Last Sunday in chapter sixteen of Saint Matthew’s Gospel we read about the events at Caesarea Philippi, the site of the pagan temple to the Greek god Pan where the Lord Jesus put to his Apostles the central question of all human life: Who do you say that I am? And we heard Simon’s answer to that question: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. In reply, the Lord Jesus then gave Simon a new name and a new mission: You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.

Then the Gospel ended last week with this strange twist: Jesus strictly ordered his disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. But why? Why would the Lord have ordered them not to speak of the extraordinary truth just confessed by Simon Peter?

The reason is simple: Because although the end of Christ’s journey was near, his mission was not yet complete. His hour - the time of his suffering and death - his hour was already on the horizon but had not yet fully arrived. And until that hour had come and he was raised from the dead, the preaching of the Gospel had to wait a little while longer.

Chapter sixteen of Matthew’s Gospel ends at Caesarea Philippi, and chapter seventeen opens six days later with the Transfiguration of Jesus on a high mountain in the presence of Peter, James, and John. Scripture does not say, but an ancient tradition holds that the Transfiguration took place forty days before Good Friday, and so the Transfiguration signaled the final stage of the Messiah’s mission.

In any case, Moses and Elijah came to the mount of Transfiguration to prepare the Messiah for the suffering and death that awaited him in Jerusalem, and on the holy mountain the Lord Jesus was revealed to be Light from Light and God the Father’s own beloved Son. Simon Peter was so filled with delight at this glimpse of divine radiance that he did not want to leave that high place.

But then the majestic and terrifying glory cloud overshadowed them, and the Father’s voice commanded them to listen to his Son, who again instructed his Apostles to keep silent until the consummation of his mission. As they descended the high mountain the Lord Jesus commanded Peter, James, and John: “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” And now we are ready to understand today’s Gospel, which is the passage between You are Peter and the Transfiguration.

Back at Caesarea Philippi Matthew tells us: “From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.”

But this was too much for Simon bar Jonah. The newly named Peter could not possibly consent to the torture and murder of his beloved teacher and friend, the man he just confessed to be the Messiah and the Son of God. And so Peter exclaimed “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

I imagine this is precisely the way any of us would respond to the prospect of an innocent person we love suffering injustice, violence, and death. But the very heart of the Gospel is that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us precisely so that he could take upon himself the suffering of the whole world. Without Christ’s atoning death on the cross and his glorious Resurrection, he could not redeem the human race from sin and the grave.

But Peter had not yet grasped this truth, which is why Christ commanded him and the others to keep silent about his identity. And to help them see that his mission absolutely required the Cross, the Lord had to be severe with Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are setting your mind not on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

How hard it is for us to set our minds on the things of God, and how easy it is to prefer the things of man, especially our own wisdom and personal preferences. We trust our experience and our judgments about what is right and wrong, true and false. Then the world tells us to follow our hearts, not realizing our hearts cannot be trusted until they have been converted and illuminated by the Lord Jesus. So we cobble together our identities by indulging our own desires and pleasures, and we choose our path and place in the world to insure maximum comfort and security.

But the cross is not comfortable; the cross is violent and loathsome and an agony to carry and die upon, and none of us would choose that path for ourselves or for those we love. And then we conclude that if we would not ask others to carry a cross, surely God will not ask it of us.

But, friends, there is no way of life for Christians other than the Way of the Cross, and so the Lord Jesus teaches us “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

But what form does the cross take? In every age, the Gospel contradicts something in human culture, and in every life, the Word of God rejects something that we dearly desire, as the Prophet Jeremiah learned in today’s first lesson. And in our day, the Gospel requires us to stand against fundamental errors about what a human person is and about several dimensions of life and love.

For example, to take five disputed questions of our day: the Gospel reveals that abortion and euthanasia are murder, that male and female are the only possible sexes and that they are chosen for us rather than by us, that only one man and one woman who give themselves to each other for life can make the bond of marriage, that only baptized men can become priests, and that Jesus Christ alone is the Savior of the entire human race.

Most people alive today do not believe any of those things, and we might be inclined to say that is simply because they are not Catholic Christians. But among Catholics many of the baptized and some of the ordained, even of the highest ranks, are tempted not to believe these teachings either, let alone try to shape their lives by them. But to reject these truths revealed by God is to reject the cross, and that rejection is seldom quiet or abstract.

Consider Simon Peter’s rejection of the cross of Christ. Matthew tells us that when Jesus described his coming suffering and death, Peter “took him aside and began to rebuke him.” Think of that. Peter rebuked Jesus; the student corrected his Master. Simon didn’t simply doubt the wisdom of Jesus. The newly named Rock reprimanded the Lord Jesus; Peter sharply corrected his rabbi, the man whom he had just confessed to be the Messiah and the Son of the living God.

But if Peter rejected the cross and contradicted Jesus, then we do exactly the same thing every time we reject the Gospel and prefer our own wisdom to the revealed Word of God. And when we reject the cross in this way, we tell ourselves just as Peter did that the Lord is being unreasonable.

When we choose our own comfort or pleasure or security over the truth revealed in Holy Scripture and handed on in the Apostolic Tradition, then we rebuke the Lord Jesus and refuse to carry the cross. When we will not acknowledge that our sins even are sins, then we sharply contradict the Lord and pretend that we know better. And that, friends, is a path to spiritual death. “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

At Caesarea Philippi Simon Peter, Master of the Palace in the Kingdom of Heaven, rejected the cross, both for himself and for the Savior. And then despite his sharp correction by the Messiah, Peter rejected the cross again in the Garden of Gethsemane by his sloth and anger, and again at the home of Caiaphas by his cowardice and lies, and again at Calvary by his conspicuous absence.

Peter failed over and again to accept the cross, and we do exactly the same thing every time we set our minds on the things of man rather the things of God and prefer our wisdom to the gift of divine revelation. But by grace through faith, hope, and love, Simon Peter eventually did find the strength and courage to accept the cross and to live according to the saving truth he already believed in his heart and confessed with his lips. And with the grace of God and through the forgiveness of our sins, we too can find that same strength.

And that is what Saint Paul is describing in the second lesson today from his Letter to the Romans. “I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”

In the end, of course, Simon Peter did die on a cross - in Rome on the Vatican Hill, and by his death Peter bore witness to his faith that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God. And we are called to give the same witness to Christ by living the grace of our Baptism, by refusing to conform ourselves to this age, and by allowing ourselves to be transformed by the renewal of our minds in the liberating truth of the Gospel.

Such renewal and transformation is a gift of God’s grace given to us in Word and Sacrament so that through the obedience of faith and nourished by the sacred mysteries of our redemption we can offer our bodies and our whole selves as a living sacrifice of spiritual worship, worship of the eternal Word of God made flesh, worship of the Savior who carried his cross first and always helps us carry our cross, worship of him who is the life and light of the world, worship of our Messiah and Lord: Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 30 August 2026, the 22nd Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Why is the office of pope so important in the Church? To answer that question we must go first not to Rome or Jerusalem but to Egypt and then to a place of pagan worship in the Golan Heights, near the present border of Syria and Lebanon.

In the Book of Genesis we read that Pharaoh entrusted to Joseph, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, an office second only to his own. The ruler of Egypt declared to Joseph:

“You shall be in charge of my palace, and all my people shall dart at your command. Only in respect to the throne shall I outrank you.” And as a sign of Joseph’s new authority, Pharaoh took off his signet ring and put it on Joseph’s finger. He had Joseph dressed in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck, because Joseph was now Master of the Palace.

This same authority is conferred in today’s first lesson, not in Egypt but in the Kingdom of Judah, upon a man named Eliakim. The Lord deposed an unworthy Master of the Palace, and then through the prophet Isaiah he declared of Eliakim:

“I will clothe him with your robe and gird him with your sash, and give over to him your authority. He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. I will place the key of the House of David on Eliakim’s shoulder; when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open. I will fix him like a peg in a sure spot.”

Here we see the power and dignity of the Master of the Palace, who effectively rules in the king’s name and with the king’s own authority, not to compete with the king and still less to replace him, but in order to extend the dominion of the king and assist him in the government of his kingdom.

This office of Master of the Palace existed in the ancient kingdoms of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, as well as in Israel, and so the Twelve Apostles would have understood immediately what it means for a man to be entrusted by his king with the keys to the kingdom.

All of that gives us a context for understanding the extraordinary event described today by Saint Matthew in chapter sixteen of his Gospel. As the Lord Jesus did last week in chapter fifteen of Matthew, he took the Twelve once again on a journey out of Galilee and into Gentile territory, this time towards the city of Caesarea Philippi, about twenty miles north of the Sea of Galilee.

Caesarea Philippi was named for two men who typified earthly authority: the Tetrarch Philip, one of the sons of Herod the Great, and the Emperor Augustus Caesar who claimed the title Son of God. The city was at the foot of Mount Hermon where Ba’al had once been worshiped, but since the time of Alexander the Great it was the site of a shrine to the Greek god Pan who was depicted as a man with the legs and horns of a goat and acclaimed as the god of shepherds and flocks. The grotto at the shrine of Pan was the site of irrational pagan worship, much of it based on debauchery and frenzied behavior from which we get our word panic.

Into this heart of pagan darkness, the true Lamb of God took his Twelve Jewish Apostles to lay the foundation of a movement that would embrace first Israel, then Greece and Rome, and finally the whole world in a new, eternal, and universal kingdom of justice, love, and peace. And the seed and beginning of that kingdom is the Church of Jesus Christ which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Jesus asked the Twelve: Who do people say the Son of Man is? Last week we saw a Canaanite woman acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Son of David, and now Christ asks the Twelve about what other people are saying of him. This question comes near the end of the time the Lord Jesus spent with the Apostles, shortly before his Transfiguration and the final journey to Jerusalem.

For three years the Twelve had travelled with Christ up and down the land, they heard him preach and witnessed his power over nature, and they were among the vast crowds who thronged to be with Jesus. And now the time had come for the Twelve to declare themselves once and for all.

Who do people say the Son of Man is? Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. These various answers speak of the difficulty encountered by anyone who sees evidence of things his preconceptions tell him cannot possibility be true.

Think of the incomprehension experienced by Pilate, Herod, and the Sanhedrin during the trial of Jesus in the early morning darkness of Good Friday. Who is this man? Where did he come from? How can he do the things he has done? By what authority does he teach with such power?

But the Apostles did not have the luxury of merely reporting what others said about the Lord Jesus. It was now time for them to make up their minds, because the hour for which the Son of Man came into the world was near at hand. And so he asked the Twelve directly and personally, “Who do you say that I am?”

Saint Matthew, who was there that day and heard the question, does not describe the scene for us in detail. Did Simon answer immediately? Or did he first hesitate, straining to find the right words to explain what his heart already knew? Did he have tears in his eyes or wonder in his face?

Did the words catch in his throat, or did they tumble out on his trembling lips? Did Simon whisper his answer with quiet reverence, or did he shout it with indescribable joy? We do not know the answers to these questions, but we do know that Simon bar Jonah replied to the Lord Jesus with words that changed all of human history: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

The children of Israel had waited for centuries for their Messiah, the Anointed One of the House of David who would restore the long lost Kingdom. So that much of Simon’s reply would have been easily understood by any Jew: you are the Christ. But the second part - that was something else entirely: you are the Son of the living God.

Israel’s everlasting mission is to announce to all the nations that there is only one, living, and true God: the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is One. And the monotheism of Israel would seem to exclude the very possibility of anyone being in truth the Son of the living God.

