For this 5th Sunday after Easter we are still moving through John 16 and the Lord’s Last Supper Discourse as well as the Letter of James. Our Gospel readings are inexhaustible and there are always manifold treasures to unlock. At the same time and for the sake of brevity, we will entrust ourselves to the…
Our context for the 4th Sunday after Easter is, in the liturgical year, our preparation for the Ascension of the Lord. Sometimes the Feast of the Ascension Thursday is given short shrift, which is unfortunate. One could argue that transferring Ascension from Thursday to Sunday was intended to emphasize the feast by making it more…
There is a Latin adage: motus in fine velocior, sometimes expressed as in fine citius. Things go faster the closer they get to the end. This is an overarching context for our days. For this 3rd Sunday after Easter we begin once again in an orderly way and check on our contexts. In our liturgical…
This year the 1 May observance of the 2nd Sunday after Easter gives way in honor of St. Joseph, whom we venerate among his other many roles and titles as a patron of laborers and as the “Worker.” In contrast to what we see now in the Church, to create counterplay against the rise of…
This Sunday we complete the Octave of Easter. In the post-Conciliar calendar, it is creatively called the “Second Sunday of Easter” or, since John Paul II was greatly interested in the theme, “Divine Mercy Sunday”. However, historically we call the Easter Octave, “Low Sunday”, probably because it was celebrated with less pomp than Easter. It…
Happy Easter! My hopeful prayer is that you experience, in this Easter Season, true joy in a personal encounter with the Risen Lord. The Church’s firehose of imagery and traditions and sacred liturgy has been blasting fully at our little drinking cups. Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum can overwhelm as we reach the apex…
Ever since we set out on our spiritual journey on pre-Lent Septuagesima Sunday, step by step we have approached Holy Week. While a measure of weariness might distress us as we slog along the paths of penance and discipline, of self-denial and self-examination, our hearts rise because we draw nearer to the goal of victory…
From the pre-Lent, “Gesima” Sundays onward, Holy Mother Church began her plunge into liturgical death. At first we lost the “Alleluia,” the Gloria, and on Sundays we dressed in penitential violet to herald the proximity of Lent. With Lent, these privations applied every day, with the exception of our great feasts. Moreover, we became stiller…
It is a fact of human nature that if our senses are constantly bombarded with the same thing, say for example, music that is too loud or an environment that is all the same color, or even violent or wicked images, we become numbed and even start to tune out, shut down. Too much of…
The Roman Station for the 3rd Sunday of Lent is the Minor Papal Basilica of St. Lawrence outside-the-walls. There are five Papal Basilicas, four Major and one Minor. They were once called Patriarchal Basilicas and they corresponded to the five ancient Patriarchates, St. John Lateran in Rome with the Patriarch of the West, the Pope.…
You’ve probably noticed that Gospel readings begin, “In illo tempore… in that time.” Well… what time is that? It is helpful to interrogate texts with classic questions from ancient rhetoric: “Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auxiliis, cur, quomodo, quando?” You can probably recognize what I am about without me telling you. Aristotle formulated them, Cicero rendered…
