ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

“This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus responds to this charge of the Pharisees and scribes with three parables: first, the Parable of the Lost Sheep, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine in order to bring back the one lost sheep; and then the Parable of the lost coin, in which a woman with ten silver coins loses one and searches diligently until she finds it. Both cases are causes for calling together friends and neighbors to rejoice and celebrate, for what they once had lost but has been found and restored to them. Jesus concludes the parable of the lost sheep by saying, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” And at the end of the Parable of the Lost Coin: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. He concludes with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which we have just heard. Today, Laetare Sunday, the Church a...

The Church lives Christ’s redemptive sacrifice throughout the liturgical year. However, in the season of Lent we would like to immerse ourselves in it in a particularly intense way, as the Apostle urges us: "Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation!” (2 Corinthians 6:2). In this important season, the treasures of Redemption, merited for us by Christ crucified and risen, are dispensed to us in a most particular way. Thus the Psalmist’s exclamation: "Create in me a clean heart… and put a new and right spirit within me" becomes during Lent a strong call to conversion. ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II Homily, Ash Wed., 12 Feb. 1997

The New Testament uses the language of the Body of Christ so as to drum in a message about unity not simply as cooperation but as a sort of mutual creation: we constitute each other… In the central act of worship, the Eucharist, we come together to be fed—fed buy a reality wholly other to us yet made wholly accessible to us; fed so that we can feed one another. The Eucharist isn't an occasion when we set out to celebrate our togetherness and to encourage each other by the degree of our warm fellowship and close agreement. It is as we meet that we are fed by Christ, and because we are fed by him that we become able to feed each other. Somehow, no account of unity that doesn't bring us to this place is going to be adequate. ROWAN WILLIAMS The Tablet, 18 Jan. 2008

Two unavoidable things about fire: it both gives light and burns. In 1955 Flannery O’Connor said the following to one of her correspondents on her difficulties in being a Catholic writer: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation: that is, nobody in your audience.” Now, why would she refer to the central mystery of our faith as awful in its effects? Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t put it past her to be playing on the two meanings of the word “awful”: at the same time the everyday one of “terrible, off-putting” and then the other more exalted one: “full of awe”. Indeed, the fact that God at a certain point decided to become a human being is at the same time the most comforting and the most problematic of events, if we take it with all the earnestness of a believer like Flannery O’Con-nor, or o...

Let us ask for the grace to believe that with God things really do change, that he will banish our fears, heal our wounds, turn our arid places into springs of water. Let us ask for the grace of hope, since hope revives our faith and rekindles our charity. It is for this hope that the deserts of today's world are thirsting. POPE FRANCIS Custodians of Wonder: Daily Pope Francis

MOSES, MY BROTHER, MY SELF Conversion is the central theme of the readings from Sacred Scripture for this Third Sunday of Lent, following on the heels of faith on the first Sunday and covenant on the second. The call to conversion is evident in the Gospel text, where we twice hear from Jesus himself the poignant warning: Unless you are converted, you will perish. The call to conversion is also present in St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in the second reading, in the form of an admonition not to fall into idolatry and to fight bravely and continually against temptations of all sorts because such a fight is what the drama of conversion looks like in the concrete. And in the first reading from Exodus, conversion appears as a decisive turning point in the life of Moses. The crisis occurs at the moment when Moses receives from the Lord the explicit commandment to do something that Moses had already decided upon on his own, namely, the task of delivering the children of Israel f...

The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil, nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward. The perfect person does good through love. His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does. He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward. The rule of life for a perfect person is to be the image and likeness of God. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA Miscellaneous Studies, 4, 22