But Simon bar Jonah, without yet grasping how and why, had come to understand by a divine gift that his friend and teacher, the rabbi from Nazareth and the Son of Mary, has no human father and is in truth God the Son made man, the Only Begotten of God the Father, the eternal Word who in the fullness of time and by the power of the Holy Spirit was made flesh and dwelt among us. And so Simon declared to the Lord Jesus: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

In reply, and to assist the other Eleven in understanding Simon’s profession of faith, Jesus declared: “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.” Christ confirmed that Simon had received a supernatural gift of divine revelation which no human wisdom could ever attain. And this gift of divine revelation had awakened in Simon saving knowledge by grace through faith of the identity of the Lord Jesus as both true God and true man.

That much alone would make this encounter at Caesarea Philippi a world historical event, but the Lord Jesus was not yet done. Because of this supernatural gift of faith, Simon was about to receive from his divine Master a new name and a new mission.

Simon, the simple fisherman from Galilee, was about to become Master of the Palace in the Kingdom of God. “I say to you, you are Rock (Kepha, Kephas, Petrus, Peter) and upon this rock, I will build my Church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

If you go into Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City and look up into the great dome of Michelangelo, you will see giant letters five feet tall running around the base of the dome about 150 feet above the floor. They say: “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum.” Meaning “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church and I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.”

That magnificent dome, the tallest in the world, rises more than 400 feet over the main altar of the basilica, which in turn is built several stories above the grave of the Galilean fisherman who was murdered by the Emperor Nero in a racetrack built at the Mons Vaticanus, the Vatican Hill. Peter was buried in a simple grave near the place of his death, but the Christians in Rome never forgot or abandoned that spot.

Why is the pope so important in the Church? The office of Master of the Palace in the Kingdom of Heaven was given first to Simon Peter, but that office did not die with him. The office given by Christ to Peter continues in the Church in Peter’s successor, the Bishop of Rome, who by virtue of his petrine ministry serves as pastor of the universal Church, not in rivalry to Christ but only as his vicar, a steward of the sacred mysteries and a herald of the Gospel.

We know, of course, that Simon Peter failed in many ways to live according to his profession of faith and the dignity of his office, as have all of his successors for two thousand years. But the sins and human frailties of the man in the office should never deprive us of our gratitude that Christ the King left us a Master of the Palace entrusted with the power of the keys to guide us in the Way of the Cross and to stand like a peg fixed in a sure spot against false doctrine and disunity in the Church.

When a pope dies and the College of Cardinals assembles in Rome to elect the next successor of Peter, the world watches with fascination as an ancient set of rituals unfolds in one of the most storied places on earth, but at the end of the day, after all the pomp, everything comes down to one question from the Savior of the world: Who do you say that I am? And the Lord Jesus puts that same question to each and every one of us, first on the day of our Baptism and then every day for the rest of our lives.

The Lord said of Eliakim, Master of the Palace: “He shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” The Church is the heavenly Jerusalem, and Pope means Father, Papa. Through the Gospel the Successor of Saint Peter is Father to all who are in Christ because it is his task to strengthen the faith of all who confess that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Like Joseph in Egypt and all Masters of the Palace in every time and place, the Bishop of Rome wears a fine robe, a ring on his finger, and a gold chain around his neck, but on that chain hangs a cross - a cross which testifies to the passion, death, and Resurrection of the King of the Jews and the King of all creation.

Yes, the Bishop of Rome and successor of Peter is truly Master of the Palace in the Kingdom of God, but the only King he serves and to whom he bears witness for us is the one confessed by Simon Peter to be the Messiah and the Son of the living God, the Lamb once slain who lives forever: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 23 August 2026, the 21st Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Last Sunday in the second lesson from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we saw Paul wrestling with the fact that most Jews in his time did not receive the Lord Jesus as the Messiah, and the Apostle was trying to understand this mystery of divine Providence by puzzling over how the many pieces of the eternal plan of salvation will finally fit together at the End of Days. And in all of our Scripture lessons today, we see several different dimensions of this very same mystery being unveiled for us by the Word of God.

In our first lesson, the Prophet Isaiah proclaims that the foreigners or Gentiles who love the name of the Lord and who demonstrate their love by doing what is just and right will be brought to God’s holy mountain and find that their sacrifices are also acceptable, hence the house of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will be called a house of prayer not just for Jews but for all peoples. And so the Psalmist sings: May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you!

And in the second lesson, Saint Paul both mourns the refusal of the House of Israel to accept Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and Lord and then rejoices that the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable, and for this reason, Paul teaches that the former lack of faith among Gentiles and the present lack of faith among Jews are in some fashion complementary principles leading in the Providence of God to divine mercy and reconciliation for people of every tribe and tongue. But that unity in redemption will be revealed only on the Last Day, and so until then we continue to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom of God revealed by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Which brings us to today’s account of a journey and very strange conversation recorded by Saint Matthew. Notice first where the scene takes place: the region of Tyre and Sidon, which were two cities in Gentile territory. These were ancient cities even in the time of Christ, and today these places are in modern Lebanon.

When the children of Israel took possession of the Land of Canaan, they were not able to subdue Tyre and Sidon, and so those two cities remained centers of Phoenician civilization. In due course, however, Alexander the Great laid waste the city of Tyre, and the Persians conquered Sidon. But after being destroyed, both cities were rebuilt, and under Roman rule they became prosperous trading centers.

Chapter fifteen of Matthew’s Gospel from which we read today opens with the Lord Jesus in Galilee engaged in a dispute with a group of scribes and Pharisees who had come there from Jerusalem to argue with him over his teaching about the Law of Moses. The Apostles noted that the scribes and Pharisees held Jesus in contempt, and so Christ then tried to teach the Twelve how to understand the Law properly and what is required of us to live upright lives. And immediately after that exchange, today’s passage begins in the next verse.

“At that time, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.” This geographical destination is not random. Jesus took the Twelve out of Jewish territory in Galilee and into Gentile territory to continue his lesson about a proper understanding of righteousness and the Law of Moses, and in that pagan place a Canaanite woman approached the Lord Jesus with surprising reverence. For centuries, Canaanites and Jews had been bitter enemies, but this foreign woman nonetheless cried out in faith and hope: “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!”

Friends, this is extraordinary. The Jewish scribes and Pharisees who argued with Jesus in Galilee regarded him as a lawless blasphemer, but this pagan woman in Gentile lands acknowledged him as the Lord, the Son of David, and thereby implicitly confessed that salvation is from the Jews.

This Canaanite woman approached the Savior because she wanted him to cure her daughter, and although Jesus initially ignored her, she kept calling out for him. Perhaps word of his miracles had already reached Tyre and Sidon, or perhaps she knew someone who had told her about the wonder-working rabbi from Nazareth. But however this Gentile woman came to believe that Christ could save her daughter, she was relentless in seeking his help, while the Twelve were annoyed and wanted nothing to do with her. They said to the Lord “Send her away,” and at first, Jesus seemed to agree with them.

Christ said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But the brave Canaanite woman was not deterred. She knelt humbly at the feet of Jesus, and then she said simply “Lord, help me.” And now comes the strangest part of the conversation. Jesus answered her, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”

Now this was a standard Jewish insult for Gentiles and a quick way to distinguish the descendants of Abraham from the goyim who are not heirs to the covenants made by the living God with the children of Israel. The Twelve Apostles would have highly approved of this brusque dismissal by their Master of the brash Canaanite woman. But there is more here than meets the eye, and she was not put off, so she then added cleverly: “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”

Matthew does not tell us and so we cannot know how this woman came to believe that the Son of Mary was the long awaited Messiah of Israel, but someone had taught her this saving truth even before Christ and the Twelve arrived at this outdoor classroom. And then Jesus answered her tenderly: “‘O woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And (Matthew tells us) the woman’s daughter was healed from that hour.”

I hope by now that the point of this apostolic field trip is clear. Jesus did not travel from Galilee to Tyre and Sidon to hurl insults at a Gentile stranger. He was, rather, engaged in a teaching mission; he was teaching the Twelve, teaching them an essential truth that they were not yet ready to receive and understand. Yes, salvation comes from the Jews, but it is not for Jews only. Salvation is offered to the entire human race without a single exception. Jew and Greek. Slave and free. Male and female.

Jesus Christ suffered and died for the redemption of every man, woman, and child who will ever live, and the grace of salvation is offered without distinction to everyone who will hear and heed the Word of God with faith, hope, and love. “For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

In the fifth section of his Letter to the Romans - which is all of chapters nine, ten, and eleven - Saint Paul acknowledged this saving truth and taught the Christians in Rome how to understand the enduring mystery that the living God can turn even our disobedience into part of his providential plan for the salvation of the world.

Once we grasp this truth, then we must not only tolerate people of other races and religions; we must also rejoice in whatever they already have which is good, or true, or beautiful. And then we begin the search in their own beliefs and culture for any seeds of the Word of God which were planted by common grace, seeds that will help us teach them to understand that salvation is found in Christ alone and that we receive the gift of eternal life only by God’s grace, the grace of the one, true God: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Friends, at the Throne of Grace, there is only one race, and that is the human race. Every human person who will one day live in eternal glory will have been justified, sanctified, and glorified only by the Son of David, the King of the Jews. Our place in the Kingdom of God comes not from the color of our skin or the lineage of our ancestors, or from the language we speak or our own wisdom or knowledge, or from the tribe to which we belong or the value of our property, or from the correctness of our politics or even our observance of the eternal moral Law.

No, at the End of Days, all who are gathered at the Throne of Grace will be there only from knowing, loving, and serving him who alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the Son of David and the Son of the living God, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End to whom belongs all of time and all the ages. He is the Long Desired of All the Nations, the Holy One of Israel, and the Lamb once slain who lives forever: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 16 August 2026, the 20th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

When Israel’s long awaited Messiah finally came, why did the vast majority of Jews alive at that time not accept him? And after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, what role does the continuing existence of Judaism have in the eternal plan of salvation, both for Christians and for all humanity?

These are among the questions explored by the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Romans, from which we have been reading in the second lesson during a fourteen Sunday sequence which began back on 14 June. Romans is divided into sixteen chapters, but a more useful way of understanding that letter is by looking at seven distinct sections of unequal length, each of which is dedicated to a general theme.

The first section is Paul’s introduction of himself to the Christians in Rome. The second is an explanation that without the Gospel the human race is irredeemably lost. The third section considers how man is justified before God by faith in Jesus Christ. The fourth treats of how justification is experienced in living the Christian life. The sixth section - we’ll come back to the fifth - the sixth section discusses the duties of Christians to each other and to civil society. And finally the seventh section is a conclusion filled with personal greetings and requests to individuals.

But today we are at the beginning of the fifth section, and it takes up all of chapters nine, ten, and eleven of Romans. In this part of his letter, Saint Paul ponders the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the eternal plan of salvation, and section five is arguably the heart of the entire letter, especially in the way it helps us understand the meaning of the third section on justification by faith rather than by observance of the law.

Our lectionary sequence spends only today and the next two Sundays on three brief passages from section five of Romans, so I encourage you to open your Bible at home and give your full attention to all of chapters nine, ten, and eleven in which you can see how Paul wrestled with the fact that most of the Jews in his day refused to accept the Lord Jesus as the Christ, a refusal that has continued for two thousand years among the vast majority of Jews. And yet it was and is the mission of Israel to bear witness to the one true God and to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah, the Holy One of Israel.

After Pentecost the first problem confronted by the Church was a sharp conflict with the religious authorities of Jerusalem who had persecuted and executed the Lord Jesus. The Sanhedrin rejected his claim to be the Anointed One of God, they denied that he was raised from the dead, and they sought to extinguish the Church by imprisoning or executing for the crime of blasphemy anyone who professed faith in Jesus of Nazareth as Christ and Lord.

