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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 6 September 2026
A key focus for the Gospel of Matthew is the relationships that constitute the Christian community. There is a way of living together and a way of relating to one another that is reflective of the Kingdom of God as inaugurated by Jesus, and that is ultimately indicative of the life of God, and there is a way of living and of relating that is not as illustrative. Fear, suspicion, resentment, bitterness draw people away from one another. Listening, humility, openness and dialogue bring people together. It is easy to identify which side of the ledger speaks of the life of God, and which does not. Writing in the 6th…
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Mercy Catholic College – Annual Mercy Day Mass – 31 August 2026
There is something rather surprising about the Gospel we have just heard. Jesus presents us with this enormous scene: all the nations gathered together, the Son of Man coming in glory, the angels surrounding him, the throne prepared. Everything sounds dramatic and overwhelming. And yet, when the judgement actually takes place, Jesus brings our attention not to enormous things, but to the smallest and most ordinary things of life. Did you notice someone who was hungry? Did you give someone a drink? Did you welcome the stranger? Did you care for someone who was sick or alone? The people ask Jesus, “Lord, when did we see you?” But in fact,…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 August 2026 – Commencing the Season of Creation
From time to time in life, disillusionment can settle upon us. Why can’t we and others live up to the ideals that are important to us? Why can’t things simply be as they should be? Why can’t people live as we hope they might? We can be left wondering whether our ideals are ever really possible, whether the world for which we hope can ever be realised. Perhaps this experience has a particular resonance for us as we prepare to enter the Season of Creation, which begins this week on 1 September and continues until the Feast of St Francis of Assisi on 4 October. It is the season, given by…
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time – 23 August 2026
“What’s in a name?” we sometimes say, as though names do not finally matter very much. Shakespeare gave us the familiar line: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Yet names do matter. They locate us in a family, a history, a culture. Increasingly, we are conscious, too, of the importance of addressing people as they wish to be known. A name is never simply a label. It says something about identity, belonging and relationship. This was even more evident in the ancient world. A name was understood to disclose something of the person themselves: their character, their place in the community, sometimes even their destiny. And…
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Renewing the Beauty of Our Church: The Way of Beauty and the Future of Our Parish – Keynote Presentation – Chatswood Parish in Council, 15 August 2026
I will never forget the first time I saw our beautiful church. I had been in our Diocese for some time but had never actually been to Chatswood, and I recall driving down Archer St from Boundary Road and seeing the bell tower and being quite surprised at the magnificence of the building. Then when I came inside the canopy of the building was quite awe-inspiring. I was amazed that our Diocese had such a building. Our church is certainly the most significant religious building in the north of Sydney. Perhaps St Mary’s North Sydney comes close, but no other building has the size and grandeur of ours. Nor is…
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Installation of Fr Vincent Nguyen as Parish Priest of Parish of Lower North Shore – 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Parish Multicultural Festival – St Leonards Naremburn – 16 August 2026
During my monastic years, I was involved for some time in the work of interreligious dialogue. It was a fascinating experience because, in dialogue with people of other religious traditions, we often discovered remarkable similarities and parallels. Sometimes we found ourselves using different language to speak about experiences that seemed surprisingly close. Yet just as importantly, we encountered striking differences. And one of the dangers in interreligious dialogue, particularly when we are anxious to establish a universal sense of fraternity, is to minimise those differences, to pretend that ultimately we are all saying much the same thing. But we are not. The differences are real, and my own experience taught…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 16 August 2026
In his novel, The Great World, the Australian writer, David Malouf talks of ‘the little sacraments of daily existence – “all those unique and repeatable events, . . . movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the beginning.”[1] Malouf is alluding to the flow of life that goes on underneath the façade of life, under all the things that occur through the exercise of…
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Solemnity of Assumption of BVM – 15 August 2026
In these middle weeks of August, we may have begun to notice something changing around us. The days are stretching out just a little longer. Darkness comes a little later in the afternoon. There is still plenty of winter chill in the mornings, but occasionally there is that hint of warmth in the air. In our gardens and along our roads, the wattles are beginning to blaze with yellow. Bare branches are showing the first signs of buds. There is a sense that winter, though not quite finished with us, is beginning to loosen its grip. We are standing on the threshold of a new season. The Assumption of Mary…
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Silver Anniversary of Ordination of Fr Stephen Wayoyi AJ – Vigil of Assumption – 14 August 2026 – St Leonards Naremburn
Tonight we stand at the intersection of two great songs of thanksgiving. The first is the song of the Church as we begin the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We rejoice in what God has accomplished in Mary: that the woman who gave herself entirely to God’s purpose, who received the Word, carried Christ within her and gave him to the world, is gathered at last, body and soul, into the fullness of God’s life. Within that great song of the Church, tonight we hear another song of thanksgiving as we celebrate twenty-five years of priestly ministry in the life of Fr Stephen. We give thanks for…
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19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 9 August 2026
For the people of the Scriptures, the sea was much more than simply a body of water. Israel was not essentially a seafaring people. The sea represented something much deeper: chaos. It was the place of darkness and uncertainty, the place of hidden monsters, the place where the familiar disappeared and where human beings discovered how little control they really possessed. And Matthew deliberately places Jesus there. Jesus does not wait for the storm to finish. He does not wait on the shore until the disciples have navigated themselves safely home. He comes to them across the water. It is Matthew’s dramatic way of saying: Jesus is Lord even here. Jesus is Lord…
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