Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this great feast of Pentecost, the culmination of the Easter season, the feast that along with Easter and Christmas is the most important in the Church year, and it's sort of par excellence the feast of the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the great Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, now right at the end of the Easter season in anticipation of Pentecost, and I'll explain that connection. I love this feast, and I think we should do a little [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, which means we're coming toward the end of the Easter season, which means coming close to the great feast of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit. So the Church gives us a kind [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue this wonderful journey through the Acts of the Apostles during this Easter season. And the reading for today, the first reading, is from the sixth chapter of Acts. It has to do with the choosing of the first [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue our journey through the Easter season. And for this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this magnificent first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. It's one of Peter's great kerygmatic speeches. The kerygma [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this Third Sunday of Easter, and our Gospel is what N.T. Wright calls the masterpiece within the masterpiece. He means the whole twenty-fourth chapter of Luke is a masterpiece, but within that, we find this [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we are continuing our celebration of the Easter season on this Second Sunday of Easter, Mercy Sunday. Divine mercy. What's mercy? St. Thomas Aquinas says it's compassion in regard to someone else's suffering. So to speak [...]

Peace be with you. Alleluia. Alleluia. Happy Easter to everybody. Just a few weeks ago, I was in London giving a series of talks, and I had a public conversation with the popular historian Tom Holland. Tom Holland's written a number of books about [...]

Peace be with you. We come, of course, today to Palm Sunday, where the Church reads from one of the great Passion narratives from the synoptic Gospels, this year from St. Matthew. If you look back at my archive of sermons, you'll see I've preached [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the Fifth Sunday of Lent and just this magnificent series of marvelous readings from the Gospel of John. Now as a kind of climax we come to the story of the raising of Lazarus. As I mentioned before in the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Fourth Sunday of Lent and just one of the most magnificent stories in the Gospel of John. I've said it many times before: John is a theological master, of course, but also a literary master. And these [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we're again getting back to spiritual basics, and reading one and reading three both focus on this symbol of water. Now, I've talked to you before about water in the Bible as a negative [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this Second Sunday of Lent, we again, going back to spiritual basics, have some marvelous readings, one from the book of Genesis about the call of Abram and then the marvelous account of the Transfiguration. I had a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, our preparation for Easter. Lent, I've often said, is a time to get back to basics. It's like when you're starting the football season and you get back to fundamentals. It's when [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we continue our reading of the marvelous Sermon on the Mount. We're in the heart of chapter 5. Can I just recommend to you? Get out your Bibles. Matthew 5, 6, and 7 is the central teaching of Jesus. Probably what he would [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've had the privilege now of reading from the Sermon on the Mount, and we'll continue for the next couple of weeks. What an extraordinary experience it is, just to hear from Jesus himself as he lays out his basic [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, these weeks we're reading from the marvelous Sermon on the Mount, chapters five, six, and seven of the Gospel of Matthew. For your spiritual reading anytime of the day or night, go to those three chapters, and you see the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we have one of the great passages in the New Testament today for our reading, namely the Beatitudes, taken from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, so the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. I'm going to go [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to one of my favorite feasts of the year, the Feast of Epiphany. Epiphany, from a Greek word meaning "intense appearance". "Phanein" means "to appear" in Greek, and [...]

Peace be with you. Happy New Year's Day, in the secular sense, but also the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God, on this January 1st. There are three words from our Gospel, it's from Luke, I've always loved. These three words I want to reflect on. The [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the Third Sunday of Advent, and it always strikes me as we move through Advent what an Isaian season it is. We hear week after week from the prophet Isaiah during Advent. We heard a couple weeks ago about the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on the Second Sunday of Advent, the Church gives us the great Advent figure of John the Baptist. Can I give you an image now to meditate on during Advent? Go online and look up "Chartres Cathedral north porch statue [...]