This story is told in detail in the Acts of the Apostles, and there we read that one of the star persecutors of the Church was none other than Paul himself, then known as Saul of Tarsus, who witnessed and approved the stoning to death of Saint Stephen, the deacon who was the first martyr to give his life as a witness to Jesus Christ.

The letters of Paul bear witness to the conflict between Jews living throughout the Roman empire and the preachers who came to their diaspora communities proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord. Despite the fact that both the preachers and those to whom they preached were all Jews, there was constant strife in those first decades which led to the bitter separation of Judaism and Christianity, but even two decades after the Resurrection, the apostles still had to argue over this question: Do Gentiles who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior first have to become Jews in order to become Christians?

That debate was resolved around the year 51 at a meeting in Jerusalem which was convoked to sort out this very question, and that gathering is described in chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles. There we read that the Apostles and the first priests or elders of the Church met together in the Council of Jerusalem, and after their deliberation guided by the Holy Spirit they declared that Gentile converts to Christ should not first become Jews in order to become Christians. This meant that Gentile Christians would not be circumcised or taught to observe the Law of Moses, except for the perennial parts of the first Ten Commandments which summarize the eternal moral law that binds all people of every time and place.

After the Council of Jerusalem, the paths of Jews and Christians were sundered, bringing great sadness to Saint Paul, a Pharisee who had studied in Jerusalem under the greatest rabbi of his age and whose entire life had been shaped by study of the Torah and worship in the Temple. During the years of Paul’s mission as the teacher of the Gentiles, he continually pondered the mystery of how and why most of the children of Israel failed to see and welcome the Messiah when finally he came, and that is where we begin today in chapter nine of Romans.

Paul wrote “I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed for ever. Amen.” (Romans 9:1-5)

Paul is here saying that if his brother Jews could only see Jesus with the eyes of faith as the fulfillment of all the Law and the Prophets, then he himself - Paul - would gladly accept being cut off from Christ forever. That is the measure of his sorrow that most Jews alive in his day would not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and that is where our passage from chapter nine ends today.

But Paul then goes on to talk about how God has revealed the eternal plan of salvation in puzzling ways such as embracing Isaac while sending away Ishmael and accepting Jacob while rejecting Esau. Paul’s point is that each of these strange inflection points, though mysterious to us, is in some way a part of the gradual unfolding of one plan for the salvation not just of a single tribe or nation but of the entire human race. This is the universal or catholic plan of salvation that was revealed finally and fully in the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and Risen.

Paul concludes that the ratification of the New Covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ does not nullify the First Covenant with the House of Israel because the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. Paul adds that until the full number of the Gentiles is added to the House of Israel, as a wild shoot is grafted onto an olive tree, the Providence of God will sustain those Jews upon whom a darkening has descended which prevents them from seeing the Messiah, and for that reason the fact of Judaism continuing in the world is, in ways we cannot yet perceive, for the sake of the salvation of all the nations by the Lord Jesus Christ.

On the next two Sundays we will skip over the rest of chapter nine and all of chapter ten and press on to two brief readings from chapter eleven of Romans, so do take time this week to read and study all of chapters nine, ten, and eleven. One of the things you’ll find in chapters nine and ten is Paul’s pondering of the difference between being a Jew by biological fact and being a Jew by religious observance, and this distinction can be useful for us in a time when many millions of baptized Christians live like pagans rather than as disciples of the Lord Jesus.

We know that the sacraments or mysteries of Christ are the ordinary means of grace, and they are given by God to bring about in us the obedience of faith and the life of the new creation. But the sacraments are not magic, and they do not have their full intended effects in the life of anyone who does not join the Church in divine worship, who does not read and believe Holy Scripture, who will not be changed by grace, who refuses to acknowledge that his sins are sins, and who will not surrender his life in the obedience of faith to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

In other words, even those who are baptized into the death and Resurrection of Christ must receive the Gospel with saving faith, hope, and love and then follow Christ in the Way of the Cross or else they make their Baptism an empty act of superstition rather than the beginning and foundation of a life of discipleship.

In chapter nine of Romans, Saint Paul describes a great division among Jews about their relationship to the living God on the basis of birth rather than belief. He writes: “It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants … This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned as descendants.” (Romans 9:6-8)

Friends, this is why no one who has been baptized should ever be content with a life that is not centered on Jesus Christ and lived according to the truth of his Gospel, and that in turn is why those Christians who understand this distinction and do live a Christocentric life should never cease trying to explain to baptized pagans why they are missing the very heart of their existence and how to return to him who alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

For the sake of those who have been baptized but who are not yet or no longer living as faithful Christians, let us resolve to live by radical conversion, deep fidelity, joyful discipleship, and courageous evangelism so that we may be convincing and compelling witnesses to the saving truth that Jesus Christ is Lord.

This is the text of my homily for 9 August 2026, the 19th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Our reading today from Saint Matthew’s Gospel begins at verse 13 of chapter 14, but to feel the full weight of this turning point in the life of the Lord Jesus, we must back up ten verses. So listen to Saint Matthew starting at verse 3 of chapter 14, which speaks of John the Baptist:

“Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, because John had been saying to him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’ And though (Herod) wanted to put (John) to death, he feared the people, because they held (John) to be a prophet.

“But when Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and pleased Herod, so that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask. Prompted by her mother, she said ‘Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.’ And the king was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests, he commanded it to be given.

“(Herod) sent and had John beheaded in prison, and his head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, and she brought it to her mother. And (John’s) disciples came and took away the body and buried it, and they went and told Jesus.” And that is where our text begins today: “When Jesus heard of it, he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.”

Let’s linger a moment with this tragedy and consider the many faces of evil on display here. Herod Antipas was a son of Herod the Great, the man who built the Second Temple as a sign of his power rather than his piety. The elder Herod also attempted to murder the Lord Jesus by killing all the baby boys in Bethlehem, and several years after that Herod murdered his ex-wife and two of their own sons when one of them attempted to assassinate him. The wages of sin is death.

Herod the Great and his sons were usurpers and puppets placed in power by the emperors of Rome, but they had no legitimate claim to the throne of Israel which was given by the Lord to the House of David. Moreover, Herod Antipas lived in an immoral relationship with his sister-in-law, and he lusted after her daughter. The wages of sin is death.

This is the same Herod Antipas who would later become friends with Pontius Pilate when they collaborated in the murder of Jesus, but on this occasion Herod murdered the last prophet of the Old Covenant and the forerunner of the Messiah because he made a rash promise out of lust for a girl who did the bidding of her lawless mother Herodias, a vicious pagan who wanted John the Baptist dead to prevent him from speaking the liberating truth of the Word of God. The wages of sin is death.

Now when the Lord Jesus received news of this depravity, what did he do? He got into a boat by himself, crossed the lake, and went to a deserted place to be alone in silence because he felt the weight of the sins of the world as he would again on the Cross.

As part of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, Saint John Paul the Great visited Jerusalem, and when he stood in the stark Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial, John Paul said that in the face of such evil, the soul feels an extreme need for silence. Even the Lord Jesus felt that same need for silence in the face of evil, but his solitude did not last.

The private retreat of the Lord Jesus was interrupted because a great multitude of people hurried around the shore of the Sea of Galilee to meet him on the far side. The Savior sought solitude to mourn the death of his cousin and herald, but there was no time for consolation because when Jesus disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them and he cured their sick.

But then came a new problem: How to feed so many people in such a remote place at day’s end? And here we come to the only miracle recorded by all four of the Gospels: the feeding with a mere handful of food of five thousand men along with the great crowd of uncounted women and children. Today I want to look not at the miracle itself but at three small details of this event.

First, please note the action of the Lord Jesus in taking, blessing, breaking, and giving the bread to the multitude, because here is a preparation for the Mass. At his Last Supper Christ repeated this pattern of taking and blessing, breaking and giving the bread as his body, and he commanded the Apostles to do the same. Two thousand years later, we’re still doing it and still feeding those who come to the Lord’s Supper exhausted, broken, bereft, and seeking the bread of life.

The second thing to notice is that Christ did not feed the hungry multitude with his own hands. Instead, Matthew tells us, the Lord Jesus “broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, who in turn gave them to the crowds.” The apostolic office was created by Christ to continue his ministry until the End of Days, and in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist, the Lord Jesus continues to feed his people through the hands of the bishops and priests who stand in apostolic succession.

The third detail to notice is that many crumbs were left over after the meal. Matthew tells us that after these many thousands of people had eaten their fill and were satisfied, “they picked up the fragments left over, twelve wicker baskets full.”

The Twelve Patriarchs of Israel and the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb are, when taken together, a providential sign that the whole human race is called to be one people, united in love, redeemed from sin and death, sanctified by grace, and destined for eternal glory as children of God and heirs of his eternal Kingdom.

And now twelve baskets are filled up with the crumbs left over from this miraculous meal, showing that God’s superabundant love never offers us just enough to get by but instead provides everything we need and more if we will but seek him with the same insistent devotion shown by this crowd who raced around the lake just to be with Jesus.

Friends, this world is constantly in chaos because all human hearts are always in chaos, and such has been the case since our first parents were seduced into a rebellion they thought would make them gods but instead caused them to Fall below the full dignity given to them by our Creator. The wages of sin is death.

The same depravity that led to the death of John the Baptist lives in every human heart in some form, and the only remedy for that darkness is the One who is Light from Light. Chaos will never be banished from the world until it is first driven from every human heart by Christ Jesus from whose love, as Saint Paul assures us in the second lesson, absolutely nothing can separate us. Yes, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23)

Only the Lord Jesus can create in our hearts and minds the peace which surpasses all understanding, and he does this by his grace through the means of the seven sacraments and the Sacred Scriptures. By revealing the sacred mysteries of the Kingdom of God, Christ alone gives the peace which the world cannot give, and so we come to Christ with our sins. From Christ we receive mercy and healing. By Christ and through his Church we are fed with the bread of life.

And for Christ we live by grace alone through faith, hope, and love to bear witness in a violent and chaotic world that Christ alone is the Lion of Judah and the Prince of Peace, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the One who is, who was, and who is to come, the Word made flesh and the Lamb once slain who lives forever: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 2 August 2026, the 18th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; for you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the kingdom.

These words of today’s Gospel Acclamation are a paraphrase of words spoken by the Lord Jesus in chapter 11 of Saint Matthew’s Gospel, words in which he thanks his heavenly Father for the gracious design of revealing his eternal plan of salvation not to those with great knowledge but to those with profound humility. But exactly what are these “mysteries of the kingdom” of which the Lord speaks?

When used in Holy Scripture, the word mystery signifies something known by God from all eternity and then gradually revealed to the human race according to an eternal plan prepared by God before creation began. But not all men are able to receive such knowledge by divine revelation, usually because of intellectual vanity, spiritual hubris, or slavery to sin, and that is one reason why the Lord Jesus so often expressed his teaching in parables.

We heard the Savior explain this in the Gospel two Sundays ago. In chapter 13 of Saint Matthew, we read that the disciples approached (Jesus) and asked him, “Why do you speak (to the crowds) in parables?” He answered them, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted. This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.”

Remember that by the beginning of chapter 11 of Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus was already meeting fierce opposition to his teaching from the religious authorities of his time, and those who stood against him did so, in part, because they thought they knew better than Jesus did what God had planned for Israel.

