Tag Archives: easter

Homily for Easter IV

08 Monday May 2017

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The month of May, dedicated as it is to the Blessed Virgin Mary, presents us with an opportunity to reflect upon the readiness of Our Lady to say yes to God. In the annunciation of the Lord’s will by the message of an angel, the young Mary freely and completely gave herself to God. This act we call her fiat, taken from the Latin phrase of scripture: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum; let it be done unto me according to thy word (Lk. 1:38). Mary’s yes to the Lord made possible the great act of the incarnation—the coming amongst us of the Word made Flesh; the person of Jesus Christ. Mary’s selfless act of obedience undid the selfish act of disobedience of Eve, and it is for this reason that the Fathers of the Church often call Mary the new or second Eve.

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Homily for Easter II

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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Detail from the Holy Sepulchre Chapel, Winchester Cathedral

At the heart of the great Easter Vigil, celebrated last Saturday evening, is the Blessing of the Font and the Renewal of Baptismal Promises. So important is this ritual that in this country the bishops have mandated that the Renewal of Baptismal Promises is to be repeated on Easter Sunday morning in order that those who did not attend the Easter Vigil do not miss out. As an extension of this every Sunday during the Easter Season we will begin the Sung Mass with the Rite for the Blessing and Sprinkling of Water in place of the usual Penitential Act. As we are showered with the water blessed by the Priest we recall the graces showered on us in our washing from sin in the waters of the font, and rejoice that through the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, which we have just celebrated in Holy Week, we are restored to paradise and to life in God.

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Homily for Easter Sunday 2017

16 Sunday Apr 2017

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Easter Sunday at Holy Family, Southampton

For forty days and nights we have journeyed through the desert of the Season of Lent. Tonight we have reached our Promised Land. In the splendour and joy of this holy night the Church is incapable of restraint any longer, crying out Alleluia over and over again as she rejoices in the salvation brought to us by Christ her Lord. We, the Christian faithful united to Christ through a covenant sealed in his Precious Blood, are filled with that joy as we rejoice with the saints of every age and generation that Christ has saved us from ourselves. In him death is put to death; sin is itself crucified; we are freed from the slavery of our former lives and given eternal life by Christ in the kingdom of his beloved Father.

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Homily for Easter V

24 Sunday Apr 2016

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Cathedral and Basilica Church of Saint Louis, MO

It is perhaps one of the greatest countercultural acts of Christianity to proclaim, by words and deeds, the commandment given to us by Christ in today’s Gospel. “Love one another,” the Lord instructs us. “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples.” This is a countercultural message, because the society in which we live claims on the one hand to care for others, and on the other limits the expression of the dignity of the human person in ways that not only oppose the care of the individual but also, in turn, reduces our the standing of each of us; our own worth in the eyes of our fellow man. In this we might think of some obvious examples: the objectification of the human person, and especially women, in the murky world of pornography and prostitution; the reduction of the human person to a biological entity or an object lacking any “quality of life” in the arena of abortion and euthanasia; the manipulation of the human person in the attempt to eradicate the natural complementarity of man and woman, in the realm of so-called ‘gender theory’ and in the name of sexual equality. Each of these represents a veiled attempt on the part of contemporary society to offer a rebuttal to some perceived injustice whilst failing, fundamentally and absolutely, to recognize the monumental damage that is done by these actions, not simply to the individual objects of the actions themselves, but to the dignity of the human race: the means by which we view ourselves and each other.

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Homily for Saint George 2016

23 Saturday Apr 2016

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Saint George depicted in Saint Saviour (Episcopal), San Gabriel, CA

“Clad in his bright coat of mail, mounted on his war-steed, and spearing the dragon with his lance,—George, the intrepid champion of our Risen Jesus, comes gladdening us today with his Feast.” Thus, the great Dom Prosper Guéranger opens his commentary on this feast of our saint, known in the east as ‘The Great Martyr’, patron of many places and institutions, not least the homeland of not a few of us gathered here for this solemn celebration in his honour. In the Roman liturgy we find relatively little concerning this martyr-saint; the greater part of his cult is found in the east. Yet there are two aspects to the life of Saint George upon which we might helpfully meditate this morning.

