When was the last time you received Christ with joy? Our Christian faith is rooted in the fact that God chooses to draw close to us, to dwell among us and to make Himself available to us in concrete ways.…

The feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica came about because the Church went without something that it wanted and needed for a very long time. For the first 300 years of its existence, Christianity was an illegal religion…

This week Jesus tells a parable that, on the surface, seems a bit strange. It definitely requires some unpacking. A king sends out invitations for his son’s wedding and the invitees say “no thanks.” The king sends out messengers to…

This week, we are invited by the Church’s celebration of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross to focus our attention on the work of Our Savior on that hill outside of Jerusalem. We are invited to renew…

Jesus’ response to the woman in this Sunday’s Gospel appears on the surface to be unusually harsh, but in actuality it is another beautiful story of faith in Christ and His never ending mission to bless and heal those who…

“God bears with imperfect beings even when they resist His goodness. We ought to imitate this merciful patience and endurance. It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet…

Do you ever feel living your Christian faith is like fighting a battle? Do you feel constantly attacked from the world around you and perhaps from within as well? Do you feel worn out, almost ready to give up? The…

I saw a recent picture of one of my favorite professors in the seminary, Holy Cross Father Robert Zylla. By God’s grace, 19 years later, he is still helping form young men for the priesthood. It brought back memories of…

Pope John Paul II dedicated the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday in 2001. This day is very fitting for such a celebration because of the Church's long standing practice of turning to the Gospel involving Jesus' first appearance to the Apostles as a group following the resurrection.

After greeting the 10 (Judas and Thomas were missing) and twice offering the great gift of His peace, Jesus commissions them, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." Our Lord passed on to the Apostles the authority to oversee the Church's mission, which was an extension of the mission that He Himself had received from the Father.

This Sunday, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, the Church serves up for our nourishment another beautifully told story of faith from the Gospel of John. It is a story about the light of Jesus, the blindness of sin and the humility of faith.

Our Lord proclaims at the start of this story: "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Light is a very rich Christian symbol because it does so many critical things in our universe. For instance, light brings warmth to the world. In our Gospel today, Christ brings warmth to a pretty cold situation.

Regarding the blind man, the disciples are mostly concerned about whose sin had caused his blindness. The blind man's neighbors sit around trying to figure out if the man who could see now was truly the guy who used to sit around and beg. The Pharisees are focused on proving that either he was not healed or if he was healed, that Jesus was not the one who healed him. There was only one person in the story who seemed to be genuinely concerned about the blind man himself, and that was Jesus. Jesus brought warmth to this encounter, the warmth of true care and concern for a hurting human being.