But despite their great learning, those who opposed Jesus looked but did not see and heard but did not understand. And in this gap between knowledge and wisdom we find one of the deepest wounds in human nature, a flaw inherited at conception by every human person except for our Savior and his holy Mother, the stain of original sin which darkens our intellects and twists our wills into rebellion against the eternal love of God.

Because of man’s Fall from grace, we are tempted to think that whatever we want is good and that whatever we believe is true simply because we want it or believe it. That is what the father of lies promised Eve as the fruit of her rebellion against God’s plan for human life: your eyes will be opened, the serpent told her, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil, by which he meant that we would be able to make things good and true simply by wanting them or declare them to be evil and false simply by not wanting them. But that was a deadly lie, and our Fall from grace was sealed in the disobedience of our first parents to God’s eternal plan for humanity.

But the healing of that rupture began at the very moment of our Fall. It began with God’s promise to send a woman whose Son who would defeat our ancient Enemy. And in the long ages between our exile and the coming of the Savior, God slowly prepared the world for the full and final revelation of his eternal plan in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ.

Among those chosen by God to be instruments of his plan of salvation was King Solomon, the son of David. As we read in the first lesson today from the First Book of Kings, Solomon prayed, “O Lord … give your servant … an understanding heart … that I may discern between good and evil,” and so God gave Solomon the gift of wisdom to see and understand.

And here is the answer to the serpent’s lie. We cannot and do not make things good or true by desiring them; instead, we learn what is good and true and beautiful if and when we allow ourselves to be taught by the Designer and Maker of all things. And we are taught the truth of things by God both through the operation of right reason and the acceptance of divine revelation.

As Proverbs has it: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Solomon prayed for an understanding heart and received the gift of wisdom because he placed himself among the “little ones” to whom is given knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom. And that is precisely what we must do if we are to be true disciples of the Lord Jesus.

Chapter 13 of Saint Matthew’s Gospel contains several parables of the kingdom of heaven, each one revealing a different facet of the infinite riches of God’s glory. In last Sunday’s Gospel, the Savior compared the kingdom first to a field in which grows both wheat and weeds, then to the giant mustard tree which comes from the smallest of seeds, and finally to the tiny amount of yeast which causes all the bread to rise.

And in today’s Gospel the Lord Jesus likens the kingdom to both a buried treasure and a pearl of great price, and the response from us must be like that of the treasure hunter and the merchant: we must sacrifice everything for the kingdom and prefer God’s glory above all else in our lives.

This is why authentic Christian discipleship requires radical conversion and why it is not possible to be a part-time Christian. There is no place in the Kingdom of God for anything contrary to the Father’s eternal plan, which is why the unworthy catch is always taken from the net and thrown away. It is also why “The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”

These are not comfortable words, but they are true words - words spoken by the Word made flesh, the one alone who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. This sober warning about the possibility of damnation is also among the mysteries of the kingdom revealed to “little ones,” and we should hear and heed this warning.

But what about those who will not heed the Word of God? The simple truth is that most of us spend a good portion of our lives in an adolescent tantrum at God. We falsely believe that our existence is a contest of wills and that if the will of God prevails over ours, then we will lose our freedom, our dignity, and our very selves.

But that view of life is false because God’s eternal plan for our lives comes not from willfulness but from the divine reason or Logos which is the origin of all things. We are created by the eternal Word of God, and our true personal dignity and eternal destiny are found only in everlasting communion with him.

When we come to know, understand, and accept God’s eternal Word, then for the first time in our lives we find authentic human freedom and interior tranquility because then we know that the purpose of our existence is to praise God’s glory world without end and to share that glory by the grace of adoption in Christ.

But what about those who cling to their sins? What about those who hear the Gospel but will not accept it? Like petulant children who chafe under parental authority, they seek to justify their sins by an appeal to a higher justice or a purer love or a greater wisdom or the search for an ever elusive freedom, meaning, and happiness, all of which are contained in the serpent’s lie about us becoming like God.

But, friends, that way of rebellion leads only to sadness and self-absorption because true freedom and happiness are found only in God’s grace, only in a life of virtue, only in the truth of the mysteries of the kingdom. And to learn of those mysteries we must place ourselves among the “little ones” who ask for the gift of an understanding heart and who allow themselves to be taught by the Word of God.

Divine mysteries, however, are not revealed only in words. In the Western Church we speak of the seven sacraments, but in the Christian East these same seven instruments of grace are called the sacred mysteries, because these acts of worship reveal the Lord Jesus to the eyes of faith. And this meaning of the sacraments as mysteries is found also in our Western liturgy.

Today, for example, the Prayer over the Offerings asks that “these most sacred mysteries may sanctify our present way of life and lead us to eternal gladness.” And the Penitential Rite at every Mass begins with these words: “Brethren, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.”

But do we truly see Christ in his mysteries, in his sacraments? Or do we look and not see? Do we heed the Gospel as God’s eternal Word? Or do we hear and not understand? How many Catholics approach the sacred mysteries with understanding hearts and how many without? If we will not admit that our sins are sins, then we have been deceived by the serpent’s lie rather than enlightened by Solomon’s example of the obedience of faith.

But if we do not repent of our sins and believe in the Gospel, then receiving the sacraments will not lead us to a deeper knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom, and if we remain impenitent, then we are on the path to everlasting separation from God rather than on the way to eternal life. And our capacity for a true conversion leading to knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom is directly connected to our trust in and comprehension of Holy Scripture as the revealed Word of God. Today the Lord Jesus asks us as he asked the Twelve: Do you understand all these things?

Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth; for you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the kingdom.

Friends, let us place ourselves among the little ones who seek the gift of understanding hearts from the God of eternal glory, the living God who revealed himself to Solomon and granted him wisdom, not because Solomon was king or the son of David but because in humility he surrendered his intellect and will to the truth of God’s eternal Word, whom now we know and adore as the eternal Word made flesh, the Son of Mary and God the Son, the one who is the same yesterday, today, and forever: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 26 July 2026, the 17th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

The Holy Bible is not a book; it is a library, and that library contains 73 books, 46 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. The 73 books of the Bible belong to a great variety of literary genres including poetry, mythology, historical narratives, legal codes, wisdom sayings, prophecies, personal letters, records of mystical experiences, and the four Gospels which tell the history of the conception and birth, the life and ministry, the teaching and miracles, and above all the passion, death, and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The books of the Bible were composed over more than a thousand years by many different human authors. But by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the living God spoke through the human writers in such a way that the Sacred Scriptures truly have God as their principal author. For this reason, the Bible is fittingly called the Word of God written in human words, and so Holy Scripture contains no error in matters of faith and morals and is the supernatural gift of divine revelation.

Almost all of the books in the Bible were written in either ancient Hebrew or Koine Greek, a common dialect of Greek that spread throughout the Mediterranean world and the Near East with the armies of Alexander the Great. Then about two hundred years before the birth of the Lord Jesus, the books of the Old Testament were translated from ancient Hebrew into Koine Greek because that was the most widely spoken language of the day even among the Jews, especially in Alexandria, Egypt where the translators worked.

The Greek rendering of the Old Testament is commonly called the Septuagint from the Latin word for 70 because 70 or perhaps 72 scholars worked on the first part of that translation, and in the New Testament when a speaker or writer quotes a text from the Old Testament, the version being quoted is almost always the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew original. Moreover, several books of the Old Testament were originally composed in Koine Greek rather than in Hebrew because they were written after the decline of the use of Hebrew among Jews.

And now we come to the main reason Protestant Bibles are missing seven books from the Old Testament. Martin Luther decided when he translated the Bible into German to use only those Old Testament texts which were written in Hebrew, and so Luther omitted from his Old Testament the seven books which were composed in Greek, even though by Luther’s day they had been included in the Bible for more than a thousand years.

Those seven texts are First and Second Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, and Baruch. Moreover, the books of Daniel and Esther are shorter in Luther’s Bible than in the Catholic Bible because some sections of those two texts exist only in Greek, and the pattern established by Luther for the German Bible was followed by other Protestant translations, including the English versions.

Sometimes these disputed books are included in the back of Protestant Bibles and described as apocrypha or as deuterocanonical texts, and sometimes not. But the Catholic and Orthodox Churches acknowledge all 73 books as divinely revealed and properly belonging to the canon of Holy Scripture.

The history of how, when, where, why and by whom the Sacred Scriptures were written is a complicated subject requiring long years of study and knowledge of several ancient languages to master, but fortunately for us, no one person must be expert in all these fields of scholarship for us to have trustworthy access to the written Word of God.

For two thousand years the Church’s best minds have toiled, as Jewish scholars did for nearly a thousand years before that, to provide clarity and certainty about which ancient books are divinely inspired and can be included in the canon of Scripture, meaning the officially accepted list of books in the Bible. And the work of making accurate translations of the original biblical texts into all other languages is a never-ending labor of love intended to allow people of every time and place to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the God-breathed words of divine revelation.

And now we come to our first lesson today from the Book of Wisdom which was written in Greek about one century before the birth of the Lord Jesus and is referenced more than one hundred times in the New Testament. We do not know the name of the author, but we do know that he was a Jew living in Alexandria, Egypt and that he had an intimate knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Although the Book of Wisdom was written in Greek, the author brilliantly imitated the style of Hebrew, and he wrote his book to encourage other Jews in a time of suffering and persecution when they were living, as we increasingly do, among hostile pagans who worshiped many false gods.

For literary reasons, the unknown author of Wisdom often speaks in the person of King Solomon, and so this text is sometimes called the Wisdom of Solomon. But Solomon, the son of David, died nearly eight centuries before the Book of Wisdom was written, and so the words are not literally his.

But marvel at the triumph of culture and education required to transmit such knowledge for many centuries across different countries and languages in an age of the world which we are tempted to think of as primitive and barbaric. And then, with a glance around at the widespread ignorance and cultural wreckage of our time, ask yourself who the real primitive barbarians are.

The entire text of the Book of Wisdom is a celebration of the power and splendor of divine reason and subtle understanding through which the mind of God guides all of creation and human history. By means of holy wisdom, the eternal plan of salvation unfolds patiently in world affairs even when we cannot perceive it because of human suffering.

The Book of Wisdom recalls the glorious events of the Exodus from Egypt and reminds the reader of the dangers of idolatry and infidelity to the Covenant, even as it affirms the unfailing majesty and mercy of divine Providence while the one true God reveals himself to the nations through the children of Israel.

And so in our passage today the author of Wisdom speaks to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob saying “There is no god besides you … your mastery over all things makes you lenient to all. For you show your might when the perfection of your power is disbelieved … But though you are master of might, you judge with clemency and with much lenience you govern us … And you taught your people … that those who are just must be kind; and you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.”

These very same qualities of mercy and forbearance are also praised by the Psalmist who sings today: “You, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in kindness to all who call upon you … All the nations you have made shall come and worship you, O Lord, and glorify your name. For you are great, and you do wondrous deeds; you alone are God.”

A common misconception and an ancient heresy holds that the Old Testament is about judgment while the New Testament is about mercy, but that is a false opposition because both judgment and mercy run together throughout all of Scripture as two essential dimensions of our relationship with the living God.

All the books of the Bible form an organic whole in which the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New. And as Saint Paul teaches Bishop Timothy: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16)

Today the readings from the Book of Wisdom and Psalm 86 are about forgiveness in the Lord, but we must not imagine that the unbounded mercy and loving-kindness of the living God grant us permission to live in opposition to his eternal moral law, the Law of Love.