Peace be with you, and Happy New Year's Day. We come today to the beginning of the liturgical year, the First Sunday of Advent. What is it about Advent? I've always loved it. To me, it's a very spiritually powerful season. And it might be because [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the great feast of Christ the King, which is always the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Think of the king coming at the end of a long procession into his palace. Well, this is Christ the King at the end of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, as we come toward the end of the liturgical year, we begin to look at more apocalyptic readings and writings in the Bible. End of the liturgical year, end of the world. As I've said though to you before, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading and our gospel for this weekend have a special resonance for our time I think, because they both speak clearly about life after death. Now I say it has resonance for our time, because there's coming more [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I'd like to begin today by looking at our first reading, from the Book of Wisdom. It makes an extraordinarily important observation that's of both theological and philosophical significance. In light of that, I'm going to [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our second reading this week is from Paul's Second Letter to Timothy. I think a couple weeks ago, I spoke on First Timothy, and I mentioned to you how the scholars are divided. Some say that Paul wrote these letters, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this Sunday is one of my favorites. It's from the book of Exodus, and it's about a battle between Israel and the Amalekites. And you'll say, "Well, that's of maybe mild interest to specialist [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for the Sunday is a little section of the marvelous story of Naaman the Syrian. You can find it in the second Book of Kings in the cycle of stories about Elisha, the prophet. Now it's not really a well [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this week I'm going to preach on our second reading. I don't do that all that often, but it's very powerful today. It's from Paul's second letter to Timothy. Scholars are divided about whether Paul himself actually [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, Pope Benedict memorably said the Church does three essential things. And this has just stayed in my mind ever since I read it, because it's so clarifying. The three essential things Church does; it evangelizes, it [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I love the opportunity today to talk about the church's social teaching and the prompt comes from readings one and two, because they beautifully show, if you want, both sides of the church's social teaching, the beautiful [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the last several weeks, we've been reading from this section of Luke that talks about the demands of discipleship, the radicality of what it means to follow Jesus. But let me tell you something now. Here's a hint, it's a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, these past several weeks, we've been reading from a section of the Gospel of Luke that is actually rather harrowing. What I mean is we find laid out before us the great principles and challenges of the spiritual life, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, a couple summers ago I had the great privilege of visiting in connection with a film we were making the sites connected to St. Ignatius of Loyola. We went to the Basque Country, to Loyola, where he was born and where he [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I'm going to admit something to you. I'm a little bit reluctant to talk about the topic of our Gospel for today, because it's this famously controversial matter of how many will be saved. So someone asks Jesus that [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I won't lie to you. The readings for this weekend, they're tough. They're very challenging. And maybe it's good we hear these sort of in the middle of the summer when we're more relaxed, because they're a lot to take in. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, if you've been following my work the last couple years, you know that I've been interested in Jordan Peterson, the psychologist from Toronto, who's become quite a celebrity on social media. And Peterson, like Joseph [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, all three of our readings for this weekend speak of a primordial spiritual truth, one that I've mentioned frequently, maybe I've even harped on it with you. But that's okay, because I think it's so fundamental in the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for today is St. Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father, this prayer that's recited probably, I don't know, millions of times a day, all over the world, at every Mass. If you're praying the Liturgy [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the Gospel for today is that wonderful and familiar story of Martha and Mary. But the Church sets us up for this in a really interesting way by giving us a first reading from the book of Genesis. We're in chapter 18; it's [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the gospel for this fifteenth Sunday of the year is one of Jesus' best-known parables: the story of the Good Samaritan. Something that Karl Barth taught in the twentieth century, he learned it from the Church Fathers, is [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, last week we had a wonderful portrait of discipleship. You might say the cost of discipleship was on clear display. As we continue now our reading of the Gospel of Luke, we have today a great, I would say, portrait of the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I'm going to be blunt with you. The Gospel for today is really tough. It's really challenging. But I love how it cuts right to the heart of the kind of ethical implications of the Gospel. Now you'll see what I mean as I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come this weekend to the feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and the Blood of Christ. I always love the opportunity to preach on the Eucharist because, as Vatican II famously said, it's the source and summit of the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've come to Trinity Sunday. It's been called the preacher's nightmare. I've never believed that. I love Trinity Sunday. I love preaching on Trinity Sunday, and what I'm going to do today, I'm going to commit an act of [...]

Peace be with you. Happy Pentecost Sunday to everybody, this great celebration of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. And I want to suggest to you that meditating upon the number three will tell us a lot of what we need to know about [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us the privilege of hearing the very last words of the Bible. Again, if you're reading poetry, you're reading a novel, you're reading even a great work of history, the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we're continuing our reading of the book of Revelation. The Church gives us throughout the Easter season these marvelous passages. Last week we started with chapter 21. There are 22 chapters in the book, so we're right [...]