Homily for the twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
St. Ambrose and the Emperor Theodosius, Peter Paul Reubens 1615-6
One of the most important works of Italian literature is a collection of 100 short stories supposedly told by a group of people from Florence who were locked down in a country house during the Black Plague. They didn’t have Netflix, so they told stories. Some of the stories are really just off-color jokes, but since they’re more than 600 years old, now they’re considered literature. One of those stories deals with a problem that’s at the heart of today’s Gospel.
There were two merchants, one Christian, one Jewish, living in Florence, and the Christian was always trying to convince his Jewish friend to convert. One day, the Jewish merchant announced that he had to go to Rome for business, and his Catholic friend despaired. You see, the fourteenth century was the low point of Church corruption, and he knew that if his Jewish friend went to Rome he would see the pope and the cardinals using the Church to enrich themselves, their relatives, and their illegitimate children. And the Catholic merchant thought, “Now he’ll never become a Christian.”
So he was shocked a month later when his friend returned from Rome a devout Catholic. He tried to ask delicately, “But didn’t you see anything wrong in Rome?” And his newly baptized friend said, “Oh, it’s a swamp. But if that is how the Church is run, and it’s still here after 1300 years, it can only be God who is keeping it going.”
Jesus consigning the keys to St. Peter, G. Battista Cassignola, 1569
Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
It’s hard to imagine a better Gospel reading with which to end an Ignatian retreat. We find this episode at the middle point of Matthew’s Gospel, and the question that Jesus poses to his disciples is the hinge on which everything else turns: “Who do you say that I am?”
We have heard the episode before, so perhaps we don’t register what a strange question Jesus asks. When I test my students at the end of the semester, I ask them about the content of the course, not about my own identity. But Jesus asks about himself, not his message. Were he any other teacher, such a question would be pure arrogance. But Jesus is not like anyone else, and everything depends upon our recognizing the difference.
Public opinion, as the disciples tell it, seeks to put Jesus into a recognizable category; he is one of the prophets, like Elijah or Jeremiah. Perhaps he is the reincarnation of John the Baptist. But Jesus does not let such answers go, and the disciples themselves have been with him long enough that they are not satisfied with such an answer, either. There is a right and a wrong answer to the question Jesus asks. It is not a matter of opinion. Jesus is not administering a Rorschach test to prompt the disciples to look more deeply into themselves. The question is not what is inside, but who is standing here before you.
Homily for the twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A).
Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, Annibale Carracci, 1604-5
When I teach my introduction to the sacraments course in Rome, at the end of every sacrament I assign one question and ask my students to write a one-page response. I try come up with unusual questions to keep them on their toes—and to keep myself entertained when I’m grading. This year’s question for the sacrament of marriage was: “Can you marry a chatbot?” Chatbots are essentially AI characters that you can have conversations with; over the past couple of years stories have appeared in the media about people—usually women—becoming emotionally attached to the chatbots they create, to the point where some felt like they had gone through a breakup with a boyfriend when the AI programs they used were discontinued.
There’s not always a right or wrong answer to my questions, but in this case, you will be happy to know that all of my students responded, “No. You cannot marry a chatbot.” And they all passed. There are lots of reasons you can’t marry a chatbot; for one thing, they aren’t actually human, and they don’t have bodies. What a number of my students pointed out, which I found particularly insightful, is that chatbots are designed to give us the answers that we want. An AI program doesn’t have emotions or needs of its own, and it is designed to keep us happy so that we keep using it. This feature is what makes chatbots seem like the perfect boyfriend. The chatbot is programed to always tell you exactly what you want to hear. It never gets impatient. If you wake up at three AM, the chatbot is happy to talk and doesn’t have to go to work in the morning. It feels like the chatbot really understands you because it’s a product of your own design.