Indeed, the Lord Jesus teaches us today in the parable of the weeds in the field that final judgment awaits us all and that a full reckoning must be given at the end of the age when the angels of God will cast out of his eternal kingdom all who will not repent of their sins and live in righteousness. In other words, lawlessness is not liberty, and it does not lead to happiness or love. Instead, lawlessness is moral anarchy, and a lawless life of sin always leads to destruction.

So, even as we are justified by grace alone through faith in Christ alone, we also seek to surrender to God’s grace to be sanctified by the Holy Spirit through our cooperation with the works of the new creation. And this is the only way in which we can give evidence that we have learned from divine wisdom how to live in the true freedom of the children of God.

And such freedom comes only through the liberating obedience of faith in him who alone is the power of God and the wisdom of God. He is the eternal and omnipotent Word of God, the divine Logos by whom and for whom all things were made. He is the Anointed One, the Messiah, the King of the Jews and the King of all creation. He alone is the divine Redeemer and the Savior of the human race: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 19 July 2026, the 16th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Saint Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome that “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Today is the fifth of fourteen Sundays on which we are reading from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and today we pick up not far from where we ended last Sunday.

Recall that last week was a meditation on deliverance from slavery to sin which requires those who are baptized into Christ to put to death whatever in our hearts and minds is contrary to the Gospel so that we may live by the Spirit of God who dwells within us through Holy Baptism.

Then between last Sunday’s reading and today’s there are three verses on the grace of adoption given in Baptism by which Saint Paul says we are made children of God, members of Christ, and heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven. But, Paul insists, this grace of adoption requires that we suffer with Christ so that we may also be glorified with him.

And that’s where we pick up today: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Saint Paul never attempted to hide from the disciples of Christ that being a Christian always demands a willingness to suffer, both in the struggle to die to self and from the contempt for our faith which we may experience from those who do not yet know that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And so to encourage the Christians at Rome to keep calm and carry on in the midst of their struggles, Paul wrote to them that the glory which will be revealed on the Last Day so far surpasses the sufferings of this present age that there can be no comparison.

But, friends, there is more here than good advice; there is Good News. Gospel truth. Paul writes: “For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility … in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

So, the entire universe awaits the revelation of its freedom with eager expectation. And where will the cosmos find this revelation of its redemption? From the children of God. From those born again by water and the Holy Spirit in Baptism. From those set free from slavery to sin and death by God’s grace through supernatural faith. From those redeemed from the grave by the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is one essential part of the Christian vocation: to bear witness that the coming new creation is the end of all futility and the beginning of perfect freedom.

But what exactly is this futility for which the life of grace is the cure? Well, it is the destruction of death. Everything we build decays and dissolves. All beauty fades and is lost. All glory passes and is forgotten. Every life ends in death. Everything ever accomplished by the human race will be destroyed, and even the universe itself, with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, will wither and die.

And that, friends, is the true depth of emptiness, which is why “creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility … in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Then Paul continues: “We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” Here the Apostle uses the image of a woman gasping in labor pains and groaning from the ordeal of giving birth yet full of hope and love because of the promise of the child to come.

But in this case what will be delivered through labor pains is not a child but a new heavens and a new earth, an entire universe restored by God to its original purpose and glory, a cosmos without corruption and futility, a creation without death in which all things have been made new and eternal by the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Word made flesh, the Lamb once slain who lives forever.

Last week I spoke of the oldest argument in human history: the serpent promised our first parents before their Fall from grace that they would find perfect happiness and divine glory in self-assertion, while the Word of God reveals that we find perfect happiness and divine glory in self-sacrifice. And as we read today in the first lesson from Isaiah, the Word of God never fails in its mission, but always achieves the purpose for which it is sent. And in the fullness of time, that Word became flesh in the womb of a virgin to accomplish our redemption.

In today’s second lesson we find the Apostle Paul explaining this cosmic dimension of the serpent’s lie, and as we have seen, Paul likens the universe to a pregnant woman groaning in labor pains. This language is redolent of the woman in labor pains described in the Book of Revelation as being clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars.

She is the same woman described in Genesis 3:15, the woman whose obedience of faith untied the knot of Eve’s disobedience of which we are all heirs, the woman whose Son would crush the serpent’s head and triumph over sin and death to deliver us from the ancient enemy who is our accuser, a murderer, and the father of lies. That woman of course, in both Genesis and Revelation at the open and close of the Bible, is Mary, the Mother of God and the Mother of the Church.

In today’s short passage from the Letter to the Romans, we glimpse a small part of the cosmic struggle to be liberated from slavery to sin and death and to find the freedom of the children of God. And the Gospel reveals that the perfect freedom for which we long is paradoxically found not in radical autonomy but in loving obedience, the obedience of faith in which Mary is both exemplar and intercessor.

We know that in this present age even those who already have the grace of adoption in Holy Baptism still groan inwardly, as Paul puts it, while we wait for our final redemption and the resurrection of our bodies at the End of Days.

And, yes, following the Lord Jesus in the Way of the Cross is painful and requires us to suffer from the struggle to put to death in ourselves whatever is contrary to the Gospel. But that struggle should never discourage us because the suffering we endure cannot be compared to the glory to be revealed, as Mary herself learned at the foot of the Cross and in the glory of the Resurrection.

The Gospel today contains the parable of the sower, in which the Lord Jesus freely acknowledges how hard it is for us to hear and heed the Word of God. In his parable and in his private explanation to the Twelve, Christ explains the difficulty of remaining faithful to the Gospel while we endure tribulation, temptation, persecution, the lure of pleasure, and doubts about the truth of the Word of God.

But we must have no doubt of what we will find on the far side of that struggle because Christ himself is both the sower of the Word of God and the seed which is sown in our heats and minds. The Lord Jesus says: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Friends, all creation awaits with eager anticipation the revelation of the living and active Word of God, so that by the obedience of faith in that Word the whole human race can be set free from slavery to sin, death, and the futility of corruption and then rise to share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is our pattern and guide in this work of surrendering our lives to her Son in faith, hope, and love. And living the Gospel with integrity and joy is how we announce to others that the whole universe, along with everyone and everything in it, will find redemption at the End of Days, but only in the eternal Word made flesh, the Son of Mary and God the Son, the One who is, who was, and who is to come: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 12 July 2026, the 15th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Friends, there is constant sadness in the world and in our lives, and the reasons are not hard to find: they are sin and death. Sin always makes us sad even when it brings pleasure, and the greater the sin, the deeper the sadness. Our own sins make us sad, and the sins of others also make us sad when they touch our lives or the lives of those we love.

After man’s Fall from grace, this is an iron law of human nature, because every form of slavery is a cause of sadness, and the Lord Jesus teaches us that everyone who sins is a slave to sin. And that means all of us, the entire human race.

Moreover, through sin death came into the world along with all the diseases and infirmities that lead to death, and death ends our lives as the final and greatest sadness. This connection between sin, death, and sadness is why we gave thanks a few minutes ago in the Collect or Opening Prayer of this Mass that God bestows eternal gladness on those he has rescued from slavery to sin.

Our freedom from sin and death in Christ Jesus is a central theme of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, from which we are reading at Sunday Mass through mid-September. Please take time in these weeks to read and study all of Romans in your Bible at home. Two weeks ago we read from chapter five about death coming into the world through sin for all the children of Adam, and we also read about Christ redeeming us from the grave by his victory over sin and death.

Then last week we read from chapter six of Romans about the sacrament of Holy Baptism and how it plunges us into the death of Christ so that we can be united to the new life of the Resurrection of Christ, making us the children of God by adoption. And now today we read from chapter eight of Romans about the ways in which we can cooperate with God’s grace in the struggle against sin in our lives.

But first we must recall that Saint Paul understands the human person to be composed of not two but three equally important parts or dimensions: body, soul, and spirit. Like all animals we have physical bodies, and all animals are alive because of the soul or life force which sets them apart from inanimate objects.

But in addition to the soul which animates our bodies like all other animals, we also have a spirit or pneuma in Greek that comes directly from God and makes man alone of all the animals a person created in God’s image and likeness, endowed with intellect and will.

Next we must grasp that when Saint Paul speaks of the flesh he does not mean the body. The Apostle knew that everything created by God is good, including the human body or soma in Greek. So when Paul uses the word flesh or sarx in Greek, he does not speak of the human body or denigrate its goodness.

Instead, by the word flesh Paul means that part of human nature which is in rebellion against the love and law of God as a consequence of the Fall from grace. And because of that rebellion of the flesh, the desires of both the body and the spirit become unruly and require subduing, something that we cannot do without God’s grace.

So, in the second reading today Paul is addressing the Christians in Rome who have already been born again by water and the Holy Spirit in Baptism when he writes: “You are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit, if only the Spirit of Christ dwells in you … If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you.”

Recall that before his Ascension to the Father, Christ promised to send the Holy Spirit to teach and sanctify the Church, and in the seven sacraments of the New Covenant, we receive the grace of justification and sanctification by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

And yet at all times we remain free to turn away from the Spirit by turning in on ourselves to every form of disordered self-love, and for that reason we are always capable of rejecting the life of the new creation and returning to the base condition of slaves by surrendering to our own willfulness.

And so Paul warns the Roman Christians: “Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him … For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”

Now, without discipline no one can be a disciple, and among the essential disciplines of discipleship is the practice called mortification or self-denial, which is what Paul describes here as putting to death the deeds of the body.

Following the Lord Jesus in the Way of the Cross requires us to engage in mortification not as works righteousness but as an essential part of a life and death struggle with everything in our hearts that is contrary to the Gospel. And once we are liberated by grace through faith, then in hope and love we must cooperate with the Holy Spirit dwelling within us to live for God in Christ Jesus.

Such mortification or self-denial in turn requires us to trust the Word of God more than we trust our own experiences, feelings, and wisdom, and then we must subject everything we think and feel, everything we say and do to the judgment of divine revelation as the only sure measure of what is true and false, good and evil.

Put most simply, after the Fall from grace we cannot know our true selves or trust our own desires until we have been freed from slavery to sin by grace through faith, hope, and love and have learned to live according to the Spirit dwelling within us. But how is this done?

The life of grace begins in us at Holy Baptism, and then it continues to grow in us every time we go to Confession and Communion. We prepare for Confession by examining our lives in the light of the Gospel to which we submit ourselves in the obedience of faith. Then in the Sacrament of Penance the grace of our Baptism is renewed in us as we acknowledge our sins and are reconciled to God and his Church by absolution.

Going to Confession regularly is the best means we have of preparing to receive worthily the Most Holy Eucharist of Christ’s Body and Blood which is the medicine of immortality and the food for our journey on the Way of the Cross. And as we receive Holy Communion regularly and worthily, we grow in God’s grace and are conformed ever more fully to Christ crucified and Risen. And that is how we live according to the Spirit and put to death the works of the flesh.

But in our time, this Christian approach to living a good human life is held up to ridicule by our culture which exalts the autonomous imperial self as the only path to the supposed liberty of self-actualization. The world says “Be true to yourself,” while the Gospel says “You cannot know or be your true self until you have been liberated from all your false selves by the Word of God.”

The world says “Trust your feelings,” and the Gospel replies “Yes, follow your heart but only after it has been changed from the inside out by grace through faith and is conformed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ.” The world says that any submission to a rule of life other than one’s own desires is a form of oppression, but the Lord Jesus teaches us that the refusal to surrender to the divine law of love is the very definition of the cruelest slavery of all: slavery to our own sins.

And here we come to the oldest dispute in human history: in the primordial garden the serpent promised our first parents that divine glory would be found in self-assertion and self-satisfaction while the Lord Jesus reveals that divine glory is found in self-denial and self-sacrifice.

