between human worker and the State were distorted. Pope Pius XII wanted the whole Church on this day to go on pilgrimage to a carpenter’s shop in Nazareth to find in the hardworking St. Joseph and his diligent foster Son the key that unlocks the meaning of the dignity, beauty and redemptive importance of human labor as part of Christ’s mission of love, so that we might not perish but have eternal life. So many today are confused about how important work is. Some, for example, behave as if work is just a necessary evil that we have to endure until we earn enough money or get to the magic age when life can become an unending vacation on the golf course or lounging at the pool. Others fail to see in the crisis of unemployment, especially among the young, that we’re dealing with something far greater than a pressing economic problem, but rather a profoundly dehumanizing one that can gradually deprive millions of a sense of moral worth through a sense of being useless. And sometimes we can see a combination of both of these confusions when people who can work just choose not to do so, opting rather to take advantage of the generosity of family members or other workers in society so that they can seemingly remain on vacation 365 days a year. Insofar as most people will spend at least 25 percent of their week, from the time they’re five through when they’re 65 or older, doing some form of work, it’s important that we learn from St. Joseph how to turn our work into a pleasing offering to God.

* Today’s readings help us to focus on aspects of the Gospel of Work epitomized by St. Joseph. In the Gospel, we have for the second time in four days the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches. I won’t repeat what I said on Sunday at the student Mass. I want to highlight rather how the fruit of all our labor is meant to come from the unity we have with Jesus. Apart from him, we can do nothing; but with him, our work can become a crucial part of the redemption. Through the Sacrament of Baptism, we enter into an ontological communion with him, one intensified by the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. But he wants us to remain in a moral communion with him, by working together with him always. This union is the essence of the Christian life. We enter into an interpersonal communion with the Lord that flows into deeds. And through this mutual communion with Christ, we also enter, as we see in this image, into communion and collaboration with all others who are similarly attached as branches on the same Vine. At the end of today’s Gospel, he says, somewhat shockingly, that to become his disciples, we must bear fruit. To become his disciples, we must be in communion with him the Vine and allow his fruit to mature in us: that’s the way we become true disciples. Part of that fruit is our communion with others, which is, as Jesus would say later on Holy Thursday, one of the means by which the father will be glorified and the world know that the Father sent the Son and loves us like he loves the Son.

* This focus on this communion with Christ and with others,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Memorial of St. Pius V

April 30, 2024

Acts 14:19-28, Ps 145, Jn 14:27-31

 

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 



One of the greatest paradoxes in the Christian faith, one of the most important things for us to grasp and live, involves the reality of God’s peace in the Christian life, especially in times of strife like we now have on the Columbia campus or of persecution, like the Church has endures in every century and continues to endure. Jesus tells us in the Gospel today and reiterates for us in every Mass, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” He was saying these words to the apostles just hours before he would be arrested and on the vigil of his being massacred by Roman soldiers. He wanted them to remain at peace during all that would transpire, just as he would be at peace. At the beginning of this discourse, which we heard on Friday, Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God. Have faith also in me.” Today he repeats those words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” He reiterates that he is going away but will come back and has given them these words of peace before everything would transpire “so that when it happens you may believe.”

Now that it has happened, and the Church reflects on these words in the light of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, it’s important to check how deeply we believe in these words about peace (and everything else) Jesus tells us. He reminds them that the “ruler of this world is coming” but clarifies that “he has no power over me.” Jesus will allow everything that will occur to happen to him so that the world will know “that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.” Jesus peacefully underwent even his crucifixion in order to show his love for the Father, because real love is shown in trial. Jesus was able to say these words because, as we’ve been talking about all Easter season long, by his resurrection he would show that not even a brutal crucifixion is enough to take one’s peace away, that there’s nothing truly to be afraid of, that in the end God triumphs and all of us who live and die in him will share that victory. That’s the ultimate ground for the peace he gives us and leaves with us. Our peace is grounded in our living relationship with him, the Prince of Peace. It is made possible by the peace treaty he signs in his own blood with God the Father through his mercy. It’s made possible by the gift of the Holy Spirit that he and the Father send. We see both fully on display on Easter Sunday evening when Jesus enters the closed doors of the Upper Room, twice wishes his startled followers peace, and then says “Receive the Holy Spirit” and “those whose sins you forgive are forgiven.” Pope Francis said several years ago in a homily in the Vatican that the peace Jesus leaves and gives is fundamentally the Holy Spirit, remembering that when Jesus in the Upper Room wished the apostles “peace be with you,” he then breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The peace that Jesus leaves with us, the peace that the world can’t give or rob, is the peace that flows from our grounding our entire life on God. If God is our treasure, if God is our foundation, if Jesus is our way, truth and life, if we’ve constructed our existence on him the cornerstone, if we are living by the Holy Spirit, then persecution, trouble, or even crucifixion can’t take that peace away but rather can confirm it.

If this is true, why is there such lack of peace in the world, in our country,