The Sunday Gospel This Sunday we celebrate the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan, marking the beginning of his public ministry. He has emerged from the 30 years of what we call his hidden life. Since Jesus was without sin, he did not need to submit himself to the ceremonial bathing that John the…
Recently NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into space, the biggest and most expensive telescope ever built. It will take six months for it to travel a million miles from the earth, find its permanent place in space, and then start transmitting pictures back to earth. Those pictures will be such as have never…
The Gospel for this Sunday is the prologue of the Gospel of John. For the past week we have had the stories of the birth of Jesus and the events of his early life. But John begins with a vast timescale of God’s action, going back to the eons before creation and then advances through…
I’m not a literary critic, nor pretend to be. Simple fact, I don’t read enough. A busy, pressured life affords me only some smaller windows of time within which to read anything that’s not directly related to my ministry. Nonetheless, I try to be faithful to a discipline I set for myself years ago, namely,…
The Sunday Gospel Have we forgotten why we celebrate Christmas? A friend told me she got a card wishing her a very merry ‘Winter Festival’? Could you beat that! People tell me they have to search in shops for cards that portray the nativity but there is no shortage of fir trees, snow, red robins…
The Christmas story is surely one of the greatest stories ever told. It chronicles a birth from which the world records time as before or after. Moreover, it is written in a way that has inflamed the romantic imagination for 2,000 years. This hasn’t always been for the good. Beyond spawning every kind of legend…
I could never be a literary critic, not because I can’t tell good literature from bad, but because I lack the hard edge. If I dislike a book, I hesitate to say so. Conversely, if I like a book, I tend to be more its cheerleader than its critical assessor. Be that as it may,…
The Sunday Gospel Children are counting down the days. After this Sunday, only six more days till Christmas. Excitement is bubbling up. I could feel it myself when watching the television commercial where a little boy keeps asking “Will he really come?” Of course, we all think that he is waiting for Santa Claus. But…
The Sunday Gospel The entrance antiphon for Mass on the Third Sunday of Advent sets the tone for coming closer to Christmas. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice. Indeed, the Lord is near.” Today is known as Gaudete Sunday, a day of special rejoicing. The second reading is worth repeating in full…
Why are so many people leaving their Churches? There is no one answer to that question. People are complex. Faith is complex. The issues are complex. Looking at the question, it can be helpful to distinguish among a number of groups. The ‘Nones’, the ‘Dones’, the ‘Spiritual-but-not-Religious’, the ‘Indifferent’, the ‘Angry’, and the ‘Marginalised’. While…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser