The Nobility of Matter
Homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord Recently I drove up to the cemetery to say a rosary and visit my mother’s grave site, as well as a number of other parishioners who are buried there. I...
Category: Scripture Reflection
A Leaven of Unity, Communion, and Fraternity
With the death of Pope Francis and the election of Leo XIV, the Church finds itself in a phase of transition. While much has been revealed about Leo XIV’s priorities and the direction the Church will take under his leadership,...
Pope Leo XIV on migrants: “Like Jesus Christ, forced to flee”
Editor’s note: On Sunday, September 27, 2020 — at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic — Pope Leo XIV delivered the following homily on the 106th World Day of Migrants and Refugees. Given from the context of Peruvian culture, then-Bishop...
A Shepherd like the Good Shepherd
On the Sunday that we hear the words of Jesus in the Gospel, “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me,” (Jn 10:27), we have a new Pope. Pope Leo XIV is the 267th Pope of...
Thomas’s search for Jesus
Where was Thomas, anyway? Scripture doesn’t give us any clues, but his absence is not remarkable merely that he missed out on the first visit to the Upper Room by Jesus. Think about the first words of today’s Gospel: “On...
A Meditation on Christ’s Agony, Part III
Already posted in this series: Part One; Part Two I am troubled now. John, mystic among Evangelists, treats of the Agony’s psychological inner content only as a pericope within the context of Palm Sunday and the entry in Jerusalem, Jesus...
A Meditation on Christ’s Agony, Part II
For Part I, link here. My soul is sorrowful, even to death. To attribute Christ’s desolation to anticipatory fear before his betrayal, condemnation and crucifixion is profoundly inadequate (although St. John of the Cross teaches that the more spiritual an...
A Meditation on Christ’s Agony, Part I
St. Alphonsus Liguori tells of this legend: “St. Thomas Aquinas was one day paying a visit to St. Bonaventure, and asked him from what book he had drawn all the beautiful lessons he had written. St. Bonaventure showed him the...
Will the Real Neighbor Please Stand Up?
There has recently been a flurry of articles about the parable of the Good Samaritan and the situation of undocumented immigrants. In an interview on Fox News, Vice-President JD Vance spoke about the ordo amoris and said that “there’s this...
The Parable of the Cheese Puffs
In his compelling shift from words of blessing to words of woe in today’s Gospel, Jesus acknowledges that there’s an unavoidable distinction between the “haves” and the “have nots” in this world, but he warns that guarding our “having” to...
The Humor in Irony
Homily for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (Readings). The gospel reading on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (Lk 2, 22-40) is really about humility. The word humility comes from the Latin ‘humous’, which means...
The Waters of the Font
One of the things we do here at Sacred Beauty, our small Association of the Faithful, is the composing of liturgical music, drawn largely from sacred texts of the saints, fathers, and doctors of the Church, in the hopes of...
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