-
Second Sunday of Advent – 8 December 2023
Christmas is associated with family for us, and often enough with family reunion. Maybe family members who have been away for awhile are coming back home. Christmas is often a time, too, when we re-unite with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year. Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we are full of expectancy about it – even if this expectancy from time to time becomes a kind of dread! This kind of expectancy is, in different ways, at the heart of the Christmas mystery, and today’s gospel takes us to this…
-
First Sunday of Advent – 1 December 2024
There used to be a Chinese curse which went, “May you live in interesting times!” It is hard to know whether we live under this curse at this time, but we certainly live in a time of great change. As Pope Francis himself remarked recently, it is not even that we live in an era of change, but that we live in a change of era. And it is this that make the times even more interesting. Because of the uncertainty of change and the insecurity that pervasive change engenders in most of us, it is easy to resist change and to defend ourselves from its demands in different ways. We can develop a…
-
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 17 November 2024
The year now, of course, has the sense of beginning to wind up. The HSC exams are over, university exams will be over in the coming week or so, the committees we might be on are having their final meetings for the year, the diaries are filling up with all the end of year social activities that we try and fit in before Christmas. So, too, the Church’s liturgical year is coming to its end. Next week it comes to its finality in the celebration of Christ the King, and then we begin a new year in the life of our Church with the season of Advent. A year ends,…
-
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 10 November 2024
There is something that may strike us as quite peculiar in this Gospel story. Why would someone so poor put all she had to live on to support something which was already endowed by the wealthy and powerful? Why would she do it? This was not a tax: the woman was not going to be punished for not “paying up.” And yet of her own accord the widow puts what is for her an extraordinary sum of money into the treasury. Surely, one would think, she would have considered herself exempt. The money she put in was probably even that which she had gained from begging. Why then give it…
-
31st Sunday in Ordinary Time – 3 November 2024
In his first encyclical Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI drew our attention particularly to the unity of faith and life, in which, as he wrote, “the usual contraposition between worship and ethics falls apart” (n. 14). As he expressed, “Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me.”[1] It is a fitting commentary on the gospel that is given us to today in which the love of God and the love of each other are brought…
-
30th Sunday of Ordinary Time – 27 October 2024
In the history of Australian art a new development took place around the end of the 19th century. It was called the Heidelberg School, and listed such artists as Streeton, McCubbin, Roberts, Conder and Withers. These artists’ work was very different from that which had come before it: the work of people like Glover, Martens and Chavalier. The scenes were different, the colours even more so. To set an example of each side by side would dramatically highlight the differences. Of course the Heidelberg school coincided with the rise in Australian nationalism in the 1880s and 90s. People were beginning to see the country in which they were living differently. …
-
Homily for Installation of Relic of St Gerard Majella – St Gerard Majella Church, Carlingford – 16 October 2024
I am very happy to share that I am a Gerard Majella child. His picture hung in the boys’ bedroom in my family home growing up in Launceston, Tasmania and I was mindful of him on a daily basis. I can still picture the image of him and its location near our wardrobe. In the 1950s in Australia his veneration was especially strong, promoted by the Redemptorist Fathers especially during their famous parish missions. He was the patron saint of expectant mothers who prayed his intercession for the safe delivery of their babies. Indeed, the picture that adorned the wall of our bedroom replicated the story how, during a visit to a family,…
-
Homily for Installation of Relic of Blessed Carlo Acutis – Our Lady of Dolours Chatswood – 11 October 2024
It has been noticed by scholars that the drawings we find in the Roman catacombs of the first Christians praying are of figures, “standing, looking up, with arms outstretched, and eyes wide open, ready to walk or to leap forward . . . posture reflects tense expectation, not quiet heart searching. [They say] . . . We are on the watch, in expectation of the One who is coming . . .[1] With their witness, as those who proclaim that Jesus cannot be found in a tomb, we are those who live a life in constant watchfulness and expectation. In the apparent absence of Christ from our midst, we live our…
-
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 20 October 2024
One of the most memorable Masses I have attended was in a little parish church in the Chianti district of Tuscany. In many ways it was a rather ordinary liturgy but what made it extraordinary for me was the presence on the sanctuary throughout the Mass of a Downs Syndrome man and an intellectually disabled man. They were there in the form of altar servers although most of the work was done by the intellectually disabled man. Nonetheless the Downs Syndrome man was with the priest throughout the liturgy: sitting beside him high on the presidential step and even standing beside him throughout the Eucharistic Prayer. That was the amusing…
-
28th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 13 October 2024
In so many ways the gospel reverses the ordinary way that we think about things. It certainly reversed the ordinary expectations that first century Palestinians had about God and the signs of God’s favour. In the society of the time wealth was a sign of God’s favour, a sign of God’s blessing. The underlying logic ran that the wealthier you were the more God was smiling on you. Therefore, those who were poor were looked upon as those who had missed out on the blessing of God, and at worst, who were cursed. Jesus, however, confronts this logic. And he confronts this logic by putting forward poverty as a virtue. …
Homily Podcasts