Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to Palm Sunday and therefore to the beginning of the holiest week of the year. It's the Church's custom, as you know, on Palm Sunday, to read the entire Passion narrative from one of the synoptic Gospels, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this fifth Sunday of Lent is taken from the thirty-first chapter of the book of the prophet Jeremiah. And there's a passage I want to draw your attention to at the very beginning here, which is super [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this fourth Sunday of Lent contains one of the most important lines in the entire Bible. And I'll get there. But first, I want to provide a little context. Our reading is taken from that marvelous third [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the third Sunday of Lent. We continue this journey through the holy season of Lent. I've often said that Lent is a bit like basic training for the military, or it's like two-a-day workouts before the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this second Sunday of Lent, the Church gives us the awful reading from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis about the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. In Hebrew called the "akeda". It's at the very [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, one of the most important periods of the liturgical year. During Lent, the Church asks us to do three things. It's really activity-oriented. We're asked to pray, to fast, and to [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this weekend is that marvelous story from the Gospel of Mark, of Jesus healing a man with leprosy. But to get the visceral power of this story, we have to follow the Church's recommendation and read this [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I want to focus this weekend on our second reading, which is taken from St. Paul's magnificent First Letter to the Corinthians. By the way, if you're starting with St. Paul, it's not a bad place to start. You'll find it [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is from the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of Pentateuch, the last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy from "deuteros nomos," meaning "second law". Deuteronomy really is just a series [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the marvelous book of the prophet Jonah. I am always delighted when I have the opportunity to preach on Jonah. One of the shortest books in the Bible. It's maybe three pages in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've moved now through the Advent and Christmas season and with the whole Church around the world, we return to Ordinary Time. And what I want to do is pick up my sermonizing on the Old Testament text. And we have a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to this great Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Jesus baptized by John. Here's the first thing to realize. The Gospel writers compel us as it were, to pass through John to get to Jesus. What I mean is, all [...]

Peace, be with you. Friends, the readings for this fourth Sunday of Advent are very dramatic. And they place us right in the heart of a central mystery in the Bible, which is the mystery of God's providence, that God cares for his world, but often [...]

When, let's say, one corporation or a conglomeration of corporations monopolizes an aspect of the economy, it's bad. They can set prices at their whim. They eliminate competition. They exclude people from free participation in the market. They drive [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the third Sunday of Advent is traditionally called Gaudete Sunday. Now, "Gaudete" is a Latin imperative. It's a command. So the Church is telling us to be happy. And it gives us in our first reading, which is [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this second Sunday of Advent the Church gives us really marvelous readings. And the second reading from Second Peter is wonderful indeed, but I'm going to focus on the first reading and the Gospel. The first reading of [...]

Peace be with you, and happy new year. As we come to this first Sunday of Advent, we come to the beginning of a new liturgical year. Advent, like Lent, is properly a penitential season. We don't often make that connection. We see it clearly in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've come to the end of the liturgical year, which means the feast of Christ the King. We always end the year with this reflection on the kingship, the lordship of Jesus. It's interesting how this feast was instituted at [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the marvelous book of Wisdom. The problem is, it might easily slip past our minds, but gosh, it shouldn't, because it articulates what is arguably the principle of biblical [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, this year, November the 1st, All Saints Day, falls on Sunday, so it gives us the opportunity to reflect on this wonderful feast day, and more particularly, on what it means to be a saint. One of the advantages of All [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading contains a wonderful little passage on the moral law that God gave to Israel. If you look through the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, you'll find that Israel is this people structured [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from that wonderful middle section of the prophet Isaiah. I think I told you before, Isaiah is divided by the scholars into three sections: 1 through 39, they call it Proto or [...]

Peace, be with you. Friends, what is it about mountains that's just so compelling to us? Now, maybe it's because I'm from Chicago, where everything is flat, but whenever I've seen mountains, I'm just drawn to them. I remember the very first time I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from the fifth chapter of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah's probably the prophet we read from the most in the Old Testament throughout the liturgical year. So, again, when you have a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is taken from the fifty-fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah. Can I recommend something? Someone teased me, by the way, on the comments because I'm so used to preaching in churches. I say, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from the marvelous book of Sirach. Maybe some older Catholics would remember it as the book of Ecclesiasticus, it was so listed in some earlier translations of the Bible. It was [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the Gospel for today is a very important theme, the theme of, to give it its traditional name, fraternal correction. So the act and the art of constructive criticism of our brothers and sisters. Now, here's the problem [...]

Peace be with you. Friends when I was a doctoral student in Paris, I had the great opportunity to go to some of the principal museums at off times, when the tourists weren't there, when it wasn't busy. I'd go to the Louvre. I'd go to the Picasso [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, in the twenty-second chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, we find the prophet's only criticism of an individual. Isaiah often criticizes nations and peoples and indeed his own people, but the only time he singles [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, one of the most distinctive and frankly scandalous qualities of ancient Israelite religion is the insistence that Israel is the specially chosen people of God. And the thing is, it's simply impossible to avoid this theme; [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the nineteenth chapter of the first book of Kings. You know, by the way, when people ask me, "I haven't read the Bible for a long time. What should I do? How should I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends we continue our exploration of these wonderful Old Testament readings for Mass. The one for this weekend taken from the fifty-fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah, arguably the greatest of the Israelite [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, this week, I want to look at our first reading, which is from the first book of Kings, and it has to do with Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba, the great Israelite King who built the temple, who eventually became a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, this weekend, we have the privilege of hearing from the wonderful book of Wisdom. Now, scholars say the book of Wisdom was maybe the last book written in the Old Testament. So a lot of the Old Testament texts are from, [...]

Peace be with you Friends, the church proposes for us this week a marvelous little passage from the 55th chapter of the prophet Isaiah. Here's one of the greatest of Israel's prophets. And the theme of this little passage is the Word of God. So, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I want to preach you today about a kind of obscure passage from the Old Testament from the second Book of Kings. Can I just say, by the way, as I start, for those just beginning with the Bible, 1 and 2 Kings is not a bad [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, today we return to Ordinary Time. So after the long Lenten and Eastern season, then we had Trinity Sunday, then we had Corpus Christi. Now we come back to Ordinary Time. And it's my joy today to focus on the first [...]

Well, let me say a word about the Council because you brought it up first. Another great grace of my life was a relationship with Cardinal George of Chicago and the privilege of living with him at least part time for about five years and of course [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, It's a delight to greet you on this wonderful feast day of Corpus Christi, The celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ. Now, here's what is on my mind today. This is the first celebration of Corpus Christi after the [...]

Well, thank you very much for that and good morning to everybody. Always a joy to be here in the arena. I first started coming to this congress back in 1997. I'm becoming a very old man. And it's always a joy to come back. It's one of the great [...]