One Sunday, two homilies. You can try to shoehorn the regular Sunday topic in/around/alongside the First Communion setting, but it's usually rough on both crowds. So here's the normie, 4th Sunday of Easter homily and the 10am First Communion Mass homily. 4th Sunday of Easter, Year B First Communion Mass ..read more

I didn't preach the parish Mass today, but I did cover the Spanish Mass in Tecumseh, so I'm just going to post the English text here. Yeah, sorry, no stumbling Spanish audio because 1) my desire for Lenten humiliation isn't that powerful, and 2) I never even considered recording it. But there are some benefits content-wise of having to switch languages. You know you'll be a lot slower. You know you can't ad lib. You know you can't use contemporary terms or references as much. Add that together and basically you're just allowed a little exposition and then make one point. Huh. Weird. How n ..read more

We've only got a few months left in the U.S. Bishops' Eucharistic Revival and one thing I haven't seen a lot of is concrete suggestions on how to participate in the Eucharistic Feast. There's been good encouragement for Sunday-some-timers to become all-the-timers and for people to try spending more time in quiet prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, but I haven't seen a lot of "Hey, pastors and parishioners, try X or Y to see if it helps you to focus or to pray better or to "get more out of Mass". So after consulting with the pastor and principal here at our school, I made a pitch the last two ..read more

In the seminary we heard a lot of hype on Mark's gospel. Some teachers hyped it because it might be the oldest gospel, and they thought that meant "the only really authentic one". Others, because they felt it had been forgotten over the centuries. Others, because they claimed it was more personal and immediate. That sounded like the best reason to be a Mark fan, but I never truly understand what that claim meant till I read Michael Pakaluk's 2019 translation-and-notes which goes by the name The Memoirs of St. Peter. Pakaluk knew how to translate Mark's unique Greek (sometimes pigeonholed by fo ..read more

Epiphany has a ton of traditions and trivia connected to it, so today's homily was a grab bag of Epiphany minutiae.  ..read more

Yesterday's sermon on dying: What we do for the living, how should we understand Purgatory, the origin of indulgences, and prayers and Masses for the Dead ..read more

Sermon about how loving and using beauty and reverence isn't remotely against the gospel call to humility, simplicity, and care for the poor. Star-witness St. Francis of Assisi takes the lead, as he did back in 1200 A.D. when he led the original Eucharistic Revival. I'm including pictures of St. Joseph's in 1970 and today, not to wag any fingers (I think the parish in the last 20 years has done great work to recenter Jesus and make a beautiful church) but because I specifically mentioned the original detail work being turned to a beige ocean. Also, the 5:30 Mass missed the story that's on here ..read more

The parable of wicked tenants and the vineyard is told as a prophecy and a promise, not as a perennial life lesson for all people. For us today it is a lesson about how Israel is God's family, but how God also reconstituted Israel around Jesus, who is both the murdered Son and the rejected Cornerstone of the story. After the vindication of the Stone in the Resurrection, the vineyard (God's family) is under new management, the Son, and not under the tenants anymore. The people of Israel are still invited back into the vineyard, but with the new badge or passcode*, for there is "salvation for ev ..read more

Good Friday before Easter Sunday. Crucifixion before Resurrection. Fast before Feast. Darkness before Light. Weeping before Rejoicing. Death before Life.  These pairs, and their this-before-that emphasis, sum up the Christian mindset on many things. They also contain (implicitly or explicitly) the sum of the good news, which we call the kerygma, the distilled and powerful proclamation of the apostles: "For I handed down to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day ..read more

The first lines of the my recording are a little weird because I was making an announcement that because it's the 3rd Sunday of the month we would have Exposition, Adoration, and Confessions at the end of Mass, and I realized that was a really good segue way into the homily and hit record. So the recording catches the segue, but not the first lines of the announcement itself.  Oh, and here's a link the Fr. Mike Schmitz video on forgiveness that I ended with ..read more