7th Sunday C - February 23, 2025

7th Sunday C

February 24, 2025

The scene in the first reading of today’s mass reminds me of the scene from the Broadway Musical Le Miserable where the policeman Javert is spared by the thief Jon Valjean  and can’t deal with the debt he now owes to this thief.     Before he takes his life Javert sings:

Who is this man?

What sort of devil is he

To have me caught in a trap

And choose to let me go free?

It was his hour at last

To put a seal on my fate

Wipe out the past

And wash me clean off the slate!

All it would take

Was a flick of his knife

Vengeance was his

And he gave me back my life!

This is much the situation for Saul and David.  David could have killed Saul, but he chose to spare his life.  David had not heard the sermon on the plain in today’s gospel, but he chose to love his enemy, not to hurt God’s anointed one.

Saul was the first king of Israel and when his kingdom was under siege by the Philistines it is a young shepherd boy who goes up against and slays the giant Goliath.  Saul should be happy, but when the people begin to praise David over him, he grows jealous and seeks to kill David.   The women sing words that hurt Saul:

 “Saul has slain his thousands,

David his tens of thousands’

As Saul chases David, one day Saul goes into a cave to relieve himself and there is David hiding and he has the chance to slay Saul, but instead he cuts a tassel off his cloak. The second time David meets Saul is today’ s first reading.  David has decided to love his enemy. He sees Saul as the anointed of God and deserving of God and David’s love.

Loving one’s enemy is not an easy thing.  We may not all have the kind of grievance David against Saul, but we all have men and woman who we find it hard to love.  Love sometimes is a choice, we choose to love not because the other is loveable, but because they are created in the image and likeness of God and therefore deserving of our love, even if they don’t earn it.  Choosing to love others may not change them, but it may change who we are.

How hard it is to pray for one’s enemies. The prayers may stick in our throats, but in offering them we change our attitude toward them and the world.  A challenge we are given is to see our enemy, as like us, created in the image and likeness of a loving God.

There is a story told of the Christmas truce in the first world war. A group of British and German soldiers stopped the war for a time to celebrate Christmas. After this celebration many of them were unable to continue to fight.  They had come to know the enemy as fellow humans and could not choose to destroy the men they came to know.

If we turn on the evening news, we will hear much about violence and hate in our world.  We can choose to contribute or look for other news of the kingdom of God at work around us.   Looking for the presence of our God during hate and violence is a discipline.   One, we develop over time.  This doesn’t mean we deny the brokenness of our world, but it means we don’t choose to let that be the whole story. 

This week in the New Yorker Magazine I read a story about a deacon and a group of nuns who chose to visit women on death row in Texas.   The women went into the prison full of fear and found they had much in common with the women on death row.  They met them as fellow travelers and loved them as children of a loving God.   The words of today’s psalm ring true:

Merciful and gracious is the LORD,

slow to anger and abounding in kindness.

Not according to our sins does he deal with us,

nor does he requite us according to our crimes.

We are invited to imitate the attitude of our God. We pray for those who hurt us and let God be the one to judge them and punish them.

We may not like it, but we may be surprised that the mercy of God extends even to those who hate us, or those who we think we hate.


Easter Sunday 2025

By Fr. Chris Welch • May 12, 2025
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Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy), Year C

