Fides ex Auditu

The Church is about to embark, beginning this Wednesday, on her annual “campaign of Christian service” which we call the season of Lent. We will undertake voluntary acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We will set firm resolutions to give something up or to adopt a new charitable practice among the works of mercy. We will deprive ourselves of various pleasures and delights. We will strengthen our resolve to turn away from sin and to be faithful to the Gospel.  We will do all of this because we desire to change. We know that we are not what we should be, and we’re grateful that the Church gives us this season of Lent each year for us to work on ourselves. And yet, however great our determination may be to make this Lent matter, chances are in the coming weeks we will quickly find ourselves struggling to keep even the smallest of those resolutions. Somewhat frequently, I go without eating breakfast or lunch; sometimes the day carries me from one thing to the next and I don’t eve...

In the wake of the Super Bowl, I’d like to begin this morning’s homily by making reference to one of the greatest press conferences ever given by a sports personality. In 2002, Herm Edwards, then the coach of the New York Jets, famously told the camera: “You play to win the game. You don’t play it just to play it… You play to win the game!”  What Coach Edwards said about football is also true of the Christian life. The reason we play the game––that is, why we live the Christian life, with all of its demands––is to win the game, to be saved. As with any game, in order to win, you have to follow certain rules, and Christianity is no different. In the twelve verses of today’s Gospel, Jesus lays down, on my count, seventeen such rules: love your enemies, do to others as you would have them do to you, be merciful, et cetera. Elsewhere, Jesus instructs us that we need to keep his commandments to remain in his love (cf. Jn. 15:10) and that, if we remain in his love, he will come again and...

You may recall that 2020 was a rather difficult year. Of course you do. We could all tell our stories about how the beginning of the pandemic impacted us, as our world and our lives were turned upside down. I’d like to share with you something that happened to me in that time––and I apologize that I’m about to talk a lot about myself, but I ask you to trust me that it’s for good reason.   As the world shutdown in March, I was quickly brought home from Rome to finish my semester virtually. At the same time, I was also assigned to live at my home parish, which at that time had neither the capacity for livestreaming Mass nor the leadership of a pastor, since ours had died suddenly in the previous fall. On top of all that, there were three other seminarians assigned to live with me in the rectory, two of whom had just started learning English. So, amidst all of this, I found myself to be part-time: grad student, parish administrator, video editor, seminary formator, housekeeper, and la...