Please note that the devil did not tempt Adam and Eve to lie, cheat, steal, rape, or murder. No, our ancient enemy, who is a liar and the father of lies, simply tempted the first man and woman to doubt the Word of God, and then all the rest followed from their own disordered self-love.

And so the misuse of their freedom metastasized into the slavery of sin and death, and for every person except for our Savior and his holy Mother, that slavery is passed to each of us at our conception as a wound in our nature. That is the stain of original sin which alienates us from God, from each other, and from our own true selves.

The Gospel today is taken from chapter eleven of Saint Matthew, and that chapter begins with Christ praising John the Baptist as the greatest man of woman born while also acknowledging that John was rejected and ridiculed by those who would not hear and heed the Word of God.

The Lord Jesus then goes on to speak of divine judgment coming for those who will not repent on hearing the liberating truth of the Word of God, after which the Savior explains that full knowledge of the true God comes only from divine revelation which must be accepted as a free gift from the Son who alone reveals the Father to us.

Chapter eleven then concludes with the final words of today’s reading. These beautiful words of consolation and encouragement can be a great help to us in our struggle to put to death the deeds of the flesh and live by the Spirit dwelling within us.

Recall that the Lord Jesus, though truly divine, is also a man like us in all things but sin, and he therefore understands our struggle to live in the truth of the Word of God from inside the human experience.

So from his understanding of our burdens, the Savior says to us: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Friends, in that easy yoke and light burden of the Savior we find the end of sadness and the beginning of holy joy in everlasting freedom from slavery to sin and death. That is the freedom of the children of God who are made a new creation in and by the Alpha and the Omega, the Son of David who is God the Son, the Incarnate Word and divine Redeemer of the world: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 5 July 2026, the 14th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Listen again to the words of the Collect or Opening Prayer of this Mass, which we offered only minutes ago: “O God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.”

As is often the case with our Mass Collects, this little prayer is densely packed with essential truths which we can easily miss on first hearing, so let’s look more closely at six different dimensions of being a Christian mentioned in this short prayer.

First, God chose us. Second, he chose us through the grace of adoption in Holy Baptism. Third, he chose us to be children of light. Fourth, he chose us not to be wrapped in the darkness of error. Fifth, he chose us to stand in the bright light of truth. Sixth and last, God chose us to be seen always in the light as public witnesses to the truth he reveals in Christ Jesus.

In the night before he died, the Lord Jesus said to his Apostles: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit.” This mystery of divine election is at the heart of all Christian faith and life, but in an age that prizes radical autonomy and self-determination above all else, being created, called, and sent by God is especially difficult to understand and accept.

The most fundamental truth about human life is that we are not the source of our own being. We do not will ourselves into existence. We do not decide in what time, in what place, or to which parents we will be born. We do not choose our own names, and we do not determine our own personal gifts or burdens. We do not plan the world events that will shape our lives. And we do not decide, either before or after birth, whether we are male or female, which for all time are the two and only two possible sexes for every human person.

There is a givenness to our existence that is beyond both our choosing and our changing, and that is not an injustice or a form of tyranny. Moreover, as it is in the order of nature, so it is also in the order of grace. We do not choose God; he chooses us. And that is not in any way a diminution of our personal integrity or interior freedom because we are always at liberty to say yes or no to the offer made by Christ to follow him in the Way of the Cross and to live as his disciples.

Now, the Collect today says that God chose us through the grace of adoption, and that gift is given to us in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. In the second lesson today from chapter six of his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul describes one of the effects of our Baptism:

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

The font of Baptism must be a tomb before it can become a womb. The child of Adam, the child of wrath, dies in Baptism, so that the child of God may be born again by water and the Holy Spirit in the grace of adoption and then live in the freedom of the children of God by grace through faith, hope, and love.

God the Son and eternal Word is divine by nature, while we are human by nature. But the Word became flesh and took our human nature to himself precisely so that he could give us a share in his divine nature by what our Collect today calls the grace of adoption, and this was part of God’s eternal plan from before the creation of the universe, as Paul explained in his Letter to the Ephesians:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”

So, by divine and eternal election we have been made God’s adopted children through the grace of Holy Baptism so that we may be, as the Collect says, children of light. Christ who is true God is also Light from Light, and he alone is the true light of the world. But all who have been made a new creation in Christ have also become children of light and have been sent by Christ as his witnesses.

The Virgin Mother sings in her Magnificat that her soul magnifies the Lord, but how can any creature magnify or increase the infinite glory of God? Well, in the same way that the moon reflects the light of the sun and thus spreads its radiance. Just so, the children of light magnify the light of Christ by their manner of life, but only, as the Collect insists, if they are not wrapped in the darkness of error.

Error is possible only where there is truth, and in this case both truth and error refer to our acceptance or refusal of all that God has revealed for the salvation of the human race in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When we receive the Gospel with the obedience of faith, we are then conformed to the truth, but when we reject the Gospel in whole or in part, then we make ourselves the measure of the Word of God and are thus wrapped in error about the most important things in human life: our origin, our nature, our purpose, and our destiny.

So, we are called by our Baptism not to be wrapped in error but to stand, as the Collect puts it, in the bright light of truth, and we stand in that light by living the truth of the Gospel with every thought, word, and deed. That is how we will be seen by others as standing in the light, something that will make us a sign of contradiction to others and may even put us at odds with our own family and friends, a possibility acknowledged by the Savior in today’s Gospel.

Here we must note that it is not possible to be a part time Christian, to be a private Christian, or to be a solitary Christian. To be a Christian is to be a public witness to the saving truth that Jesus Christ is Lord and that his Gospel is the full truth about both God and man through which we find in the Church the freedom of the children of God, not through radical autonomy but through the obedience of faith.

In other words, while we do have the capacity to turn away from the grace of our Baptism and to live as though Jesus Christ is not Lord, we find our authentic freedom and happiness, our true dignity and destiny, only when we cooperate with God’s grace and live the life of the new creation by forsaking everything that is contrary to the Gospel. And so Paul continues in today’s second lesson:

“If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

And here we find the chief challenge to Christianity in our time and in our own hearts. Those who regard radical autonomy as the prerequisite for human maturity believe that they must become a law unto themselves to be free, and so they refuse to be called to anything by anyone and they reject all attempts to distinguish truth from error as a tyrannical form of intellectual and emotional violence.

But the refusal to acknowledge the truth known by right reason and divine revelation finally makes it impossible to tell vice from virtue. When that happens, then both moral reasoning and metaphysical certainty about good and evil come to an end, and we are left with nothing but the will to power, which is precisely what we find in the increasingly frantic cultural chaos in which we now live. And if you need empirical confirmation of this claim, then just spend a few minutes at the center of any of our large cities or on the campus of one of our elite universities.

In this cynical and egocentric approach to human life, the God and religion of the Bible are considered the enemies of human freedom, the Gospel is denounced as hate speech, and the Church is seen simply an engine of oppression. And once this false view of life has taken deep root in someone’s heart and mind, about the only way to bear witness to Christ for them is with a self-emptying love even more radical than their self-absorption and lawlessness.

Friends, being a Christian is hard work, and it requires the most serious commitment to die to self and live for God in Christ Jesus, as the Savior himself explains in the Gospel today. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

But here’s the Good News: the hardest work of conversion has already been accomplished for us by the Lord Jesus Christ through his Cross and Resurrection, and the grace of his Paschal Mystery is offered to us as a free and unmerited gift. All that we have to do is accept his gift and then cooperate with the grace of our Baptism to live even now the life of the new creation.

And so we pray with the Church today and always: “O God, who through the grace of adoption chose us to be children of light, grant, we pray, that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.” Amen.

This is the text of my homily for 28 June 2026, the 13th Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Divine Providence is the name we give to God’s eternal plan of salvation and his loving care both for the entire universe and for each of us individually. And trusting in the Providence of God, especially in the face of great hardship, is the common thread running through the readings today from the Prophet Jeremiah, Psalm 69, and the Gospel of Saint Matthew.

Such trust in divine Providence is impossible for us without the grace of God and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love which are poured into us at our Baptism. These three divine gifts equip us both to trust in God’s Providence and to cooperate with his grace during the pilgrimage of salvation by the Lord Jesus Christ, and our salvation by Christ is not a single event so much as it is a process which begins with the grace of justification, deepens with the grace of sanctification, and reaches completion with the grace of glorification.

The Prophet Jeremiah was chosen by God to announce his holy Word to Israel at a time of profound infidelity and corruption which led to unimaginable horror: the conquest of Jerusalem, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the fall of the nation, and the captivity of the people. But the children of Israel, because of the hardness of their hearts, would not hear the Word of God from Jeremiah. Indeed, the rulers of Jerusalem turned on the prophet as though he and not the Babylonians were their enemy, and instead of acknowledging their own sins as the cause of their downfall, the people blamed and punished Jeremiah for the calamity they faced.

“So Jeremiah said: I hear the whispering of many: Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!” But despite all that grief and because of his faith, Jeremiah could still cry out with confidence: “But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion … Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked.”

Then Psalm 69 sounds a similar note of suffering in the face of injustice. The Psalmist sings to the Lord: “For your sake I bear insult, and shame covers my face. I have become an outcast to my brothers, a stranger to my mother’s children, because zeal for your house consumes me, and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.”

These words of Psalm 69 are cited several times in the New Testament, especially in the accounts of the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus. But as the Resurrection reveals, suffering is never the last word and love is always stronger than death, and so the Psalmist continues with confidence: “I pray to you, O Lord, for the time of your favor, O God! In your great kindness answer me with your constant help. Answer me, O Lord, for bounteous is your kindness; in your great mercy turn towards me.”

And in just this way, the Lord Jesus taught his Twelve Apostles as they prepared for the mission that would bring them all a share in his Cross and eventually claim their lives. “Fear no one,” said the Savior. “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops … And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”

Friends, being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ is hard work, and there is no way to follow Christ except by the Way of the Cross. But no matter what hardship we must endure for the sake of the Gospel, we should always persevere with trust in the Providence of God. In three weeks we will read these words of Saint Paul from Romans chapter 8 verse 18: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the sons of God.”

And this is why our present struggles are not comparable to our future glory. In Christ Jesus we have become children of God and heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. And in Christ Jesus we know why we exist and how to live in keeping with our dignity as the children of God by the grace of adoption. We must therefore take up our cross, reject whatever is contrary to the Gospel, and bear witness to the saving truth that Jesus Christ is Lord, no matter what the cost may be to our own desires and the plans we make for our lives, both personal and professional.

Put simply: the grace of God is free, but it is not cheap. To be a Christian and bear witness to Christ, both in the public square and in our private lives, is to invite ridicule, rejection, and even persecution. Living our faith with integrity may cost us friendships, colleagues, and economic opportunities, and it may even put us at odds with our own families as we will read in the Gospel next Sunday.

But if like Jeremiah, the Psalmist, and the Apostles we trust in the Providence of God, then we discover that the sacrifices we are called to make are not random or futile, because nothing is beyond the eternal plan of salvation as the Savior assures us today: “even all the hairs of your head are counted.”

But to trust in Providence we must also be mindful of the many ways in which Christians are tempted to forsake the only Way of the Lord Jesus, the Way of the Cross. So, some false preachers promise great prosperity or long life and good health to those who surrender themselves to the dominion of Jesus Christ, but that is not the Good News proclaimed by the Word made flesh. Others say that if the Gospel is rightly preached there will always be miracles among us, especially inexplicable healings, because the Lord wants abundant life for his people and will work wonders among us by the power of the Holy Spirit to confirm his love for us.