By Deacon Paul Cerosaletti • April 27, 2025
How many of you recall the following hymn refrain? Misericordes sicut Pater Misericordes sicut Pater… It is the refrain from the hymn of the same title that was composed for the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy, which Pope Francis opened in the first week of Advent in 2015 and concluded with the feast of Christ the King on November 20, 2016. You may recall that throughout that Jubilee Year, we opened our Masses with that hymn and sang that refrain. Misericordes sicut Pater… …Merciful like the Father …Merciful like the Father. How appropriate that on this Sunday, the second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, is also the weekend in which we have laid our Holy Father Pope Francis to rest, and entrusted him to the tender, eternal mercy of God the Father. It was no coincidence that Pope Francis declared the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy. Pope Francis believed Mercy is the primary expression and experience of God’s love for us, and Mercy is the primary expression and experience of the love that God calls us to share with each other. So important was his belief and trust in God’s Mercy, that when he was ordained to the order of Bishop, he took as his episcopal motto “ miserando atque eligendo ” ( which roughly translates from Latin as “having mercy, he chose him”). It is taken from a homily written by St. Bede the Venerable, an eighth-century saint and Doctor of the Church, reflecting on the call of St. Matthew by Christ to become an apostle. St. Bede wrote, “[Jesus] saw the tax collector [Matthew] and, because he saw him through the eyes of mercy and chose him, he said to him: Follow me .” So important was his belief and trust in God’s Mercy, that when Francis was elected as Pope, he kept this episcopal motto as his papal motto. This motto expresses so simply and beautifully truths of our faith: God loves us deeply; God expresses that love to us through His mercy for us in our sinfulness; and that despite our sinfulness, God calls us . God calls us to trust and hope in God’s love for us and calls us to express the same love and mercy for one another. That call is reflected also in the Gospel account of Matthew’s call to discipleship by Jesus, which concludes with Jesus challenging the Pharisees, saying “Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice'” (Mt. 9:13). Jesus challenges us in the same way. He calls the Pharisees – and us – out of ritual acts of worship and piety that are not also accompanied by acts of mercy! Jesus is clear about this. In the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus says, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:36). In his Papal Bull announcing the Extraordinary Year of Mercy, Pope Francis describes God the Father’s mercy for us as like “that of a father or a mother, moved to the very depths out of love for their child…a “visceral” love…gush[ing] forth from the depths naturally, full of tenderness and compassion, indulgence and mercy” (Misericordiae Vultus, no. 6). He also describes God’s Divine Mercy as a ”wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace.” (MV 2). These words bring to mind the visceral atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross for our sins, when blood and water sprung forth from Christ’s side as the cleansing waters of baptism. It is that visceral sacrifice which we recall in the Divine Mercy chaplet when we pray, “O Blood and Water which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as a fount of mercy for us, I trust in You!” It is that cleansing sacrifice that we recall when we pray in the Anima Christi prayer, “Water from the side of Christ, wash me.” And it is that same merciful cleansing in which we hope and trust, as we place all that burdens us into the waters of God’s grace, as we have done here, symbolically, in placing our Lenten stone-burdens in this fountain of Holy Water from the Easter Vigil Baptismal pool. As we contemplate God’s Divine Mercy, we place our trust and our hope in that Divine Mercy, recalling the words our late Holy Father Pope Francis left us with: “Mercy will always be greater than any sin, and no one can place limits on the love of God who is ever ready to forgive” (MV 3); “Mercy [is] the bridge that connects God and man, opening our hearts to the hope of being loved forever” (MV 2). Misericordes sicut Pater Misericordes sicut Pater…

Palm Sunday, Year C

By Deacon Paul Cerosaletti • April 13, 2025
I have long thought that the Church gives us the two Gospel passages we hear today — the account of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the account of his Passion and death — for very practical reasons: this is the last Sunday before Easter when we will celebrate Christ’s Resurrection and not everyone is able to attend and celebrate the Triduum liturgies during Holy Week. Therefore, the Church places these two critical Gospel passages together so that we hear and experience them in a regular Sunday Mass setting — literally, to ‘fit them in’ before Easter. But there is another equally, if not more, important reason we are to experience these Gospel passages together. And I honestly don’t know if the Church intends this reason or not, but I believe the Holy Spirit intends it. These two Gospel passages remind us as much as any passage that Jesus Christ, while fully Divine, is also fully human. He is like us in all manner except one, in committing sin. He therefore shares with us the experience of the full range of our humanity. In these two Gospel passages we experience Christ moving from triumph to tragedy, from soaring to suffering: the triumphant, soaring entry into Jerusalem and the suffering and tragedy of His Passion and crucifixion. Christ’s human experience is also our human experience, for do not we all experience triumph and tragedy, soaring and suffering? Therefore, we do not have a God and Savior who cannot sympathize with our human experience, but rather one who shares it with us! And we have a God and Savior who not only soared and suffered for us, but soars and suffers with us. Not just two thousand years ago, but right here, right now, in every minute of our lives. For what did Jesus promise? “I am with you always , until the end of time.” (Mt 28:20) When we soar and triumph, Jesus is with us, by our side. And when we suffer and experience tragedy, especially, Jesus is with us, by our side. We are encouraged to give thanks to God in our triumphs and soaring. And we are invited to unite our suffering with Christ’s suffering and offer it up for whatever or whomever is in need. Christ’s suffering was not pointless, and united to His, neither is ours. We offer it up, trust, and hope. Sisters and brothers, that hope comes from our knowledge of the rest of the Gospel story that we will experience with Christ: that His triumph and tragedy, His soaring and suffering does not end in death, but in the glory of Easter Resurrection.