Mercy Triumphs: Weekly Homilies of a Catholic Priest

Was it a catch or not? Should the Bills’ coach have been fired? NFL fans, and especially us Bills fans, are deeply divided on those questions. They have been widely debated, and commentators and well known personalities have offered strong opinions on both sides. Yet when all is said and done, those disagreements don’t affect our souls; they don’t affect our relationship with God or our hope of Heaven. That’s why this division is not something Saint Paul would ever write a letter to us about. But Saint Paul did write letters to Christian communities that were deeply divided, not over sports, but over matters that had eternal consequences. The divisions he addressed were about whether people were following God or slowly drifting away from Him. The divisions we heard about in the second reading in the church at Corinth were so deep that Paul writes, “Each of you is saying, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divide...

I’ve listened to many stories of people who were overly self-reliant, hit rock bottom, and only then finally surrendered to Jesus. And almost without exception, they speak about how grateful they became for God’s mercy. They knew they had been ignoring God. They weren’t giving Him time during the day. They were depending almost entirely on themselves. Some of those stories involved people getting drawn into astrology, things like tarot cards or fortune-telling. For a while, it gave them a sense of control over their lives, even a feeling of power. But when they eventually tried to step away from it, things became spiritually dark. I’ll leave it at that. What followed was often a long period of prayer and suffering before they finally came to Jesus and surrendered to Him. And when they did, He freed them. He gave them peace. In the same way, the Magi were astrologers. They studied the stars and looked to created things, not God, to give them direction in life. And, like so many thi...