But while there are still miracles among us, they are rare, and they are not given for the benefit of those who receive them or as a motive for our belief. No, the Savior does not send signs and wonders to lead us to salvation, and his riches are not found in the kingdoms of this world but only in the eternal Kingdom of God.

The signs of Christ have gone over into the sacraments, and the kingdom is planted among us by the preaching of the Word of God to awaken the supernatural gift of saving faith which leads to everlasting life through the grace of justification, sanctification, and glorification. Friends, the life of the new creation, the life of grace, is planted and grows in our hearts and minds by Word and Sacrament, not by signs and wonders.

Christ himself insists that the only sign that will be given us is the sign of Jonah, meaning his passion, death, and Resurrection on the third day. And to those who follow him in the Way of the Cross, the Messiah promises only opposition of precisely the sort visited upon him. So now we struggle to bear faithful witness to the Providence of God, and we know that our triumph must wait for the full coming among us of the Kingdom of God on the Last Day. And until then we count the days and years and ages of the world until the return of Christ in glory.

From last week until the Solemnity of Christ the King in November, we are in the the weeks between Pentecost past and Advent ahead. These are the green Sundays of the liturgical year, the Ordinary Time of spiritual growth in which by hearing and heeding the Word of God we can deepen our trust in the Providence of God and become ever more fully converted disciples of Christ Jesus.

And God be praised! Such constant conversion, as it continues over a lifetime, deepens our faith, hope, and love and strengthens us to bear witness to others by every thought, word, and deed that our redemption from the grave and our only hope of eternal life is from the One alone who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the One alone who is both the Son of Man and God the Son, the One alone who is the divine Messiah and the Savior of the world: the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the text of my homily for 21 June 2026, the Twelfth Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

From today until 13 September, the second lesson each Sunday will be taken from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans, so during these fourteen weeks please read and study all of Romans which was written around the year 56 or 57 AD when Paul was most likely still living in Corinth. Saint Paul wanted to visit Rome to raise money for a planned mission trip to Spain, and so to introduce himself in advance of that journey, Paul wrote to the Christians in the imperial city, where Saint Peter led the Church.

But before Paul could set out for Rome, he first needed to travel from Greece to Jerusalem with a large collection he had taken for the relief of the persecuted Christians in the Holy Land. So Paul intended to go to Jerusalem, leave the money he had raised with the Church there, and then set off for Rome on his way to Spain. But events interrupted Paul’s plan.

In the year 57, Paul arrived in Jerusalem for his fifth and final visit there since his conversion to Christ. He invited all the Christians in the Holy City, both Jews and Gentiles, to join him in the Temple area where the Christian community still gathered regularly to pray, and when the Christians arrived at the Temple a group of angry Jews accused Paul of breaking the Law of Moses by teaching Jewish Christians that they need no longer obey most of the 613 commandments of the Law. They also accused him of defiling the Temple by bringing Gentiles there, and so a mob dragged Paul out of the Temple area to stone him to death.

But then a riot broke out which was large and violent enough to cause the Roman commander in Jerusalem to send in troops to break it up. For a full account of what happened, read chapters 21 through 28 of the Acts of the Apostles to see how Paul defended himself and spent years in Roman custody in the Holy Land before being sent to Rome for his case to be judged by the emperor, a privilege Paul enjoyed because he, unlike most other Jews, was a Roman citizen.

Paul’s journey to Rome was an adventure in itself, including storm, shipwreck, and a winter spent on the island of Malta. When Paul finally arrived in the capital city, he was placed under house arrest with one guard, but he was still able to teach great numbers of people who came to visit him. Finally, after two years of confinement, Paul was beheaded, apparently at the order of the Emperor Nero, just outside the walls of Rome around the year 67, about ten years after Paul wrote his Letter to the Romans.

Two and half centuries after Paul’s death, in the year 325, the Emperor Constantine built a vast church over Paul’s grave, and because of its location, that structure has always been called the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. It is a magnificent church which has been damaged or destroyed and then rebuilt several times over the centuries, and to this day it stands over the grave of the Apostle Paul as a glorious and fitting memorial to the teacher of the nations.

None of Saint Paul’s letters in the New Testament can be called a complete account of all Christian teaching. His texts were written for many different purposes, each according to whom they were addressed and what controversies the Apostle was seeking to resolve, and for that reason, all of Paul’s letters contain only parts of the complete Gospel rather than a single, systematic exposition of all that God has revealed to us in the eternal plan of salvation. And the Letter to the Romans, despite its length and complexity, is no exception to this rule.

So, when we read the Letter to the Romans and all the rest of Holy Scripture, we must do so with what Paul himself called the analogy of faith, a phrase taken from chapter 12 verse 6 of Romans where Paul urges his readers to exercise spiritual gifts in proportion to their faith, in Latin analogia fidei.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the analogy of faith as “the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.” (CCC 114) In other words, since no one book in the Bible presents a comprehensive account of all of divine revelation, it is essential that we read each book of the Bible in the light of all other books and understand every Scriptural doctrine in the context of everything revealed by the Word of God.

If Martin Luther had read Paul’s Letter to the Romans in this way and without an anti-semitic bias, then perhaps the last 500 years of Christian history would have been radically different from what actually happened, and the unity of the Church might have been preserved by a unity of doctrine understood according to the analogy of faith.

I mention this now in the hope that as you read the Letter to the Romans you will bear in mind the dangers of proof texting. That is the practice of making one verse or one section of one book of the Bible try to bear the weight of all revelation and thus become a distorted way of understanding the Scriptures without the analogy of faith. Proof texting nearly always leads to misunderstanding some part of the Gospel and then to false doctrine, as it did in the case of Martin Luther and the other leaders of the Protestant Reformation.

The Letter to the Romans is divided into sixteen chapters but is better understood as having seven main sections: first, the general introduction; second, an account of fallen human nature; third, a description of justification through faith in Christ; fourth, an explanation of how justification is experienced in the Christian life; fifth, an extended meditation on the relationship of Jews and Gentiles in the eternal plan of salvation in Christ; sixth, a discourse on the duties of Christians; and seventh, a conclusion filled with personal greetings and ending with a hymn of praise to God’s glory in Christ Jesus.

The passage we have today from chapter five of Romans is taken from the third section on justification through faith in Christ, and understanding this text in its proper depth requires knowing all that comes before it, especially the section on man’s Fall from grace and the consequences of original sin. Among the effects of the Fall are a darkening of the intellect that prevents us from seeing God clearly and the twisting of our wills into rebellion against the Creator in order to exalt the desires of our imperial selves as the highest good and final arbiter of truth.

In the second section of Romans, Paul explains the universal bondage of the human race to sin, and then he teaches us that the only freedom from that bondage to sin is found by God’s grace through faith in the Lord Jesus and not in any observance of the commandments which we undertake by our own efforts. This is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and chapter five begins with Paul’s declaration that since Christians have been justified by faith, we have peace with God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And so Paul continues in today’s reading that “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. How much more then” Paul asks “since we are now justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath. Indeed, if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

Put most simply: the salvation of the human race is a free divine gift, not a reward for a job well done. Jesus Christ did not die to make bad men good or good men better; he died and rose from the dead to make dead men live. And we live the life of the new creation only by divine grace, by grace through faith, hope, and love.

Over the next three months we will continue to read from the Letter to the Romans at each Sunday Mass, so spend some time now reading, studying, and praying with Paul’s letter, who as he writes in the introduction, is “a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an Apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God which he promised beforehand though his prophets in the holy Scriptures, the Gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.” Amen!

This is the text of my homily for 14 June 2026, the Eleventh Sunday of the Year.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

A majestic, full grown oak tree looks nothing like the acorn from which it grew, but between the two there is organic continuity. Everything the mature oak will ever become is contained within the acorn, and when sun, water, and time are added to that seed, then the glorious tree grows and takes shape according to its nature.

And so it is also with the Church, which in our time looks very different than she did in her first days, but across the millennia there is organic continuity. That is because the Church is not an organization. Rather, the Church is an organism, the living Body of Christ growing across time and spreading out all over the world according to her nature, with everything she now is having been contained within her in seed form on that Pentecost day when she was revealed in Jerusalem.

And as the Church grows organically, so too does her doctrine develop over time. By the action of the Holy Spirit leading her to all truth, the Church understands ever more deeply all that was revealed in the Gospel by the Lord Jesus, and two prime examples of this development of doctrine are celebrated on the two Sundays after Pentecost: the Solemnities of Most Holy Trinity last week and the Most Holy Eucharist today.

In today’s Gospel we read that the Lord Jesus taught his students that he is the living bread from heaven and that unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood we do not have the supernatural life of grace within us. And when Christ announced this strange and difficult teaching, Saint John tells us, those who heard him were angry and confused and argued among themselves.

Even the Twelve acknowledged at the time that they did not understand what Jesus was saying, and many disciples walked away from Christ because of this teaching, the meaning and full implications of which would not become clear until after Christ’s death and Resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And even then the search to understand Christ’s presence in the Eucharist was just beginning and would take centuries to unfold in its fullness, but from the very first days of the Church, Christians faithfully celebrated the Holy Eucharist in keeping with Christ’s command, just as we continue to do today.

Holy Scripture tells us that in the fullness of time, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the Greek word we usually translate as dwelt means literally that he pitched his tent among us or he tabernacled among us. And now he gives us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink through the Sacrament of the Most Holy Eucharist by which he fulfills the promise he made at his Ascension to remain with us until the Last Day.

The Lord Jesus continues to pitch his tent among us in every place where the sacrifice of the Cross is renewed by the celebration of the Mass, especially when the Sacrament of the Altar is reserved in a tabernacle near the altar as we have here. And the sacred depository of the Blessed Sacrament is called a tabernacle precisely because Christ, the Word made flesh, pitches his tent among us in the Eucharist, and the flickering sanctuary candle is the sign of the Real Presence of the Savior in our midst.

This enduring Real Presence of Christ allows us to draw near to the Savior in person when we come to pray in this or any place where the Most Blessed Sacrament is reserved, and by this Sacrament of the Altar the Church is formed into one Body as Saint Paul explains to the Corinthians in the second lesson today.

Just as the children of Israel were nourished on their journey to the Land of Promise by manna from heaven, so now Christians are nourished on our journey by the panis angelicus, the bread of angels: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” says the Lord; “whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

The Church has believed and taught this doctrine from the very first days of her life, but as with the growth of the oak tree, the teaching on the Real Presence has developed over time, not least because of the need to respond to false teaching about the reality and manner of the presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

In the first Christian millennium, the doctrine and discipline of the Church about the Holy Eucharist was accepted and lived with fidelity by almost all Christians, but that began to change in the 11th century during a philosophical controversy over the proper way to understand Christ’s Real Presence in the consecrated elements of bread and wine which become his Body and Blood in the celebration of the Mass. Throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, theological and philosophical debates continued among scholars, and these helped the Church develop and refine her understanding of how Christ is present in the Most Holy Eucharist.

These disputes came to a crescendo during the 16th century in the many branches of what we call the Protestant Reformation, which was actually not one thing but several different movements. The main parts of the Protestant Reformation were led by men like Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, John Knox, and Thomas Cranmer, and they sharply disagreed with each other as much as with the Catholic Church on the proper way to understand how the Lord Jesus dwells among us in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.

The false teaching of the first Protestants on the sacraments moved the Catholic Church to respond in the Council of Trent with dogmatic decrees that still bind us today, as does the teaching of the Council of Nicaea which was formulated to correct false teaching on the divinity of Christ. But by the time the Council of Trent responded to the doctrinal errors of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and the others, the damage was already done, and it remains with us to this day.

