a parish priest, 10/23/2016
We live in a world that is filled with stress: stress to keep up with the standard of living, stress to keep a job, to cope with family, to cope with illness. But who says we have to be perfect in all of this? We have been brainwashed into thinking that we need all of these things, that if we don’t have them we will be a failure. Life has to be perfect and we have to work and work till we can have that perfection.
a parish priest, 10/16/2016
Family, religion, society, all seem to be suffering a dystopian sickness that is the crisis of our age. People cry out for freedom and seek a self-fulfilment. Without justice in their life, who can blame them? If we don’t live justice, who will believe we have found it?
a parish priest, 10/9/2016
We can always prepare for disaster by building up our own resources. Not stockpiling food or things as in the days of the great fear of a nuclear war, but the more important things such as a solidarity among our neighbours, and sense of service of the community, the importance of integrity and justice. These are things that never go amiss. Who knows what will happen in the future, but we are not helpless before it.
a Parish Priest, 10/2/2016
A new breed of activists who are taking seriously the Church’s social teaching as well as its moral teaching. They at least have the courage to stand up and say something radically new is needed to save their country.
a Parish Priest, 9/25/2016
What use is ideology if it remains only that. If words are never followed by action, then they remain empty and open to the accusation of hypocrisy.
a Parish Priest, 9/18/2016
Perhaps the modern insistence on the importance of individuals and the rights of individuals is a reaction to a long history of suppression of people in favour of ideas, but individualism is no answer to our world’s problems either. It too can wander around lost in the complexity of modern life without any real guide, it too can be dazzled by the promises of money and end up as just another form of selfishness.
a Parish Priest, 9/4/2016
For us the difficult thing can be that our lives are littered with failures as well. It isn’t everyone who can succeed. In the Olympics or Paralympics only one person gets the gold. We are not all saints.
a parish priest, 8/28/2016
When we are not afraid to acknowledge our weakness, when we no longer refuse to accept need of others, we are more open to the presence of God because we do not seek control and power over ourselves and our world, we seek the joy and hope of a love that does not abandon us or forsake us. We can deal with the confusion of life because we see the touches of a love that is present even in the confusion of a world we do not always understand.
a Parish Priest, 8/21/2016
If you have been watching the Olympics, you cannot help but be impressed by the efforts of the athletes and the amount of effort and training that they have put into what they have achieved. There is a great sense of achievement in our successes, but it does not compare with knowing the love that comes into our lives.
a Parish Priest, 8/14/2016
There is something very attractive about the dedication of these Olympic athletes, they are to be admired, but probably if we are honest, they are to be admired but also there is something in most of us that says it’s not for me. Most of us seem more content with a middle road in most of what we do.
a Parish Priest, 7/31/2016
The internet is a constituent part of the age of the individual in which we are living. Educating the individual has never been more urgent. But who can we trust to decide on what our children are being taught?
a Parish Priest, 7/24/2016
We live in a society where people are trying to figure out what is right and wrong, but differently from previous generations they are trying to figure it out without God’s laws or without any belief in God.
a Parish Priest, 7/17/2016
St John Paul thought religion had something to offer to politics and politicians. But that isn’t how many people see things, including many politicians.
a Parish Priest, 7/10/2016
As long as we refuse to acknowledge the reality that sin exists, that we do wrong to God and others in sinning, that it is more than simply a failure for ourselves, we will never change our world, we will never be able to escape from a downward spiral that is afflicting the morals of our society.
a Parish Priest, 7/3/2016
We need something more objective, we need to realise that values such as truth, justice, and beauty, are objective, but we also have to acknowledge that they transcend our ability to wholly capture them, otherwise we reduce them to something under our control and so reduce them to a subjective reality rather than an objective one. That means that we have to have the humility to say not just that our knowledge is limited, but also that what we can know is limited, a statement that is anathema to
a Parish Priest, 6/26/2016
It was Christ who wanted to separate religion and politics. He wanted nothing to do with that human power and so he chose a different path, the path of service, a path without the power of the state, the path of the cross, because you cannot stand up for human dignity without persecution in this world, you cannot stand up for peace and equality without oppression.
a Parish Priest, 6/19/2016
Unless we are recalled from this madness of treating people as objects, as less than human, we will destroy our civilisation because civilisation is based on the premise that we are all human beings. When we have excluded some people in the past from our civilisation, then it has led to slavery or violence or some form of discrimination.
a Parish Priest, 6/12/2016
It was mercy and compassion from some people that opened her heart again.
a Parish Priest, 6/5/2016
The real illusion is that through our intelligence and technology we have succeeded in dominating our world; we look to ourselves and are thrown back in on ourselves, rather than looking to the Sacred Heart and finding there a consolation of something greater than ourselves, but something that loves us.
a Parish Priest, 5/29/2016
What is important to us now seems to be about how comfortable we will be in life and what will maintain us in our standard of living or increase it even more. Once, the memory of war was still fresh in people’s minds, and peace and economic prosperity was seen to depend on community. Now that is breaking up, and it is becoming everyone for themselves: a reflection of a more individualistic society in which we are living.
a Parish Priest, 5/22/2016
It is only in faith that we can see a clear reflection of the Grandeur of God reflected in Christ. Each of us is called to reflect what we have seen, each of us already does that in the way we live our life.