My students were right to recognize that conversing with a chatbot is not a real relationship. A relationship means interacting with someone else—someone who is different. Our differences make relationships hard at times, but they are necessary for us to grow. Relationships challenge us to grow because sometimes we don’t get the answer that we want from the other person, and then we have to learn how to respond. This is why marriage is always dynamic, always in progress. In marriage, the fact that men and women are different—physically, emotionally, socially—is what makes the relationship fruitful; the biological difference is necessary for our species to survive.
So why am I bringing up chatbot romance to explain this Sunday’s readings? The reason is because Jesus’ behavior in today’s Gospel story is definitely not what you would expect from a well-programmed chatbot. What Jesus says and does doesn’t quite make sense to anybody. Even for us, reading the Gospel at some distance, his response is jarring because it seems to put a woman seeking help from him in greater difficulty. She comes to him not for anything selfish, but asking for her daughter’s healing. We feel natural sympathy for her, but Jesus, at first, ignores her. An AI boyfriend would never do that.
Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome
Today’s marvelous Gospel story of Jesus walking across a stormy sea shows us how faith grows from fear to true understanding. The disciples move from a superstitious worldview, imagining that the Lord is a ghost, to true faith, confessing to Jesus, “Truly, you are the Son of God.” But since the same reading came up at daily Mass earlier this week and some of you already heard what I had to say about it, I thought today I would step out onto a different kind of stormy sea: the second reading, taken from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The reason this particular passage from Romans means walking on turbulent waters is because it deals with St. Paul’s attitude toward his own people, the Jews. It has implications, therefore, for what attitude Christians should take toward the Jewish people today.
I decided to risk stepping out onto such waters this morning because over the past several years we have seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric and an increase in violence directed against Jews. In March, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan was attacked and, soon after, the FBI thwarted a plot to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Scottsdale, Arizona. The situation in Europe is worse, and it should disturb anyone of good sense and good will that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023—which included murder, rape, and hostage-taking—anti-Semitic rhetoric in the West increased.
Yesterday I wrapped up a retreat for Jesuits about praying with the liturgy in Parma, Ohio. It was the second time I offered the retreat, and I was blessed to have another wonderful group of participants. As I’ve worked with young Jesuits in studies in Rome and encountered others around the world, I’ve sensed a renewed interest in celebrating liturgy well. (I made some brief remarks on the topic at the Jungmann Society Congress a few years ago.)
While working on my retreat conferences this year, I read several of the talks that Pope Leo XIV gave on the subject of liturgy at his Wednesday morning catechesis earlier this summer. The Holy Father has been reflecting on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document from Vatican II dedicated to the liturgy. As to be expected, the Pope’s reflections are solid, touching on the document’s key strengths. In his first talk, for example, he points out that merely changing the rites was not the Council’s goal; instead, the Council wanted us to appreciate just what liturgy is — an encounter with Jesus.
In drafting this Constitution, the Council Fathers sought not only to undertake a reform of the rites, but to lead the Church to contemplate and deepen that living bond which constitutes and unites her: the mystery of Christ. Indeed, the liturgy touches the very heart of this mystery: it is at once the space, the time and the context in which the Church receives her very life from Christ. For in the liturgy, “the work of our redemption is accomplished” (SC, 2)
Today, the Church in Europe is sometimes portrayed as ready for last rites, and the decline in Church participation, vocations, and the general vibrancy of the faith there since the mid-1960s is undeniable. But, if the history of Christianity on the continent has taught us anything, it is that the Church can survive ups and downs because she is endowed with a supernatural capacity for renewal.
My own decade living in Europe has taught me that, in times like ours, we need to be attuned to the danger of historical determinism and cultural conformity. We must resist the temptation to think that history moves in an inevitable direction so we might as well just go along with the times. Such an attitude is a recipe for managed decline and eventual extinction.
In contrast, as I’ve noted in previous posts on the Church in Scandinavia (reflecting on my trip to Sweden and and the fine work of Norway’s Bishop Erik Varden), times such as ours present unexpected opportunities if we know where to look and are bold and unapologetic enough to seize them.
Homily for the fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
“Brothers and sisters,” Saint Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us.”
