Homilies
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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…
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18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 4 August 2024
Recently, a friend told me that on average he receives on his mobile phone 120 social media messages a day. Facebook, Instagram, X, Whatsapp – all wonderful means by which we keep connected with one another. We enter a short message, like, “I am enjoying a walk in the park” and immediately all those on our contact list are made aware of this significance! As someone who struggles to keep on top of any number of daily emails, the thought of receiving over a hundred social media messages astounds me. However, we seem to live increasingly in a cultural climate where many feel an extraordinary need to let the world…
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Homily for ACU Xavier School for Preaching – 3 August 2024 Feast Day of St Dominic
The American writer, Robert Fulgham once told of a story of Frank Marshall, an international chess player. During a competition many years ago, Marshall made what is often called the most beautiful move ever made on a chessboard. In a crucial game in which he was evenly matched with a Russian master player, Marshall found his queen under serious attack. There were several avenues of escape, and since the queen is the most important offensive player, spectators assumed Marshall would observe convention and move his queen to safety. Deep in thought, Marshall used all the time available to him to consider the board options. He picked up his queen –…
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16th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 21 July 2024
We all probably feel from time to time the need to get away from it all. Most often this is a result of life getting out of hand for us, and it all becoming a little too much. We long for a freedom from all the pressures that seem to impinge upon our time and energy. Space and freedom is a luxury few of us have, but we long for it often enough. Though most often this longing comes about as simply the felt need to be free of the stress we might be experiencing, the spiritual tradition has long recognized the need for us to withdraw from time to…
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15th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 14 July 2024
It is often lamented today that the rites of initiation into adulthood have been lost. We no longer have those rituals which mark the passage from childhood or adolescence into maturity. However, it has been suggested, not without merit, that perhaps one of the principal rites of passage today is overseas travel. We often hear of young people taking time away. With few resources they head off to distant places where for six months, twelve months or more, they move from country to country, culture to culture, working and touring. Often enough they return home then with a new sense of identity and ready for a commitment to work, or…