Fides ex Auditu

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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 an...

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 ha...

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 ...

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...

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...

Last Sunday’s Gospel concluded with Jesus’ revelation to Peter that when he grows old, “you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” John the Evangelist explains, “He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.” Peter would indeed be crucified in 64AD at the command of Nero in his circus on the Vatican Hill outside the City of Rome.  That Gospel passage and the person of Saint Peter have always been close to my heart. But in the past two weeks, I have stopped to wonder, as I never have before, who exactly Jesus meant when he told Peter someone else will dress him and lead him where he would not want to go. Did he mean Nero or the Roman soldiers who would crucify him? Or did Jesus mean no one in particular but rather that Peter would simply no longer be the master of his own fate?  To my mind, today’s Second Reading proposes a different reading of this “someone else”. In the Book of Revelation, ...

In the midst of their perilous climb to the heights of Mount Doom, Frodo and Sam stop to ask themselves “what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into” Is their story, they wonder, one that will have a good ending or a sad one? Both hobbits agree that, in any real story, the reader may guess what kind of tale it is, but “the people in [the tale] don’t know. And you don’t want them to.” At this point in their quest to destroy the One Ring and save Middle-earth, it seems – at best – unlikely that their story will end well. And yet Frodo and Sam are not discouraged from pressing on, for whether their story has a good-ending or a sad one is not ultimately up to them. What is up to them is to stay the course, even through the darkest pages, and not to close the book too early by giving up.  Although they carry on, Frodo and Sam do not, in fact, know what sort of tale they’ve fallen into. We, on the other hand, at least those of us who are familiar with The Lord of the Rings do, as did its auth...

We, as humans, love to argue; and whether we’ve studied the science of how to argue or not, we all basically know how to do it, on the evidence of the fact that we argue about all of the things, all of the time. (What I just made, in case you missed it, was an argument!) Regardless of what we’re arguing about, all arguments rely on the same fundamental principle, which is this: when all the premises of an argument are true, the conclusion must also be true. It cannot be false. An example: All Easter eggs are filled with candy. There is a basket of Easter eggs on the kitchen table. Therefore, those eggs in the basket are filled with candy. The truth of the conclusion derives from the truth of the premises, unless, of course, you don’t fill your Easter eggs with candy, in which case, you can substitute candy for flax seeds or whatever else, and the argument still holds its water.  We love to argue, and we argue about everything: from how should fill Easter eggs to matters of global i...

No matter on which side of the political aisle we may fall, even a cursory study of world history and a quick glance at the events of recent years and months is enough to make us skeptical of kings and those who seek to become them. “Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously said, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Yet from beginning to end the portrait of Jesus that Saint Luke paints in his Passion Narrative is nothing other than the royal portrait of a King. Christ tells his disciples to find a colt “on which no one has ever sat”, and he is later laid to rest in a tomb “in which no one had yet been buried”. Both evoke a King’s privilege. As Jesus enters Jerusalem, the crowds cry out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” while the Cross on which he hangs declares him the “King of the Jews”.  Jesus Christ is most certainly a King, and his power is absolute, for even at his Name “every knee should bend, of those in heaven on earth and under the ea...

Without a doubt, the parable we have just heard is the most famous parable Jesus ever preached – that of the Prodigal Son. It has captured hearts and inspired imaginations down the centuries, and it speaks ever so powerfully to us today. Part of what makes this parable widely compelling comes from how easy it is to see ourselves in any of its characters: the son who squanders his inheritance, the father who forgives, or the brother who resents both. As we see ourselves in the characters, we can also read particular sins into the very center of the narrative. Whatever the younger son may have done to waste what his father gave him can easily stand for our own sins or the sins of our loved ones.  The sins from our own experience that we read into this parable, however, tend not to be the superficial or inconsequential ones but, on the contrary, those that are deep and damaging. We don’t compare the sin of the prodigal son to the little white lie we told when we were twelve; nor do we...