Gordon Hayward - Butler Star and NBA Star converts to Catholicism!

 

Here is Gordon Hayward's near miss in the National Championship game that would have caused Indianapolis to burn down!

Saint Paul's Greatest Failure - Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2025

 

Saint Paul’s Greatest Failure as a Preacher

I would like to preach about Saint Paul’s greatest failure as a preacher, how he learned from it, and what the implications are for us today.

About halfway through the Acts of the Apostles, it talks about how Saint Paul went to Athens.  And he is walking around Athens getting ready for his opportunity to address the philosophers in Athens.  Saint Paul sees all these different altars around town just off to the side of the roads.  There was an altar to Zeus, and candles and incense being lit at the altar by devotees of Zeus.  Maybe several hundred yards down the road, there was an altar to Aphrodite, with a statue of Aphrodite on it, and candles and incense being burned to honor her.

Saint Paul, at some point during his walk around Athens comes across an altar, as the inscription says, to “an unknown god” with no statue on it. 

Later that day, then, when Saint Paul gets his chance to speak to the people of Athens, he shares the experience of his walk through town and says “As I walked through your town, I came across an altar to an unknown god.  That is the god that I serve.”  And the people of Athens are completely unimpressed and say “we should like to hear more about this from you some other time” which means exactly what it does 2,000 years later – “we could care less.”

 

The Acts of the Apostles says after this, Saint Paul went to Corinth.

 

And when we read Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, it is clear, right from the very start, that he has learned two HIGHLY valuable lessons from his Athens failure.  In Chapter 1 Saint Paul writes “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.”

And in Chapter 2 Saint Paul says “When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God, I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”

 

In Athens, Saint Paul did not mention the Name of Jesus, and he did not mention suffering.

 

In our Gospel today, when Jesus sends out the 72, they come back saying “Jesus, at the mention of your NAME, demons tremble.  In the Mass, and everywhere, when we hear the name of Jesus mentioned, we are to bow our heads.  If we hear someone take the name of Jesus in vain, we should charitably correct them, and ask them not to take the name of Jesus in vain.

 

So, getting to our 2^nd reading today, Saint Paul says “may I never boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”

 

The lesson, it seems to me, is clear.  When we are talking to people, we should be mentioning the name of Jesus, and we should be talking about the power of the Cross; the power of suffering and offering our suffering up, and how that helps others and ourselves.  We should be, as Saint Paul says elsewhere, “boasting in our weaknesses” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

 

Let us never fail to mention Jesus’ Name when trying to spread the Good News of the Gospel with Joy, and may others see in us a joy in the midst of the various sufferings, big and small, that we encounter each day.  As St. Paul learns, those are the 2 things that will attract other people to also follow Jesus Christ.

Mass for July 4th, 2025

The Catholic Church has a special Mass for the United States every July 4th.  I prayed the Mass this morning.  The Collect (opening prayer) was especially poignant:

 Father of all nations and ages,

 we recall the day when our country

 claimed its place among the family of nations;

 for what has been achieved we give you thanks,

 for the work that still remains we ask your help,

 and as you have called us from many peoples to be one nation,

 grant that, under your providence,

 our country may share your blessings

 with all the peoples of the earth.

 Through our lord Jesus Christ, your son,

 who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the holy spirit,

 one God, for ever and ever.

Corpus Christi Processions 2025

 

Pope Leo With Encouraging Words for Us Priests!

 ADDRESS OF THE HOLY FATHER TO THE CLERGY OF THE DIOCESE OF ROME 

Thursday, 12 June 2025

I want to ask for a big round of applause for all of you who are here, and for all the priests and deacons of Rome!

Dear Priests and Deacons who provide your service in the diocese of Rome, dear seminarians, I greet you all with affection and friendship!

I thank His Eminence the Cardinal Vicar, for the words of greeting and for his presentation, telling something of your presence in this city.

I wished to meet you to get to know you personally, and to begin walking with you. I thank you for your life given in the service of the Kingdom, for your daily labours, for your great generosity in the exercise of your ministry, for everything you live in silence and that is at times accompanied by suffering or misunderstanding. You carry out different services, but you are all precious in the eyes of God and in the fulfilment of his plan.

The diocese of Rome presides in charity and in communion, and can fulfil this mission thanks to each one of you, in the bond of grace with the Bishop and in the fruitful co-responsibility of all God’s people. Ours is a truly particular diocese, because many priests come from various parts of the world, especially in order to study; and this implies that pastoral care too – I am thinking above all of the parishes – is marked by this universality and the mutual acceptance it entails.

Starting precisely from this universal outlook that Rome offers, I would like to share cordially with you a few reflections.

