Homilies
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Third Sunday of Advent – 2021
Whenever I hear today’s gospel the first image that comes into my mind is a particular cartoon of Leunig. It is of one of his typical figures seated at a chess board which is against a window opening out to the night sky. The figure’s chess partner is indeed the night sky, the unknown, the mystery, God himself. “What then must we do?” – the question repeated three times in today’s gospel – seems to be such an apt title to the cartoon. “What then must we do?” It is the question with which we are confronted so often in our life which feels many times like a chess game…
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Second Sunday of Advent – 2021
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…
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First Sunday of Advent – 2021
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, but we certainly live in a time of great change. As Pope Francis himself remarked, 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. The hardest challenge for us in a situation of change, is to listen deeply, to be alert for both the dangers and the possibilities. In fact, the full Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times…
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Homily for Red Wednesday 24 November 2021
On this day each year, the Church celebrates the memory of the Vietnamese martyrs. Though the first Christian missionaries arrived in Vietnam in 1533, it was not until 1615 that the Jesuits were able to establish a permanent mission in the central region of the country, around Vinh. In 1627, a Jesuit went north to establish another mission, the same year the first martyr was beheaded. More were executed in 1644 and 1645. The persecution of Christians followed for another 150 years or so. However, it was in the first half of the 19th century, in 1833, that all Christians were ordered to renounce the faith, and to trample crucifixes…
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Christ the King – 2021
Historically, the feast of Christ the King, which we celebrate on this the last Sunday of our liturgical year, is a recently initiated celebration, stemming from the late 19th century when the Church had been displaced from the centre of power but was desperately seeking to regain its influence. The celebration of the feast acted as a defiant reminder to the emerging independent social and political systems where the ‘real power’ lay, so to speak. Today the feast can speak of a sovereignty and a rule in imagery that can sound quaint to our own ears. Despite the difficulties of the history of the feast day, Jesus himself does not…
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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021. Filipino-Australian Catholic Community of the Central Coast Commemorative Mass for San Pedro Calungsod and San Lorenzo Ruiz
The year now, of course, has the sense of beginning to wind up. The delayed HSC exams are unfolding, 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 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. As we do come to the end of our liturgical year we are invited…
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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 2021
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 – 2021
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 in Ordinary Time – 2021
The mystic, Chardin wrote, “Seeing. We might say that the whole of life is in that verb . . . To see more is really to become more. Deeper vision is really deeper being. [1] It is, however, no simple thing to see reality as it is. And yet, seeing reality – as it is – is the most important part of becoming whole and holy. It is the foundation stone. That is why as Christians we commit our whole life to the task. Seeing reality – as it is – is the means into truthfulness, and it is the truth which sets us free. Often, however, we are afraid…
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Mass of Thanksgiving – Fr Aldrin Valdehueza – 19 October 2021
The late Irish writer, John O’Donuhue who was sent to a parish in London as a deacon to train for a summer. During his first week working in the parish, he found an old down-and-out man at the back of the church one evening. He was eating a burger and drinking a bottle of Guinness. The correct young priest-to-be went up to him and informed him that this was a church not a restaurant and asked him to leave. The old man took no notice of him and just continued to babble away to himself. The deacon went later in exasperation to the parish priest. He smiled and said, “Ah…