a Parish Priest, 5/15/2016
As Catholics we are called to live a different vision, one that comes to us from the Holy Spirit. There is a difference in being a believer in Christ, and hopefully as society continues pursuing its particular vision of love, that difference will once again become clearer.
a Parish Priest, 5/8/2016
First communions are joyful and happy occasions. There is lots of human joy and excitement. But it doesn’t compare with the beauty of life to which your eyes can be opened when you let Christ guide you through life. The Eucharist can be the door through which we enter and see that beautiful world once again.
a Parish Priest, 4/30/2016
We need to find a way of presenting the Gospel to people that speaks to this fear and their need of control. That is quite a challenge because a cornerstone of Christian religion has always been that of doing the will of God as Christ did, even to death on the cross and there are some things on which we cannot compromise. But perhaps what is important is not about us getting everyone to believe, but about the quality of the witness we give to Christ.
a Parish Priest, 4/24/2016
God’s laws set the bar at a higher level, but when we get hold of them we confront them with our instincts and often we find ourselves doing only what the law requires and no more.
a Parish Priest, 4/17/2016
Life is good, not just that it’s nice to be alive, but that existence is good. It is a culture of life, not a culture of death. It is Christian love. It is the mission that we received when we were baptized: to say with Christ, even as he hung on the cross, ‘it is good that you exist’.
a Parish Priest, 4/10/2016
The future for the Church now requires a greater depth of spirituality for everyone.
a Parish Priest, 4/3/2016
Mercy needs hope, and trust if it is to be welcomed into our lives; we need to trust that goodness has conquered evil and that its triumph will become more manifest in our world if we embrace the path of mercy. We need to hope that our world can change, that there is the possibility of something better.
a Parish Priest, 3/27/2016
The cross and the resurrection go together and together they give us the meaning of our life in this fallen world. Perhaps we need to look again at how we live our life.
a Parish Priest, 3/20/2016
We can blame God all we like for suffering and death, we can beat our own breasts and acknowledge our guilt for our sin and the sin of the whole world, but in the end we can do nothing about anything. All is grace and all is mercy. The cross shows us that, but we still have to wait for the resurrection to feel it.
a Parish Priest, 3/13/2016
The mercy of God is recognisable in that it re-establishes our communion with him and one another. We cannot avoid having power in life; it is not something to be frightened of, neither is it necessarily to refuse it, because it can do wonderful things, as long as we never separate it from mercy.
a Parish Priest, 3/6/2016
We have lost sight of what is essential to us as human beings because we have believed that everything is about sex. So, this wonderful gift that is at the heart of who we are as people, has become something that is driving us ever further apart and isolating us more and more and making real communion harder and harder to believe in as a possibility - even as something to be desired. Instead of finding a greater communion, we are becoming more alienated from everything.
a Parish Priest, 2/28/2016
The genius of the Judeo-Christian tradition was to see that the order in existence was to be explained by the existence of God; creation was an expression of his goodness, of who he was. If we want to understand our existence then science can show us many things, but only in the person we know as God, will we find the answer to our questions, only in him will we know how everything fits together.
a Parish Priest, 2/21/2016
Isn’t it strange, when it comes down to it, even when we deny there is such a thing, there nearly always seems to be an objective absolute that makes demands of us? We can call it Progress or some other name; it’s still an idol. I think I prefer a personal absolute. I’m going to call him God. Hopefully he’ll get in touch and offer some guidance.
a Parish Priest, 2/14/2016
All the penances we take on, the extra things we do, unless they help us place God in our heart and find him there, we will have wandered off and not be standing beside Christ on the cross, or hear about the resurrection.
a Parish Priest, 2/7/2016
We need the cross, and we need the resurrection, we need to be able to look and see that evil doesn’t win, that for all its power there is someone greater and more loving and more merciful.
a Parish Priest, 1/31/2016
Pope Francis said that, ‘No saint is without a past and no sinner is without a future.’
a parish Priest, 1/24/2016
Perhaps the Pope is right; perhaps more than anything else right now our world needs mercy. Maybe even instead of seeing God as the great threat to our freedom and trying to kill him off, we will realise he is the great protector of our freedom.
a Parish Priest, 1/17/2016
Mercy challenges our perfectionism and so opens the door to others; then it can begin to break down the walls that separate us.
a Parish Priest, 1/10/2016
Christ’s Baptism gave him a truth to hold onto – you are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you. We all need a truth to hold onto in life. It’s time that helps us understand that truth we have already got hold of. Truth is a gift that we discover has been given to us. It’s not something we can find out there by searching for it. We have to hold it before we can understand it.
a Parish Priest, 1/3/2016
When you go to visit the crib this year, maybe you too will see that it is not only about the birth of a baby who was Son of God; it is also about you and your journey through life and love.
a Parish Priest, 12/27/2015
The strength we need to show mercy, is the strength of knowing what is right, what is true, the strength of knowing that some things are really important.
a Parish Priest, 12/20/2015
We have a freedom to live and shape our world and not live in fear that there is something more powerful than us that wants to rob us of our freedom. Christ was born for our freedom.
a Parish Priest, 12/12/2015
In the deep mid-winter we need something to brighten up our days and put a little spring into our steps again
a Parish Priest, 12/8/2015
Living well this Jubilee Year of Mercy