The first note, that is particularly close to my heart, is that of unity and communion. In the so-called “priestly” prayer, as we know, Jesus asked the Father that his people may be one (cf. Jn 20-23). The Lord knows well that only by being joined to him and united among ourselves can we bear fruilt and give credible witness to the world. Presbyteral communion here in Rome is favoured by the fact that, by ancient tradition, it is it is customary to live together, in rectories as well as in colleges or other residences. The presbyter is called to be the man of communion, because he is the first to live it, and continually nurtures it. We know that this communion today is hindered by a cultural climate that favours isolation or self-absorption. None of us is exempt from these pitfalls that threaten the solidity of our spiritual life and the strength of our ministry.

But we must be vigilant because, in addition to the cultural context, communion and fraternity among us also encounter some obstacles that are, so to speak, “internal”, which relate to the ecclesial life of the diocese, interpersonal relationships, and also what resides in the heart, especially that feeling of weariness that arises because we have experienced particular hardships, because we do not feel we are understood and heard, or for other reasons. I would like to help you, to walk with you, so that each person may regain serenity in his own ministry; but it is precisely for this reason that I ask you for zeal in priestly fraternity, which has its roots in a solid spiritual life, in the encounter with the Lord and in listening to his Word. Nourished by this lymph, we are able to have relationships of friendship, outdoing one another in respect (cf. Rm 12:10); we feel the need for others in order to grow and to foster the same ecclesial drive.

Communion should also be translated into commitment in this diocese: with diverse charisms, with different paths of formation and even with different services, but the effort to sustain it must be one. I ask all of you to pay attention to the pastoral journey of this Chruch which is local but, because of who leads it, is also universal. Walking together is always a guarantee of fidelity to the Gospel; together and in harmony, striving to enrich the Church with one’s own charism but having at heart the single body of which Christ is the Head.

The second note I want to give you is that of exemplarity. On the occasion of the priestly ordinations on 31 May last, in the homily I recalled the importance of the transparency of life, on the basis of the words of Saint Paul who said to the elders of Ephesus: “You yourselves know how I lived among you” (Acts 20:18). I ask you, with the heart of a father and of a pastor, let us all undertake to be credible and exemplary priests! We are aware of the limits of our nature and the Lord knows us in depth; but we have received an extraordinary grace; we have been entrusted with a precious treasure of which we are the ministers, the servants. And fidelity is required of the servant. None of us is exempt from the suggestions of the world, and the city, with its thousands of offerings, could even draw us away from the desire for a holy life, inducing a levelling down in which the profound values of being a priest are lost. Let yourselves be drawn once again by the call of the Master, to feel and live the love of the first hour, that which drove you to make important choices and courageous sacrifices. If together we try to be exemplary in a humble life, then we will be able to express the renewing force of the Gospel for every man and for every woman.

A final note I wish to give you you is that of looking at the challenges of our time from a prophetic perspective. We are concerned and saddened by everything that happens every day in the world: we are hurt by the violence that generates death, we are challenged by inequalities, poverty, many forms of social marginalization, the widespread suffering that assumes the features of an unease that no longer spares anyone. And these are not distant realities, far from us, but rather they affect even our city of Rome, marked by multiple forms of poverty and grave emergencies such as the issue of housing. A city in which, as Pope Francis remarked, the “great beauty” and charm of art must also be matched by “simple decorum and the normal functioning of places and situations in ordinary, everyday life. Because a city that is more liveable for its citizens is also more welcoming to everyone” (Homily for Vespers with Te Deum, 31 December 2023).

The Lord wanted us in this time filled with challenges that, at times, seem to exceed our strength. We are called to embrace these challenges, to interpret them evangelically, to experience them as opportunities to bear witness. Let us not flee from them! Pastoral commitment, like that of study, become for us a school to learn how to build the Kingdom of God in today's complex and challenging history. In recent times we have had the example of holy priests who have been able to combine a passion for history with the proclamation of the Gospel, such as Don Primo Mazzolari and Don Lorenzo Milani, prophets of peace and justice. And here in Rome we have had Don Luigi Di Liegro who, faced with so much poverty, devoted his life to seeking ways of justice and human advancement. Let us draw on the strength of these examples to continue sowing seeds of holiness in our city.

Dear friends, I assure you of my closeness, my affection and my readiness to walk with you. Let us entrust our priestly life to the Lord, and let us ask him to be able to grow in unity, exemplarity and in prophetic commitment to serve our time. May we be accompanied by the heartfelt appeal of Saint Augustine, who said: “Love this Church, be ye in this holy Church, be ye this Church; love the Good Shepherd, the Spouse so fair, who deceiveth no one, who desireth no one to perish. Pray too for the scattered sheep; that they too may come, that they too may acknowledge Him, that they too may love Him; that there may be One Flock and One Shepherd” (Sermon 138, 10). Thank you.