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Homily for Low Sunday 2016

02 Saturday Apr 2016

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Saint Joseph, Cold Spring, KY

Last Saturday evening, in churches across the world, Christians watched and waited in solemn vigil as, once more, the story of salvation was laid before us in the words of sacred scripture. For many of us, it was the culmination of a pilgrimage through the season of Lent: a time in which we are called to repentance for our sins, to return to the Lord who, by his passion, death, and resurrection, has opened to us new life. For others, it was the culmination of a much greater pilgrimage. At the Paschal Vigil, the Church, having retold the narrative by which she came to be, becomes new again in Christ. The new fire is blessed, the new light of the Paschal Candle is honoured with the great love song of the Exsultet, the presence of Christ is restored to the tabernacle after the days of the Sacred Triduum: all of this points to the utter difference that is made for us in our life in Christ, as a result of that first Easter. Thus it is fitting that this is also the time when the Church creates new Christians. With the blessing of the font, the Paschal Candle is plunged three times into the waters to symbolize the fecundity of this womb of the Church, and those who have been preparing for Holy Baptism are initiated into the life of Christ through the solemn and irreversible gift of baptism, that opens for the individual the gift of eternal life in the kingdom of heaven.

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Divine Worship: Easter Octave

01 Friday Apr 2016

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Holy Water, the Cathedral Church of Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston TX

The days of the Easter Octave retain a special character throughout the Roman Rite. This is true of both the Ordinary Form and the Extraordinary Form, and also of Divine Worship: The Missal, which preserves this sacred time in accordance with ancient practice, whilst also making use of certain Anglican translations and practices.

Overview of the Easter Octave

If the Paschal Vigil is “the mother of all vigils,” then the Easter Octave is to be considered the mother of all octaves. Its origins predate even those of the Octave of the Nativity of the Lord, of the Epiphany, and of Pentecost, and of course those of later feasts such as Corpus Christi. Blessed Ildefonso Schuster goes so far as to say that the octave “was characteristic of the Easter festivities.” Dom Prosper Guéranger says, with equal eloquence, “So ample and so profound is the mystery of the glorious Pasch, that an entire week may well be spent in its meditation.” With an overview of its associated practices, we can see how right they are.

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Homily for Easter Sunday 2016

28 Monday Mar 2016

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Detail from the apse in Saint Mary’s Seminary, Houston, TX

Over the course of the past week we have travelled with our blessed Lord to the gates of the city of Jerusalem; we have supped with him in the cenacle as he kept the Passover with his apostles; we have stood with his Blessed Mother at the foot of the Cross as he was brutally put to death. Now we come with raw emotion and profound joy to this celebration of new life—of perfected life—in which, through the resurrection of Christ, we are invited to share. Christ has harrowed hell! He has conquered sin! He has put death to death! As we have sung in that great victory hymn, the Easter Sequence: “Death with life contended: combat strangely ended! Life’s own champion, slain, now lives to reign.”

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Homily for Easter V

03 Sunday May 2015

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Immaculate Conception, South Pittsburg, TN

Immaculate Conception, South Pittsburg, TN

Throughout these weeks of Easter we begin our celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with an act of penitence, recalling the baptism which has united those of us who are called “Christian” with the very person of Christ. By our sprinkling with holy water and the words of the chant of the Vidi aquam, we are reminded of the cleansing from sin which is the fruit of baptism, by which the guilt of original sin is taken from us and the life of Christ implanted. In baptism we have become one in Christ’s mystical body, the Church, and are literally incorporated into his life; caught up in the selfless relationship of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity recalled in the very formula used to administer the sacrament: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.

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Homily for Easter IV

26 Sunday Apr 2015

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Detail from the Ukrainian Catholic Church of Ss Volodymyr and Olha, Chicago, IL

Detail from the Ukrainian Catholic Church of Ss Volodymyr and Olha, Chicago, IL

On this fourth Sunday of Easter we hear in the Introit words of Psalm 33: “The loving-kindness of the Lord filleth the whole world, alleluya: by the word of God the heavens were stablished, alleluya, alleluya.” By this opening text of the Mass the Church bids us rejoice today that the Lord has, by the merits of his passion and by his victory over death, rescued us, his people, from the certain death which is the result of our sin. In the light of the paschal season we are reminded today that, as the Easter Sequence proclaims, “Death with life [has] contended: combat strangely ended! Life’s own Champion, slain, yet lives to reign.”

The saving action of Christ, by which he leads us from the clutches of death and returns us to fullness of life in him, is the ultimate sign of the loving-kindness or mercy about which we hear in today’s Introit. Our restoration to life in God—the undoing of the serpent’s guile and the sin of the Garden of Eden—is a fruit of the Father’s love for us; a love seen most perfectly in the passion of his only-begotten Son, by whose death we have life. That mercy is at the heart of the message of the gospel. It is the cause of our joy and our hope, and it is the catalyst for our evangelizing mission, to bring all peoples to know and to love Christ in the communion of his holy Church. With Pope Benedict XVI we can say, “mercy is the central nucleus of the gospel message” (Regina cœli, 30 March, 2008).

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