Homilies
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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. …
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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,…
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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…
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26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 September 2024
We have come to the time of football finals. For the teams and the supporters they have one thing in mind, and everything else falls in accordingly. Single mindedness is a quality we often associate with sport. It’s the very attribute that brings excellence of performance and success. Some call sport the religion of Australians but of course sport is a very different experience than faith. In sport we get what we put into it. Our skill grows in proportion to the amount of dedicated training we apply. In sport we master a range of techniques and then through the continual exercise of those skills we perfect them and have…
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Feast Day of Our Lady of Sorrows – Sunday 15 September 2024
Over this last week, each evening, a number of us have had the opportunity to come together online and reflect on the seven sorrows of Our Lady – the seven moments that our Tradition gives us by which to consider the part Mary, the Mother of Jesus, plays in his life – and not only in the life of Jesus, but in our own lives as we struggle with the reality of suffering in our own experience. We have explored in different ways the mystery of suffering, love, and hope, all embodied in the figure of Our Lady of Sorrows, the woman who stands steadfastly at the foot of Jesus’ Cross.…
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 8 September 2024
When Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee he breaks from the standard expectations of his family and society. Jesus steps out with daring. As St John Paul II wrote, “Jesus presents himself as filled with the Spirit, ‘consecrated with an anointing,’ sent to preach good news to the poor.”[1] The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Lk. 4:18-19; cf. Is. 61:1-2). There is a term in…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 18 August 2024
In the late 20th century, there was a famous Catholic writer in the United States named Flannery O’Connor. In one of her short novels, The Violent Bear It Away, an eccentric old man catechises a young boy, his great nephew, about the Eucharist: “You were born into bondage and baptised into freedom, into the death of the Lord, into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Then the child would feel a sulliness creeping over him, a slow warm rising resentment that his freedom had to be connected with Jesus, and that Jesus had to be the Lord. “Jesus is the bread of life,” the old man said. The boy…