2012

Part 2. New Testament Reading If you wish to have two readings before the Gospel, the first reading is taken from the Old Testament. If you wish to have one reading before the Gospel, the reading may be taken from the Old Testament (or the New Testament). The order for each would be: (One reading…

Part 1. Old Testament reading If you wish to have two readings before the Gospel, the first reading is taken from the Old Testament. If you wish to have one reading before the Gospel, the reading may be taken from the Old Testament (or the New Testament). The Liturgy of the Word always concludes with…

Choose one from the following six options Option A Let us pray. And all pray in silence with the Priest for a while. Be attentive to our prayers, O Lord, and in your kindness uphold what you have established for the increase of the human race, so that the union you have created may be…

As Jesus and his disciples make their way back from the mountain-top experience of the transfiguration and the ultimate revelation of Jesus as the Messiah, it is little wonder that the disciples remain confused. Jesus has been teaching them and preparing them for the day that they finally grasped that he was the true Messiah…

Social Media Protocols – a keynote talk given at the Australian Catholic Youth Ministry Convention, Campbelltown, 21-23 September 2012 Born in country NSW, I celebrated my first birthday in the 1960s; but a few weeks later decided that I was bored with this decade and we moved into the decade of flares, big hair and…

The Gospel passage today is taken from the centre of the Gospel of Mark – not only is it the literal centre chapter, but it is also the place in Mark where the ministry of Jesus takes a definite turn. Jesus and his disciples are on the move. Last week, in Mark 7, we heard…

Over the weekend I have been able to create and post new versions of the both the ePub and Kindle editions of the Roman Missal (3rd edition); for the first time the Kindle edition now includes all of the music of the ePub edition, as well as the corrections of a number of minor errors…

  The Fathers of the Church remind us that there were many miracles that Jesus performed; when a particular one stood out in the memory of the evangelists, it was perhaps for a particular spiritual lesson that the story can offer to us as we read and listen to it. AS always, we are invited…

One of the gifts of Fathers’ Day – which we celebrate today in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea – is the impunity that it gives to fathers today to tell Dad jokes. Even though it might invoke a deep groan on other days, today we are more inclined to declare these to…

It has often been said that the first evangelist in any parish is the parish secretary. This is because it is usually the parish secretary who answers the phone or opens the front door of the parish office (or presbytery) and so she or he becomes the face of the parish in its interaction with…

As we come to the final of five readings from John 6, we arrive at the crunch moment in the chapter. Although confusion, grumbling and complaining have been part of the whole chapter – and would have reminded the first readers of the people of God complaining in the wilderness of Sinai in the book…

As we arrive at the fourth week of our readings from John 6, we arrive at the section that has been the most controversial over the centuries, as different Christian traditions have offered very different understandings and interpretations of this key text. Until verse 51, although Jesus has been speaking about the Eucharist, it has…

Today in I Kings 19, we meet a very different Prophet Elijah then perhaps we are more familiar with – especially from the dramatic story that unfolds in the previous chapter when he single handedly takes on the 450 prophets of the false Caananite god Baal and defeats them. This does not please Queen Jezebel…

The church leads us out into the wilderness to be with the people of God – it seems many months or perhaps even years into their wilderness adventures – such is the bitterness and the discontent that they evoke with their complaints against the Lord. It is only when you realise that no, this all…

Last week, when I celebrated Mass in the 803 year old private chapel of Lilienfelderhof at Pfaffstatten with the Galbraith family (as one does on holidays) we found ourselves in Mark’s gospel with the disciples needing time away from the hustle and rush of ministry, so they head across the lake to be by themselves…

From the archives… I am away on holidays, visiting friends in Europe. So this is a homily from the archives. In order to understand our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah today, we need to understand what has been happening in the history and practice of Israel. We need to go back a few hundred…

From the archives… I am away on holidays, visiting friends in Europe. So this homily description is from 2009. The linked audio (below) is from 2012. Sunday 15B – The view from on high (Ephesians 1:3-14) Everywhere you go, whenever you find an accessible high place, our ancestors have so often built a lookout there…

The disciples in the gospel of Mark are at times amazed and astonished by the work and ministry of Jesus. Here, when Jesus makes his way back home to Nazareth, there is more amazement and astonishment – but not in the good way. The people think they know Jesus – they grew up with him…

In the Gospel of Mark we are treated to a rather brilliant example of the Markan sandwich – two inter-related stories that provide flavour, texture and context to each other to highlight the power of the kingdom of God that breaks into our existence through the ministry of Jesus. The woman suffering with the hemorrhage…

One of the deepest deficiencies of our current age is that our religious education presents the person of Jesus and the teaching of Christianity as if they existed in splendid historical isolation. You experience this in part with the tendency to focus only on the stories of Jesus – the parables and the mighty deed…

Even though as a family we would gather to pray the Rosary every night, I have never had a strong devotion to Mary, and some forms of Marian devotion have been a real turn-off for me. So when I was discerning which Diocese to join, the fact that the Patronal Feast of the Diocese of…

Growing up our home was full of images of the Sacred Heart – not just in the lounge room but almost every bedroom also had a large image of the Sacred Heart. But many of the images can be somewhat … interesting. This first image is similar to the images that I grew up with…

Although the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ is the only feast day during the year where the traditional Latin name is still well-known, to call the feast Corpus Christi seems to do some injustice to the richness of what today’s liturgy offers us. The readings today do not focus on the Body…

It is no wonder that the Gospel of Matthew ends with the disciples gathered on a mountain. Mountains are key in the history of Israel, as well as being key to the ministry of Jesus. So I am sure it was with light hearts that the disciples made the journey from smelly Jerusalem that sunny…

About a month ago I accepted the invitation of one of our parishioners – Peter – to go gliding with him. It is certainly an incredible experience as you are towed up a couple thousand metres by an old crop-duster, and then once you reach the designated height the cable connecting you to the plain…

The Feast of the Ascension can strike us a quite bizarre affair – especially to one who grew up on a diet of science-fiction and imagined that Jesus somehow managed to add flying and living outside of the atmosphere to his walking-on-water and multiplying food – as well as raising the dead and getting through…

In the first century, the standard expression of the Jewish faiths was strongly influenced by the Pharisees, the most populous of the many forms of Jewish sects that were active at the time. Unlike other groups which were often on the fringes of Jewish society or groups such as the Sadducees which were deeply embedded…

Bastien Joseph Isaiah Madrill, 18 April 1996 – 26 April 2012 It is always with a certain hesitation that I attend to a call like I received last Thursday evening, to visit a family’s home after the death of a loved one. Although you have been invited, you are never quite sure what will await…

I am sure that if many parishioners ever bother to listen to the first line of the second reading today, they either choose to ignore it or doubt that it can actually be true. It is a rather extraordinary claim: ‘think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be…

  One of the lovely things about the Gospel today (Luke 24:35-48) is that it deals with the nature of the resurrected body of Jesus and demonstrates that the disciples did not share the same drug-induced hypnotic experience, or simply remember the warm and fuzzy experiences of Jesus invoked by a vision of his ghost,…