PAN DE LA SEMANA

6 th Sunday of Easter Year C May 5, 2013 PEACE, YES! TROUBLE, NO! A decade ago, I was deep in study once again, somewhere in the US East Coast. It was supposed to be a Catholic institution, but I soon found out that most students were not only not Catholic. Some were even anti-Catholic! One day, there was an imam who came to talk about his religion. Of course, he did talk about it, and in the process also talked against my religion, ever so subtly. I wouldn’t have minded that one, coming as it does from someone like him. But when a “Christian” deridingly asked me whether Catholics were Christians, I was definitely incensed. I wasn’t in the mood for peace at that moment. I was seething … like I was on so many other occasions in my life when my ego was stepped on, hurt, abused, or otherwise put down. It is hard to be at peace when being a Catholic nowadays is equated with so many unsavory terms … when being orthodox means you are the...

Sunday Morning Worship / Gospel Reflection / Catholic Homily 4th Sunday of Lent Year B March 22, 2009 It was the lowest point in the history of the chosen people of God! Worse than the situation they were in, there was none… being on exile, being far from the land promised to their forefathers, far from the temple, far from what they have gotten used to, far from the familiar sights and sounds of home, far from the security that comes from the knowledge that what one does is never foreign, never strange to anybody around him or her. The chosen people of God were down in the depths of communal humiliation and suffering… at Babylon, where the purity of their faith could not find perfect expression. “ By the rivers of Babylon, there they sat and wept, on the poplars that grew there, there they hung up their harps.” On top of all this, Jerusalem, the holy city was left in ruins, destroyed by the gentile conquerors. The Israelites, for all intents and purposes, were “pitched past pitch o...

Catholic Homily/Sunday Reflections 1st Sunday of Lent(B) March 1, 2009 There always seems to be something timely and current whenever we hear God’s Word. God’s Word always convicts us, confronts us, and engages us in a task that is concrete, here and now. Thre is simply no skirting around it, no deying, no running away from it. Today, we are told about chaos, confusion, wilderness, flood, sin, wild beasts, desert, temptation, and arrest, on the one hand. But we also hear about a covenant, about a promise, about inclusiveness. We are told about all creatures as being part of this inclusive promise from God, no one excluded. Absolutely! The promise from God was given in the heels of sin-induced destruction by flood. But as the creatures saved in the ark filed out into dry land, God, in His mercy promised a new covenant to be symbolized by the rainbow. Not only did God promise no more flood to destroy all mortal beings. He also included “every living creature” in this promised new covenan...