The 2nd Sunday of Ordinary TimeBackground: Ordinary Time gets its name because each year one of the three synoptic gospels is read “in order” starting with the Baptism of the Lord which marks the end of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany season and going on through 34 Sundays to Christ the King. Only Lent-Easter-Pentecost interrupt the steady progress.Yet […]

Christmas Mass During the DayBackground: This is the last and oldest set of readings for Christmas in the Roman Rite. It can startle us because there are none of the details about the baby and the manger that we are so used to from the Lucan infancy narrative. Yet a saying from St. Athanasius, an

Cycle A – DISCUSSION QUESTIONSIntroduction to MatthewMatthew was writing for a predominantly Jewish audience, and so he occasionally presumes a bit of knowledge about the laws and customs of Judaism that many of us might be unfamiliar with. But it is easy for us to understand his references if we check the footnotes of any

You can reflect questions for every Sunday of the year by clicking here.Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary TimeBackground: The pointless self-righteousness of the Pharisees is a dominant theme in Luke’s Gospel. This Sunday, though, it is the Sadducees’ narrow concept of God which is being portrayed for us. By setting up a rhetorical situation which can easily

You can reflect questions for every Sunday of the year by clicking here.Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary TimeBackground: Although much of the Old Testament tradition proclaims God’s love and care for the poor and the vulnerable, another strand in the tradition presupposes that wealth is a sign of God’s favor. On the road up to Jerusalem,

You can reflect questions for every Sunday of the year by clicking here.Twenty Second Sunday of Ordinary TimeBackground: Jesus is still on his journey to Jerusalem and continues to teach us what we need to do to make the journey with him. In this Sunday’s gospel selection, he is warning us to take the long

Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary TimeBackground: In contemporary America this Sunday’s set of readings is profoundly countercultural since only two decades ago we had a head of the Federal Reserve consistently assuring us that “Greed is good!” At this stage in his journey to Jerusalem, Jesus is once again calling our attention to the need to get