Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, on this Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews offers us a great biblical description of faith. I stand with Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, who said that faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. Critics of religious say that faith is accepting things on the basis of no evidence; it’s believing any old nonsense; it’s naïveté; it’s superstition...

Friends, George Harrison once sang, “All things must pass; all things must pass away.” Almost every major religious figure and philosopher the world over has intuited this great truth about our world. It’s good, and there are good things in it—a beautiful sunset, an enjoyable meal, a great conversation—but they don’t last. With that in mind, let’s turn to our readings for this Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, which are about the...

Friends, on this Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our Gospel is the Martha and Mary story, and in my years of preaching, I’ve found that it tends to bother people a lot. With the first reading about Abraham in mind, we can better understand what this passage means—and doesn’t mean. Rather than playing one sister off the other, we should read Martha and Mary together: When we focus on the “unum necessarium,” the one thing necessar...

Friends, in our first reading from the book of Deuteronomy this week, Moses says to the people, “For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. . . . No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.” This is a master text for what we call in the Catholic tradition “the natural law.” It means that there is within us a kind of deep m...

Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, it’s appropriate that we’re looking at a portrait of the Church, because we’re coming back, if you want, to the ordinary work of the Church up and down the ages to the present day. Our Gospel from the tenth chapter of Luke gives us our marching orders—from going on mission together and staying rooted in prayer, to trusting in providence and supporting the work of the Church, to curing the sick a...

Friends, this year, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul falls on a Sunday, and I want to spend some time reflecting especially on Saint Peter. Around the year 64, Shimon Bar Yonah, a fisherman from Galilee, was put to death brutally in the Circus of Nero. But while the Roman Empire is long gone and the successor of Nero doesn’t exist, the empire of this fisherman, Peter the Apostle, is everywhere, and in May, his 266th successor wal...

Friends, this is the great feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. In the First Reading, the Spirit manifests himself as a strong driving wind, and while you can’t see the wind directly, you can see its effects. The text I want to reflect on today is not in the readings but is one of my favorites: Galatians 5:22–26, when St. Paul talks about “the fruit of the Spirit.” And it’s precisely to this same point: What are the si...

Friends, getting the Ascension of the Lord right is very important for understanding many aspects of the Church’s life. So I want to dwell on that a little bit with you today, and I want to do so under two headings: the first I’m going to call more political, and the second more liturgical. They are both hinted at in the great statement in the Creed that we recite week after week: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right...

Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, and as the Church readies us for Pentecost, the readings begin to talk about the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel, Jesus, speaking to his disciples the night before he dies, says, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. But God spoke h...

Friends on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we have an extraordinary Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian thing. Jesus, at the beginning of a lengthy and incredibly rich monologue he gives the night before he dies, says to his disciples, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another....

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this marvelous, short but very punchy reading from the Gospel of John: Jesus referring to himself as the good shepherd. This is a remarkably apt metaphor for how God reaches out to us—knows us personally—and how we are able to discern and follow his voice. But how do we hear the voice of the shepherd? In a lot of ways—but I wonder if the clearest way isn’t through the conscience, wh...

Friends, happy Easter! Many of you probably know that I’ve spent much of my life reading philosophers and spiritual writers—Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel. What all those figures have in common is a kind of calm, musing detachment as they talk about high ideas. Well, there’s all of that—and then there’s the Gospel, the “Good News.” Yes, the Gospels have inspired philosophers and s...