Homilies
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Fifth Sunday of Easter – 18 May 2025
Last Sunday, the fourth week of Easter, the Church’s liturgy explored the life of the Risen Christ through the imagery of shepherding. Through this image of shepherding the Gospel of John develops the inter-relationship between the life of Jesus and our own lives. The image speaks of the particular bond by which we have both our identity and our direction. It is through this bond, and through this bonding, that we experience the life of the Risen Christ. The bonds that unite us therefore are not incidental to our Easter experience; they are one of the primary means by which we touch the life of the Risen Christ How does…
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Fourth Sunday of Easter – 11 May 2025
We have a new pope. We have, I am sure, all been captivated by the scenes of Pope Leo XIV struggling with his emotion on the balcony of St Peter’s as he was presented to the world. Now, we wait in anticipation to understand the way in which he will exercise his ministry. It was a remarkable choice – not the person everyone expected to come out on the basilica’s balcony. No one really knew who to expect but this choice was perhaps one of the least expected. And yet, as we come to learn the story of Robert Prevost we begin to realise the wisdom of the conclave to…
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Pius X College – Founder’s Day Mass – 9 May 2025
In a couple of weeks’ time, our Parish of Chatswood will host again a Youth in Council. A number of students across years 9-12 have already participated in two earlier occasions of such a gathering. The mornings on which we gather senior students from both Pius and Mercy College aim to encourage conversation about some of the most important things. At our first Youth in Council we focussed on what helps us belong. At the second one a few months ago in March we focussed on Hope. And in our third on 22 May, taking the lead from the students themselves, we will focus on mental wellbeing. I am excited…
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Third Sunday of Easter – 4 May 2025
Over these Sundays of Easter, we are introduced to the great post- Resurrection accounts, the stories of the way in which the life of Jesus becomes manifest to the first disciples. These stories, of course, cannot be read in the same way that we might read a modern newspaper account of something that happened yesterday. The gospels are not written from a modern sensibility. Rather, the stories are complex theological reflections, in story form, on what the Risen life of Jesus means, and how we experience the reality that Jesus lives. Each of the stories, including the one we have heard today, is an invitation extended to us, to wonder anew, and more deeply,…
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Memorial Mass for the Repose of the Soul of Pope Francis – 28 April 2025
By a strange quirk of history, in June 2019 I was privileged to participate in the Australian Bishops Ad Limina visit to Rome. This is the pilgrimage that all bishops are expected to make to the See of Rome every so many years. It was the first and only Ad Limina visit the Australian Bishops enjoyed with Pope Francis. The pilgrimage took us to the four papal basilicas of Rome and, of course, central to the visitation was our encounter with the Holy Father. Pope Francis had introduced a different way for bishops on Ad Limina to meet him. On a stifling hot Roman June morning we met him as a group. Having been greeted by…
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Second Sunday of Easter – 27 April 2025
Last weekend we celebrated how the life of Jesus has burst forth, no longer constrained by the fetters of death. And we suggested that at the heart of this experience lay a question. On the first day of the week the women come to the tomb looking for something. And there in the empty tomb, where they do not find what they are looking for, a proclamation re-orients and transforms, not only their own search, but indeed the human search itself. The question with which they are greeted is simply, “Why look among the dead for someone who is alive? Just as discipleship of Jesus begins with hearing a question, “What are you…
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ANZAC Day – 25 April 2025
I have often shared it in the past, but I would like to share again today the scene in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings in which one of the main characters, Sam, says at one stage, “We shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport,…
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Easter Morning – 20 April 2025
One of my favourite lines out of the Church Fathers writing nearly 2000 years ago is from the 3rd century Clement of Alexandria. He wrote simply: “Christ our Lord turns all our sunsets into dawns.” It is Christ our Lord who turns all our sunsets into dawns. This day we proclaim that dead ends have given rise to new possibilities. Where diminishment and decay might be expected, there a new invitation is always available. A new possibility has dawned into the world. The future is given to us as a pure gift. And by how more powerful a way does the Christian Tradition express this than situating the Resurrection on the first day of the week at…
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Easter Vigil – 19 April 2025
We are as those who think in stories. To tell a story is a defining mark of our human existence. And the stories that we remember, the stories that have meaning for us, are the stories detailing the search for love, for power, for redemption. We never tire of hearing these stories. This is why we watch films, why we watch television, why we become engrossed in literature. In the stories played out in front of us, we see reflected back to ourselves some fragment of that for which we ourselves are searching. If as humans we are those for whom the experience of ‘story’ is a vital expression of our existence, so, too,…
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Good Friday – 18 April 2025
Some years ago, I was introduced to the thought of the psychotherapist Ernesto Spinelli. Spinelli had a keen sense of the inter-relatedness of human life – that our relationships with one another are the very stuff of existence. He understood very well that we are our relationships, that we exist in relationship or not at all, and that we see everything in the world, especially ourselves, in light of those relationships. It is our relationships that fashion our very sense of the world, and how we exist in the world. However, if this be the case, then an inevitable uncertainty about life begins to emerge because I can never fully know with complete…