Fides ex Auditu

Nearly 70 years ago, a young Italian priest found himself on a train sharing a compartment with some high schoolers. This being Italy in the 1950s, it was rather natural for a conversation between a priest and young people to revolve around religion, as they, like practically every Italian, were all Catholic. Yet the priest quickly picked up on the fact that these young people only had a tenuous grasp on the basics of the faith. They knew their prayers, but not much else. What was worse––and what shook the priest to his core––was that to these young people, the faith simply didn’t matter; it was irrelevant to their lives. Their belief in God, in Christ, and in the Church had nothing to say to their everyday lived experience.  This priest’s name was Father Luigi Giussani, and this encounter on the train changed Father Giussani’s life because it opened his eyes to a tremendous crisis––a crisis, as he saw it, at the level of education.  Father Giussani soon after asked his bisho...

  Some of the greatest joys of my ministry here at the Cathedral are the day-to-day encounters I have with students, teachers, and parents in our Cathedral school. In the fall, our third-grade teachers, Ms. Hurtt and Ms. Courtney, had their kids write down questions on slips of paper for me to answer; and sitting down to write individual responses to each of their questions was one of the most enjoyable ways I could spend an afternoon, because their questions were not only amusing but also deeply insightful and intriguing. Kids may sometimes say the darndest things, but I’d wager that some of our third graders might just be budding theologians.  One of the best questions they asked was this: “Is the Bible telling the truth?” That’s probably a question you’ve asked yourself. In fact, it’s one that’s on my mind not infrequently. In seminary, I took at least 3 classes that tried to answer it, and even the bishops at the Second Vatican Council spent a long time forming their posit...

Readings: Is. 62:1-5, 1 Cor. 12:4-11, Jn. 2:1-11 By all accounts, the ancient city of Corinth in the 1st century after Christ was a rather wild place. Located between two seaports, Corinth was a center for commerce and tourism, and, as tends to happen in such places, the city gained a reputation far and wide for its shameless immorality, making it something like the eastern Mediterranean’s version of Las Vegas. And, if the analogy holds, then this “Sin City” would seem to be an unlikely place to find God. Back then, they might have said: What happens in Corinth stays in Corinth. But, in fact, Paul’s first letter to the people of God in Corinth proves that this is not the case. Paul had founded the Church in Corinth probably around the year 51, and as best as we can tell, he most likely wrote this letter to them about five years later, in the year 56. As with all of Paul’s letters, what he writes is in response to practical issues within that specific Christian community. So, when in to...

Homily for Monday of the First Week of the Year Today, the liturgical year turns over to that period which is now known as “Ordinary Time”. Although some have tried to buttress the name of this season by giving it a theological meaning, that we call this season “ordinary” simply means that these weeks of the year are designated only by ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). Before the reform of the calendar in 1969, however, these weeks were known by their distance from the feast of the Lord’s Epiphany (yesterday would have been the First Sunday after Epiphany); and even if that is a nomenclature that we no longer use, there is still great value in thinking of this sacred time in that spirit. That is because the beginning of today’s Gospel, from the first chapter of Mark’s account, constitutes an epiphany. Whereas a star over Bethlehem announced that the Messiah had come, now Christ himself, the light of the world announces to Galilee: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand!” And this epiph...