My Ordination

16th Ordination Anniversary Homily

 

Righteous Anger?

 

“Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22)

 

Is anger sinful?  There is a Church Father who said: “he who, on just cause, is not angry, is in sin; for an unreasonable patience invites the good as well as the bad to do evil.”

 

Of course the most famous incident in Jesus’ life of justified anger is when he flipped over the tables in the Temple.

 

In 2018, I preached a righteously angry homily against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.  If I had not preached that homily, then the hundreds of victims who I have been able to help in some small way would have not been helped.

 

Does anyone this morning here like the fact that children and vulnerable adults are sex-trafficked?  The pornography “industry” is the worst sex trafficker of children and vulnerable adults IN THE WORLD!  And they get money every time anyone clicks on an image or video.  You SHOULD allow your righteous anger to compel you to never click on a video or image of pornography moving forward.

 

Priests and religious brothers and sisters pray night prayer every night, and last night we had the reading that we have every Wednesday: “If you are angry, let it be without sin” (Ephesians 4:26) that means, of course, as we have been saying, that there ARE things that we should be angry about, and that “anger” is not sinful but rather there are situations where, if we are NOT angry, that is sinful.

 

Far from being the opposite of “love” there are many situations where “love” DEMANDS being angry.  What are we righteously angry about, and what are we doing this morning to be part of the solution to those situations?

Some of Paul's Letters are confusing

In our first reading this morning, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "For the Son of God, Jesus Christ...was not “yes” and “no,” but “yes” has been in him.

This struck me as confusing, eventhough I have read it hundreds of times.

Jesus Christ clearly says in the Gospels "no" to lots of different sins; so what does St. Paul mean that there was not “yes” and “no,” but “yes” has been in him"?

In praying over today's first reading for the last 24 hours or so, I am reminded of what St. Peter said at the end of his 2nd letter: 

"Our beloved brother Paul, also wrote to you, speaking of these things as he does in all his letters. In them there are some things hard to understand that the ignorant and unstable distort to their own destruction, just as they do the other scriptures" (2 Peter 3:15-16).

In reading various commentaries, I found little help from them.  But I would like to recommend the USCCB website.  When you go to the "Daily Reading" link, it takes you to a wonderful page where all the readings for the day are on one page.  

The only downside is that the page with the readings does not have any footnotes.  But if you click on "2 Corinthians 1:18-22" at the top right of the page, it takes you to that chapter of the Bible on the USCCB website with the footnotes.

You can click HERE to go to 2 Corinthians 1:18-22.

And once you are there, there is a star right after "faithful" and when you click on it, the footnote says this: 

"Christ, Paul, and the Corinthians all participate in analogous ways in the constancy of God. A number of the terms here, which appear related only conceptually in Greek or English, would be variations of the same root, ’mn, in a Semitic language, and thus naturally associated in a Semitic mind, such as Paul’s. These include the words "yes", "faithful", "Amen", "gives us security", "faith", and "stand firm". 

The point of this homily is this: sometimes when you read the daily readings for Mass, they do not, on your first reading of them, make sense.  But the Church says that it ALWAYS bears fruit in our lives when we dive deeper on the questions that rise in our hearts on our first reading of any passage in the Bible.

Homily for the Ascension: Waiting in Trust for Christ's Return

Spy Wednesday 2025

 

Today we remember Spy Wednesday, the day that Judas betrayed Jesus and handed Jesus over to the Jewish leaders.

Judas’s betrayal on a Wednesday is why the early Church (and many still today) fast almost every Wednesday throughout the year.

There is a really problematic and wrong understanding of why Judas betrayed Jesus, and I would like to preach about why that wrong understanding has so many harmful implications.

The general wrong position is “Judas HAD to betray Jesus?”  so God had Judas do something evil so that something even better could come out of Judas’s betrayal…. And so Judas may have just been performing a needed role for God.

 

But the Gospels discredit all this.  Jesus says in today’s Gospel “woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.  It would be better for that man if he had never been born.”

 

So what is the right way to understand these events? 

First of all, we need to know that God NEVER forces nor commands someone to do wrong.  God is incapable of having anything to do with evil or sin. 

And Here’s the problem with thinking God CAN have someone do a wrong act – if God can have people do a wrong act for good outcomes, then WE can start doing wrong acts for “Good outcomes that we think will happen”

God ALLOWS evil, but only ever because God desires to bring something GREATER out of the allowed evil.

