Fides ex Auditu

The title of the fifth book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, is the combination of two Greek words meaning “another” or “second” law. Today’s First Reading is taken from the conclusion of this “second law”, and, there, Moses’ speech suggests that the People of God have accepted the law he has spoken to them and must now put into practice what they have been given: the law “is something very near to you,” Moses assures them, it is “already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.”  Every Sunday, the Church, the new People of God, gathers to listen to God’s law proclaimed to them with the expectation and command that they will “go forth” from the Mass to put what they have received into action. Yet practicing God’s law presumes the People have accepted it; and as even the smallest degree of awareness indicates, like Israel of old, some Catholics today struggle to accept what the Church teaches, particularly on issues of morality. Rather than being “near” to them and “a

The most recent installment of the Star Wars saga turns around Obi-Wan Kenobi’s startling realization that his padawan apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who he thought he had left for dead, in fact, lives in the ruthless and fearsome Sith lord Darth Vader. Obi-Wan must now contend with the fact that his own student, whom he once loved as a brother, has utterly rejected his master’s teaching and has instead fully embraced the dark side of the Force to advance his reign of terror in the galaxy.  If we can take the premise of Obi-Wan as an analogy of the Christian life, we would find that the startling realization on which our lives turn goes in the opposite direction. We are not one and the same as Anakin Skywalker, although we do share with him a divided heart. As we recognize our own failure to adhere to the teaches of Christ our Master in preference of our pride, we look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, “What have I become?” Our sin and its destructive force with which it wreaks havoc

For the past week, I was on vacation with a group of young adults in the mountains of western Colorado. Among the 15 of us were four priests, a seminarian, several married couples, at least one person discerning religious life, and a handful of single people. We spent the days hiking and biking and the evenings cooking, telling stories, singing songs, and of course, lifting our hearts and voices to the Lord in praise.  As we started out on one of our hikes, I asked a couple of the people in the group what they thought I should preach about this Sunday, on the Solemnity of the Lord’s Body and Blood. The conversation lasted several miles and left me with much to think about. In fact, it was so insightful that I titled that hike on Strava as “Afternoon Homily Writing.”  As we talked about the Eucharist, we kept coming back to the question, “Why does the Eucharist matter?” Obviously, we believe that it does, but we were searching for the right way of expressing why it matters for us, for t

Fifty days ago, the Light of Christ, in the single flame of the Paschal Candle taken from the Easter Fire pierced the darkness of this church at the beginning of the great Vigil of the Lord’s Resurrection. In the Easter days since, the same Light of Christ has continued to burn before us in this Candle, and we have basked in the warmth of its rays as the most sacred mysteries of our Christian faith have been renewed. But now, on this day, when the time for Pentecost has been fulfilled, the Light from this Candle no longer remains at a distance, but it leaps down upon us in tongues of flame to burn us, to consume us, and to make us into people of fire to carry this Light of Christ from this holy place to pierce the darkness of a broken world. Reflecting on who she is in the light of God, Saint Catherine of Siena once prayed, “In your nature, eternal Godhead, I shall come to know my nature. And what is my nature, boundless love? It is fire, because you are nothing but a fire of love. And

In 1908, The Times of London asked notable authors to respond to the following question: “What is wrong with the world?” In these heavy and somber days following the school massacre in Uvalde, yet still on the heels of the racially motivated shooting in Buffalo not two weeks ago, our entire country is asking the very same question: “What is wrong with the world?” Of those attempted answers put forward by the secular news media, I have admittedly read only a few, in part, because I suspect that I already know what they are going to say––or rather, what they are not going to say. And what I expect is that they will not answer the question in the way that G.K. Chesterton did over a century ago, which––to me, at least––seems to be the only answer to the question worth listening to.  To the editor of The Times , Chesterton wrote this: “Dear Sir, Regarding your question ‘What is wrong with the world?,’ I am. Yours truly, G.K. Chesterton.” While in the wake of great tragedy people today (in

Nestled in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, in the middle of the 19th century, one would not have expected anything great to happen in the small village of Lourdes. Even less would anything remarkable have been expected of the sickly eldest daughter of the town’s miller, lazy and drunk, whose vices forced his family to live in the foul poverty of a disused prison and at least one of his children to eat the church’s candle wax in lieu of proper food. Yet the God who prefers the weak of the world to the shame of the strong (cf. 1 Cor. 1:27) chose this humble town and this poor family – the Soubirous – to cast down the mighty from their thrones and to lift up the lowly (cf. Lk. 1:52) by sending she, whose words they are, to visit Lourdes by appearing eighteen times in 1858 to the simple and illiterate peasant girl named Bernadette.  Bernadette bears testimony, like all the saints before and after her, to the truth of Paul and Barnabas’s words recorded in the Book of Acts: “It is nec