In other words, Saint Paul recognizes that the present time, the world in which we live, is characterized by suffering—pain and weakness, shame and fear, insults and injustices. Human life is not entirely suffering, but suffering is present. Christianity does not promise us a life without it.
But if Saint Paul does not promise to eliminate suffering, what is his message? His message is that suffering can help us obtain a greater glory. In fact, if we read the Gospel with Saint Paul’s words in mind, the meaning of Jesus’ message today becomes clearer.
Jesus uses the image of the seed, and a seed, as we know, must be buried in order to grow. Before taking on its new form, before becoming a plant and blossoming, a seed must lose its old form—it must, in a certain sense, die.
The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, Peter Paul Rubens 1617
I was delighted to sit down a few weeks ago to talk to Hannah Brockhaus of the National Catholic Register about Pope Leo’s call to be a missionary Church. The article is out now in the Register: “Pope Leo XIV Wants a Missionary Church — What Does That Look Like Today?” There are lots of important insights in the article from a number of top theologians and Church officials — we talk about the message, the changing cultural situation in which the Church finds herself, our motive for evangelization, the recent increase in adult conversions, and more. Here’s a snippet, but be sure to read the whole article:
From around 1500 to 1800, we thought about missionaries as being sent out from a Christian heartland, [said Father Lusvardi, the author of Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation].
Today, he explained, “we’re missionaries in the same way that they would have been in the early Church. … The whole world is mission territory, which I think actually makes the urgency of mission even greater.”
Father Lusvardi noted that missionary activity used to go hand in hand with economic, educational and healthcare development.
Those “don’t necessarily go together anymore. … I think that we have to be even more up front with acknowledging the uniquely supernatural dimension of Christianity and what it gives — it gives us a relationship with God, period. And we don’t need to justify that on any other grounds,” he said. “A relationship with God is valuable in and of itself.”
Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist
John the Baptist, Filippo Lippi (ca 1455)
The story of Saint John the Baptist begins in the temple, when an angel announces his miraculous conception to the priest Zechariah while he is offering incense at the altar. The account of Gabriel’s announcement is read during the vigil of this feast, and today we read about the fulfillment of that prophecy.
We probably do not associate John with the temple because most of his prophetic mission takes place in the desert—which is exactly where he heads at the end of today’s Gospel. But I would like to pause for a moment in the temple, where the story begins.
As modern Christians living after Luther, Kant, and the Enlightenment, we are unfortunately accustomed to viewing the temple and all Jewish rituals in a somewhat negative light. We tend to see them as superfluous, rigid, and irrational. We think of ourselves as more enlightened, scientific, progressive, and perhaps even more moral, believing we have no need for such complex and useless rituals.
I must admit, I am grateful that I am not required to observe the entirety of the Jewish ritual law. I, too, enjoy eating prosciutto and calamari. But if we view the Jewish religion in a negative light—as if ritual worship were in itself merely a sign of a primitive mindset that we have finally outgrown—we lose something. The Gospel of Luke begins in the temple but, as all our biblical scholars know, it also ends there: after the resurrection, the disciples “were continually in the temple praising God” (Lk 24:53).
Today, in the Acts of the Apostles, we read about one of the first developments in the most significant controversy in the life of the early Church: the question of whether Christians of non-Jewish origin should be required to observe the Mosaic Law, particularly circumcision.
We know that, in the end, the Church recognized that all Christians are bound to observe the moral law, but not the ritual precepts that were intended to preserve the distinct identity of the Jewish people. Through his perfect and definitive sacrifice on Calvary, Jesus inaugurated a new worship, in which we participate today, and to which all peoples are called to join.
This controversy, resolved centuries ago, might seem of little relevance to us today, but it is not. It is important to remember this historical event because it teaches us at least two fundamental things. First of all, the Christian mission is universal, directed toward every human being. As St. Peter says after Pentecost: “There is no salvation in anyone else; for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we are to be saved.”
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 