LITERALLY ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE THE MOMENT A PERCEIVED FUTURE CONSEQUENCE CAN BE USED TO JUSTIFY AN ACTION

And so it has become fashionable to say such things, even in the Church today, that apparently wrong acts might not actually BE wrong, as the circumstances or intentions of an act might make a wrong act actually good.  

But the Chruch says that there are 3 things that make any human act according to the Catechism paragraph 1750

1)      Act itself

2)     Circumstances surrounding the act

3)     Intentions of the person doing the act

 

And so if the act itself is wrong, no circumstances nor our intentions can make that act a good act

Catechism paragraph 1753 provides us with an example

It says “A good intention, for example, that of helping one's neighbor, does not make behavior that is intrinsically disordered, such as lying and calumny, good or just. The end does not justify the means.

 

The Catechism in paragraph 1755 says there are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely wrong; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery.

One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

 

That is a distinctly Catholic phrase that the Catechism repeats over and over again, the perceived ends, which we can never actually know, never justify the means to get to those ends

Jesus’ words about Judas need to be with us always – Woe to that man by whom the son of man is betrayed.  It would be better for that man if he had never been born.

So what, then, is the best way for each of us to proceed?  First of all we need to pray for the Lord to always be purifying our intentions. 

Secondly, there is SO MUCH SUFFERING in our world.  I think we can all look around and find one person who is carrying a cross of suffering, and our offering to help that person carry their cross is probably a big part of what God is hoping to bring out of whatever evil was done to that person.

 

My Mission Talks from New Hampshire

 

Kevin Wells article about me

 I am super grateful to author Kevin Wells for writing an amazing article about my journey that you can read by clicking HERE

Holy Week Hype Video!

Created with the "New Evangelization Ninjas" at Annunciation several years ago!

Fiat Classical Academy

Catholic Church Sexual Abusers...if you do not repent "sooner or later God will cut you down"

BEAUTIFUL Sung stations of the Cross

Homily on Pornography and "Covenant Eyes"

Pornography and the temptations of Jesus 

The Devil tempts Jesus in the desert, and we first of all need to understand that Jesus was in fact TEMPTED.

It can be a temptation for us to think of Jesus as a robot, or that Jesus is God pretending to be a human being, but he is a human being like us.  In the book of Hebrews, we find in chapter 4 that Christ was tempted in every way we are, but did not sin.

 

And so I would like to briefly preach about one of the greatest temptations to sin that our world has ever known.  And that is the temptation to view explicit material, particularly on our phones and computers.

 

When I was 7, despite being homeschooled, I was exposed to explicit material at a friend’s house when my friend found his dad’s magazines.  It is not a matter of IF your child or teen will be exposed to explicit material, but WHEN.

 

“The use of pornography by anyone in the home deprives the home of its role as a safe haven and has negative effects throughout the family’s life and across generations”

“Create in me a clean heart” a pastoral response to Pornography” by the USCCB (2015)

Pope Francis also questioned social media for the first time in 2015…why 2015 for both the USCCB and Pope Francis…because 2015 was the first time the majority of U.S. teens had a smart phone.

A recent study found that 82% of teens and 72% of preteens sleep with their phone in the bedroom

            This places kids at greater risk to exposure to explicit content, encourages isolation, and makes it more difficult to have accountability

I also counsel every person who struggles with viewing explicit material that the pornography industry is the greatest human trafficker of children and vulnerable adults in the world so even if the video or image you click on does not involve a child the pornography industry gets money from that view and so any time you view any explicit material you are helping to fund human trafficking.  NO one here wants to see their child or a niece or nephew or friend or relative human trafficked. 

The 4 parishes of Dearborn County have been asked by the Archdiocese to pilot a totally free program called “Covenant Eyes”.  It works!  My parents have used it for 20 years.

As you leave Mass today, there is an ebook on how to create a safe environment for your family

 

Jesus was tempted, and you and your family certainly face graves temptations and guaranteed exposure to explicit material.  Please take advantage of the resources we are offering as you leave Mass this morning!

 

Many of our homes have glass TV screens that we stare at, glass smart phone screens that we stare at, glass tablet screens that we stare at, and glass laptop screens that we stare at… but at the end of this Mass we have a few minutes to stare at the only glass screen that will bring us any lasting peace.  At the end of this Mass we will have a few minutes to stare at the glass screen of a monstrance with Jesus’ Real Presence right behind it.  Let us gaze on Him, and allow Him to heal all our ills and grant us His peace!

My Two Favorite Evangelists

Video on All Saints Parish