Friends, Happy Easter! We’ve come to the high point of the Church’s liturgical year, the reason why we’re Christians at all. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, Christianity is a waste of time; the resurrection is the hinge point, the standing or falling point, of our faith. Taking Easter seriously

Friends, we come now to Palm Sunday, also called “Passion Sunday” because we read, in its entirety, one of the Passion narratives from the Synoptic Gospels. This year, we hear Matthew’s version, and one of the distinctive qualities of Matthew’s account is his stress on Judas—and more precisely, on t

Friends, this Lent, we’ve been journeying through some marvelous stories in John: the woman at the well two weeks ago, the man born blind last week, and now the climactic story of the raising of Lazarus. The great miracles of Jesus in John’s Gospel are referred to as “semeia” in Greek—“signs.” They’

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, we hear the incomparably rich story of the man born blind, which has beguiled Christians up and down the centuries. We are meant to identify with this man: All of us are born into a world that has been infected by cruelty and violence and hatred. Original sin

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we hear the story from John’s Gospel of the woman at the well—a kind of master class in evangelization. What is evangelization all about? It’s about telling starving people where to find bread; it’s about telling people dying of thirst where to find water. Ever

Friends, on this Second Sunday of Lent, our first reading about Abraham and Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration orient us to a basic biblical principle. God has made us to go out from ourselves, to experience the splendor of reality. The more we let go of ourselves and our prerogatives—and the

Friends, we commence the holy and wonderful season of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter. I always think of Lent as something like spring training for baseball players, or like the end of the summer workouts for football players. It’s a time to get back to spiritual basics, to reacquaint ourse

Friends, this Sunday, right before the commencement of Lent, the Church is giving us something of great moment to reflect on—namely, the centrality of freedom and choice for the good at the center of the spiritual life. As Thomas More puts it in A Man for All Seasons, “God made animals for innocence

Friends, a great professor of mine at Mundelein Seminary, Dr. Richard Issel, once said, “If you want to be happy, stop worrying about being happy and get on with becoming fulfilled.” We find something similar in Jordan Peterson’s observation that “self-consciousness is equivalent to misery.” In shor

Friends, for the next several weeks, we’re going to be reading in our Gospel from the primal teaching of Jesus: the Sermon on the Mount. And we begin today with a kind of overture to it, which we call the Beatitudes. “Beatitudo” in Latin means “happiness”—the one thing we all want, no matter who we

Friends for this Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, our first reading from the prophet Isaiah and our Gospel from Matthew both have a section that’s a little weird. While most preachers skip over these sections to get to the better-known and understandable parts, I want to dwell, on purpose, on the stra

Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and the Church asks us again to think about the baptism of the Lord, this time in light of Saint John’s distinctive account. John the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him on the banks of the River Jordan, and the Baptist says, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who ta

Friends, we come to this wonderful feast of the baptism of the Lord. And the first thing to know is that this was a profoundly embarrassing event for the first Christians. Jesus is the son of God, the sinless Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. So why is he going to John the Baptist t

Friends, why has the story of the Epiphany—the three wise man paying homage to the Christ child—so captivated us over the centuries? I think, in some ways, it tells the whole spiritual life: our infinite longing that will never be satisfied here below; the following of beautiful but ambiguous signs

Friends, the great feast of the Holy Family follows immediately upon Christmas—a very interesting juxtaposition with a deep theological significance. The Savior came as a little baby who required the protection of a family, and from the beginning, he was opposed by forces both seen and unseen. Chris

Friends, our readings for the fourth and final Sunday of Advent are all about maybe the central motif of the spiritual life. Our culture today is so self-oriented: It’s all about me and my choice. But that attitude is directly repugnant to the Bible; in fact, the Bible is constantly trying to move u

Friends, our readings for this Third Sunday of Advent help us understand what to do while we wait for the Lord. An Advent spirituality of waiting is part of Christian life; our entire life, in a way, is waiting. We pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” waiting for Christ to come back. But this is not just a pas

Friends, our first reading for this Second Sunday of Advent, taken from Isaiah 11, describes the Messiah’s arrival: He “shall sprout from the stump of Jesse,” and “the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him.” The Messiah, we hear, will come bearing seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, gifts that come to

Friends, we come to the New Year celebration of the liturgical year: the First Sunday of Advent. This is the season of sacred waiting—four weeks of looking, hoping, and watching, with a kind of joyful anticipation, for the adventus (coming) of the Savior. If you’re like me, you rather hate to wait.

Friends, we come to the final weekend of the liturgical year and the celebration of the Solemnity of Christ the King. Now, our country was formed in rebellion against a king, and kingship as a political reality is far removed from us. But what does kingship mean for us spiritually? In a word, everyt

Friends, we come to the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, which means that next Sunday is the final Sunday of the liturgical year. During this time, the Church always gives us apocalyptic readings, and our Gospel today is from “the little apocalypse” in the Gospel of Luke. Apokalypsis in Greek d

Friends, this Sunday we’re celebrating, with the whole Church, the dedication of the great cathedral of Rome: the Lateran Basilica. You could argue very persuasively that this see church of the pope is the most important of the four major basilicas in Rome; it is the great temple of Catholicism worl

Friends, All Souls Day, November 2, falls on a Sunday this year, so we can really spend some time reflecting on this wonderful feast, which means so much to Catholic people. Why do we pray for the souls in purgatory? I wonder if I could begin by reflecting on why we speak of the “soul”—this higher p

Friends, for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, we are treated to the wonderful and deeply challenging parable of the Pharisee and the publican from Luke 18. We are meant to see in this deceptively simple story a basic and clarifying principle in the spiritual order—namely, that the ego is mean