July 29 2019 - Association Of Catholic Priests

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29 July. Saint Martha

There is a fine appraisal of Martha and Mary by Saint Augustine, in today’s Liturgy of the Hours…

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01 Oct 2023 – 26th Sunday, (A)
October 1 2023
Thara Benedicta
Key Message: Let us change our minds and live purposefully!! Homily: Our Lord Jesus Christ explains that "change of mind" is needed for repentance. Repentance is also our resolution "I am going to change my mind. I am going to turn away from my old bad ways and lead a new righteous life according to the will of God". Many times God will reveal to us that what we are doing is not correct and we do need to change it. It may be like always shouting at others for trivial things, easily getting angry, knowing others need help but still staying away from helping, gossiping, manipulative talks and so on. They would have become a regular habit for us and we were more comfortable living like that. So we generally tend to put off changing ourselves. But let us go ahead and initiate this change in our lives. Otherwise more and more time will be wasted in guilt and condemnation. Let us initiate the change in us immediately. If we continue in our old ways, we will not be seen as good in our own eyes. After initiating the change in mind, we will encounter situations where we are not able to follow our good resolutions. But God is a good potter. He will patiently mould us no matter how many times we do not take the shape. He just wants to be still in the potter's wheel. Not give up on Him or on us. If you feel very dejected by the number of times we fail in our good resolutions, keep the count of successes and the count of failures in a day. Target having more successes than failures in a day. That is reformation. Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself fell thrice on the ground on the way to Calvary. The important thing is He completed His journey. Changing the way we think is critical for changing the way of our life. Once I was filled with good intentions, but my life was not fruitful. I used to feel dejected at being myself, why was I not doing anything useful like that? It was a very big question for me. When I was praying one day, God told me it was because of my thought life. But I couldn't understand it. I was still feeling "I want to be good, so all my intentions are good, then what is the problem with my thought life?" I was only thinking that it is a lack of time on my hands to do the good stuff that I have planned to do. God made me realise that most of my thoughts are useless. I can and I should "choose to think what I should think about". Criticising others in our hearts, remembering their bad deeds, all this is a pure wastage of our time, effort and energy. Why should we involve all our time, effort and energy just to find others' faults? Today at noon as I was having my lunch, my thoughts were wandering and I was having judgemental thoughts about someone. To avoid it I needed to listen to good Christian messages so that there was no need for me to fight this battle of thoughts. This was making both the meal and the meal time more enjoyable. (Try only when you are eating alone...) Lack of time was also resolved by making valid use of our thinking time. It is never that we do not have time. God always gives us enough time to complete all our tasks. It is that we spend our time thinking and doing useless stuff, unnecessary for our time of living and death. We are trying to earn some brownie points from others, calculating that they will come in times of emergency. We cannot do it at the cost of not doing what our God is expecting us to do. Once we do what God has put in our hearts to do, we will realise that God will move people to take care of us at the right time. Our self pain will not come and rescue us. We unnecessarily compete with others. This happens more vigorously with parents, forcing their children to run the parent's race. Everyone is keeping someone else in front and imitating him/her, obviously trying to run his/her race. They forget their own track. But God is choosy. He will help us only to run our race, not to compete with others. Do all fingers in our hand have the same function? Every finger has its own job to do. If the thumb wants to do the little fingers job, then can it succeed? If we are the thumb, let us live as a thumb. If we can think like what our Lord Jesus thinks, then we can absolutely achieve what God has put in our hearts to achieve within our time limits. Our Lord Jesus also completed all His tasks within three years of His life. He did not keep brooding over the Pharisees. He told them directly that they needed to undergo a change in their minds in today's Gospel reading. He did not lose His sleep over their misbehaviours or always wanting to kill Him. He did not miss enjoying His ferry rides with His friends nor eating with the sinners. He was the happy guy wherever He went. He was the consolation to all. The Bible says the cities and towns were filled with good news and joy because of Him. He spread His goodness to everyone. People who accepted Him, underwent a change of mind and were happy (example, Zachaeus). People who rejected our Lord were never happy. God is our loving Father. He will surely lead us to see the changes required of us. Let us implement those changes and be the person whom God wants us to be!!
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4 comments
Lessons for the Church from recent State scandals?
April 1 2014
Sean O’Conaill
Jesus was crucified because he was a whistleblower against religious hypocrisy and injustice - but we will wait forever for an encyclical to tell us this - or to admit that Jesus tells us that himself when he says he has ‘overcome the world’ (John 16:33). To overcome the world is obviously to overcome our greatest fear - the fear of ‘what people will think’ if we do speak truth to power. St Ignatius of Antioch had obviously overcome that very same fear when he was making his way to the Colosseum c. 107 CE - two centuries before the inauguration of Christendom by Constantine. The recent BBC series ‘Colosseum’ clearly admits that it was Christian martyrs such as Ignatius who undermined the might-is-right ethos of that central Roman arena, making it eventually a neglected ruin - because they believed that the power of the truth of Jesus’ resurrection was greater than the power of Rome to kill them. And Ignatius’ letters (written on that journey) show also that his faith was creedal. Christendom did not invent the Creed but instead it undermined it by making the clerical church itself a broker of power. After Augustine of Hippo justified coercion of Christian dissenters, the Donatists, in 408 CE it was to take until 1965 for Vatican II to contradict that by insisting that the truth cannot be conveyed by coercion. That was far too late to stem the rise of relativism, and we are still suffering the consequences of what Pope Francis has recently called the ‘immorality’ of the Inquisition.
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4 comments
Lessons for the Church from recent State scandals?
April 1 2014
Father Kilian Byrne
Yes, if you read his Confessio you will see that it begins with a true confession of his sinfulness and that his ‘vision’ came from a faith informed by the supernatural. A rarity today, even among priests.
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5 comments
24 Sept 2023 – 25th Sunday, (A)
September 24 2023
Lucian
Thank you for your inspiring reply and thanks to the writer of the main homily. God bless.
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