Mercy Triumphs: Weekly Homilies of a Catholic Priest

When I was six years old, I experienced a miracle. It was 1993 in the month of May: My oldest brother was having his ninth birthday party, and my parents had their friends and family over with neighbors; my brother's friends were there too. We were in our backyard when my father started a baseball game for the kids. He made the baseball diamond out of any items he could find and saw that our brand new Blessed Mother statue looked good for first base. So, he swiveled the concrete statue over as my mother's parents looked on in anger. My grandmother, my mother's mother, ended up standing by the statue to make sure none of the kids would knock it over while rounding first. The game went on and it ended; the statue was fine. So, my grandmother started returning the statue to its rightful place but, as she was doing that, she started screaming, “Look at the sun look at the sun!” And, turning around and looking up at the sun, I saw an explosion of color: The sun was moving viole...

When I have a funeral, and the family allows me to pick the gospel passage to be proclaimed, I almost always choose the story about Jesus and the good thief. We just heard it: Jesus is hanging on the cross beside two men. One of them is sorry for his sins and the other one is not. And the reason why I choose that Gospel passage is because it gives me and, I hope, everyone else tremendous hope. Again, the man who is sorry for his sins, dying beside Jesus on the cross, is called the “good thief.” He is guilty of some crime. That’s the only thing we know about him. And what a sad way to be remembered: We remember nothing good about this man’s past. But the present, in which he exists in this story, is one of the greatest stories of hope that we can ever hear. Jesus never met this man beside him and the man never met Jesus. But for some reason he senses how good Jesus is. And for some reason he senses that Jesus can help him somehow. And all he does is call out one single time f...

  Imagine someone being dragged into church during a priest’s homily and, whoever is dragging this person in, throws them on the stairs and says, “This person is living their life like this, and the Catholic Church teaches it’s a mortal sin. Father, what do you have to say?” First off, I hope the police would be called immediately. And I hope whoever was dragging a person in would be tackled, very gently, by the ushers. But what about the question? According to the Catholic Church, certain things are sinful for tremendously good reasons, reasons which can be easily looked up, even if popular culture accepts those things as good.  So, what should the priest say about a person being dragged into church who lives contrary to what the Catholic Church teaches? Nothing. How inappropriate for anyone to drag someone else into church and humiliate them. The people who would do that would be committing a grave sin themselves. …And that's what's happened in the Gospel. The scrib...

I'm often called to the hospital to pray with patients who are very ill, sometimes close to death. This one time, I was called into a hospital room of a man who was dying from COVID.   When I arrived, I saw the man lying on his back, clearly in distress; oxygen tubes up his nose; his face was red and perspiring. He had a lot of anxiety, clearly and understandably so; he knew his life on this earth would soon be at an end. And, as I was speaking with him, he shared that he had committed many serious sins earlier in his life, that he had been to confession with a priest about them, but that he still felt much guilt over those sins. So, I told him a story taken from the diary of a nun by the name of Saint Faustina. She lived in Poland and she died right before the beginning of World War II at the age of 33. And Jesus appeared to her many times with messages about the great mercy He has for even the greatest of sinners. The story goes like this: Saint Faustina writes about an ol...