One of the great sadnesses of the schisms which occurred 500 years ago, is that today many millions of Christians do not know the Lord Jesus through meeting him in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. They do know him, of course, through the Holy Scriptures and Holy Baptism, through common prayer and the service of other people, and in this we rejoice.

But our Protestant brethren largely regard the Eucharist as at best a symbol or an image of Christ crucified and Risen rather than as what he taught us it is: “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”

Our profound disagreement with Protestant Christians about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is one of the many reasons why no Catholic may ever receive communion when attending Protestant worship and why no Protestant should receive Holy Communion if they attend Mass in a Catholic church.

Division among Christians is a great sadness, but the only path back to full, visible unity is found in acceptance of the whole truth of the Gospel, including the truth of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist which depends upon the apostolic ministry of bishops and priests who can celebrate the Holy Mass.

But the doctrine of Christ’s presence in the Holy Eucharist, though essential, is just the starting point. What we believe about the Eucharist is made present to us in divine worship which must be beautiful and reverent and directed to the glory of God. In the sacred liturgy we do not celebrate ourselves being gathered to talk about God; instead, we draw near to the Throne of Grace and approach the heavenly Jerusalem.

The Mass joins us, as we read in the Letter to the Hebrews, to innumerable angels in festal gathering and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. And to put flesh on the bones of our doctrine about the Holy Eucharist, our ritual forms, sacred music, and ecclesial architecture must all bear witness to the transcendent truth that simple bread and wine become the Sacred Body and Precious Blood of Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world.

In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul wrote: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said ‘This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup, after supper, saying ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”

Friends, our bodily senses tell us that in the Eucharist we receive only bread and wine, but the Savior teaches us otherwise. The Eucharist is not a symbol of Christ; the Eucharist is the Lord! But only by grace through faith can we see that in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar we truly receive the Risen Lord Jesus. In fact, we receive the same Christ at the altar who is now adored by the angels and saints in glory.

In the Communion Rite at every Mass, the priest says a silent prayer as he prepares to declare to the people: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.” In that silent prayer, the priest addresses the divine Savior in words that could fittingly be spoken by any Christian who is preparing to approach the altar for the medicine of immortality, and this prayer beautifully expresses the saving truth at the heart of today’s great feast:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who, by the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit, through your death gave life to the world, free me by this, your most holy Body and Blood, from all my sins and from every evil; keep me always faithful to your commandments, and never let me be parted from you. Amen.

This is the text of my homily for 7 June 2026, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

If you have lived long enough in the South, you have probably seen signs bearing the inscription John 3:16. You might see a little sign nailed to a telephone pole or a big sign painted on the side of a barn. And John 3:16 is this: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

These words from today’s Gospel are among the best known and most beloved in all of Scripture, but who exactly is this God who loves the world? And who is the Son whom he sent for our salvation?

The first lesson today from chapter thirty-four of Exodus tells us of an encounter between Moses and the living God, during which the Ancient of Days gave his name as Lord or Adonai in Hebrew, but that is less a proper name than a title. The one revealing himself to Moses, of course, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and earlier in Exodus we read that the same living God called Moses and sent him on a mission to deliver the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt.

At verse thirteen chapter three of Exodus we read this: “Then Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO AM. And he said, Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you.’”

So the proper but mysterious Name of God is the verb to be. In Christian theology, the living and true God is identified as ipsum esse subsistens, meaning the One whose very essence is to exist. The true God is not one being among other beings in this universe, nor is he contained in space and time which he himself made.

Rather, the living God is the ground and possibility of all other beings which he alone freely creates from nothing, including most especially the human race whom he fashioned in his own image and likeness to share his own divine life world without end.

The absolute holiness and radical otherness of God is among the reasons why the children of Israel would not utter the proper divine Name which God revealed to Moses, and so titles were used in place of the ineffable Name, titles which came to be regarded also as names of God, titles like Adonai and Elohim, meaning Lord and the living God.

But using titles for God rather than his given Name does not create distance between the Lord and his people, as we can see from the most intimate human relationships. Children do not call their parents or grandparents by their given names because it would not be fitting; instead, children use titles like mom and dad, nana and pawpaw and all the variations thereof. Such titles used as names signify great intimacy rather than distance, and so it was and is for the Lord and his people.

From the Book of Exodus and the giving of the divine names we learn that there are things we cannot know about God unless he himself tells us, and such self-disclosure by God is what we call divine revelation. But if the Lord must disclose the mystery of his own inner life for us to know him, there are still things that we can know about God without supernatural revelation, starting with his existence.

We observe this universe and everything in it, and we know by right reason that something never comes from nothing, that no effect is greater than its cause, and that order does not arise from chaos without a designer and maker. In this way we can know the existence of God without special revelation.

Or at least we should be able to know God’s existence from reason alone. But then sin darkens the intellect and twists the will into rebellion against the creator, and so we deceive ourselves into accepting absurdities while calling them wisdom, primarily because we do not want to be accountable to the living God for our conduct.

For example, the atheist sees the self-evident design in all things but then concludes that the cosmos must be the result of impersonal forces which work without design because he is already certain that all religion is superstitious nonsense.

But that is like observing the island of Manhattan and the complex city built on, under, and over that ground and then concluding that the entire metropolis and everything in it was produced by the random action of volcanoes and glaciers. Such absurdity is willful insanity, but in our day, that irrational approach to existence passes for intellectual sophistication and will get you a tenured chair in our great universities.

And so we come back to the need for God to reveal himself for us to know him with certainty and clarity. Holy Scripture is the record of that revelation, beginning with our first parents and continuing by stages until a turning point arrived with Abram of Ur of the Chaldees.

The living God revealed himself to Abram and called him to leave his home and travel to an unknown land where, the Lord promised, Abram would become the father of a great people with descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sands of the seashore. And so here we are, four thousand years later, all of us children of Abraham by grace through faith.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob gave his Name to Moses, and then he taught the Lawgiver how the children of Israel should explain the living God to their children: Shema Yisrael: Adonai Eloheinu; Adonai Echad. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Divine revelation teaches us that all the the deities invented in human history were but the creation of the people who searched for the hidden causes of things, while the one true God of Israel is the cause of all things and the creator of all those who search for him, even when they know him not.

For two thousand years, the children of Israel were the privileged witnesses to this essential truth about the origin and destiny of the universe, and holding fast to that revelation of the living God was, even in the midst of their great suffering, a cause of cohesion for Abraham’s stock.

But in the fullness of time, something came to pass which even the Hebrews did not expect. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed that although he is one God, Adonai Echad, he is also a Trinity of three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, eternally sharing the same divine nature and glory, the same Godhead.

This revelation was made possible only by another mystery of faith, the mystery of the Incarnation or taking of human flesh by God the Son through the will of God the Father, by the action of God the Holy Spirit, and at the free consent of the Virgin Mary. Jesus of Nazareth, by his life and ministry, by his teaching and miracles, and above all by his suffering, death, and Resurrection revealed himself to be not only the Son of David and the anointed shepherd King of the Jews but also the eternal and only begotten Son of the living God, his true Father.

Our knowledge of this revealed truth is made possible only by the gift of God the Holy Spirit, who leads us to all truth and draws us by the tether of love to a union of faith and hope with the one true God. And what is revealed to us for the salvation of the world is this: in the fulness of time, God the Son and eternal Word was made man and took our human nature to himself so that he could give us a share in his divine nature by the grace of adoption through which we become children of God the Father, able to call him now not simply Lord but Abba, Father.

To make this gift intelligible to us, the Lord taught us while he walked among us as the Son of Mary that he and God the Father are one, sharing the same divine nature in a bond of perfect self-emptying love who is God the Holy Spirit. And if we have seen the Son, then we have seen the Father by the gift of the Holy Spirit because the Son “is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1:3)

And so in his Great Commission to the Church, Christ commanded us to preach his Gospel to the ends of the earth and to the end of time and to invite all peoples by Word and Sacrament to saving knowledge of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And why? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

This Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity is kept each year on the Sunday after Pentecost to remind us of these truths which God has revealed to us about himself, the God who creates us from nothing, who redeems us from the grave, and who sanctifies us to be holy as he is holy. And because man is created in the image and likeness of God, this feast of the Trinity also teaches us essential truths about ourselves.

Friends, we are not autonomous and solitary individuals who can live by ourselves or for ourselves. Instead, we are designed and made for communion with others, and we find our identity and our purpose only in that communion, that being-with others. And this is why every form of brutality, hatred, oppression, deception, anarchy, exploitation, strife and injustice are absolutely contrary both to the love of God and to the dignity of the human person.

We find our purpose and our true destiny only when we live in perfect unity with the living God and with each other, but that perfect union is made impossible by sin which rends and tears us from God, from others, and from our own true selves. And that is why if we are to know why we exist and how we must live to be happy and holy, both now and in the glory to come, then we must be cured from sin-sickness. We must be cured from disordered self-love of every kind and then learn to live the life of the new creation by grace through faith, hope, and love.

And so Saint Paul exhorts us in the second lesson today: “Rejoice. Mend your ways, heed my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.” And then the Apostle concludes with a trinitarian prayer of wisdom and blessing which endures in every age at the heart of all Christian faith and fellowship:

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Amen. Alleluia!

This is the text of my homily for 31 May 2026, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” Think about that: Fifty days after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the universal Church was still small enough to fit inside one room, and all the disciples were together in that place.

Holy Scripture does not name the place in which they were gathered at Pentecost, but ancient tradition holds that the disciples were in the same upper room in which on Maundy Thursday night the Passover of Israel became the Eucharist of the Church. The Risen Lord then appeared to the Apostles on the evening of Easter Sunday in that same upper room, the supper room, and in chapter one of Acts we read that the Apostles returned to that upper room after the Ascension of the Lord Jesus, ten days before Pentecost.

Given how often this one room was used by the Savior and the Twelve, we might well wonder: Who was paying the rent? We don’t know for certain, but there is one intriguing possibility. Saint Luke tells us in his Gospel of an unnamed man who was expecting the Lord Jesus to celebrate his final Passover in an upper room of his home, and then Luke writes in chapter twelve of Acts that after Saint Peter escaped from jail in Jerusalem, he went to the home of John Mark’s mother - leading some ancient authorities to conclude that the upper room was in the family home of Saint Mark the Evangelist.

But whoever owned the house, it was in that upper room that the young Church was forged by fire and revealed to the world by the gifts of the Holy Spirit who is the breath of God sent forth by the Father and the Son to bring the life of the new creation to the human race. The Father utters one eternal and omnipotent Word, and God the Spirit is the breath by which that Word is eternally spoken.

As the Spirit or breath of God moved upon the waters at the dawn of creation to bring forth life, so the Holy Spirit was breathed out by Christ on Easter Sunday for the forgiveness of sins and fifty days later was breathed out again in fire - a fire like that which revealed the holiness of God to Israel on Mount Sinai, though sent now not to give the Law but to inaugurate the new creation and bring forth the abundant life of grace through the forgiveness of sins accomplished by Christ’s atoning death and glorious Resurrection.

And now two millennia later, the Church throughout the world continues to proclaim in every language that Jesus Christ crucified and Risen is the only Savior of the entire human race. He is the Son of God and the Son of Mary, the Word made flesh and the Anointed shepherd King of Israel and of all creation.

But as Saint Paul taught the Christians at Corinth, no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit, and so it is only by the gift of God the Spirit and to the glory of God the Father that we can say of God the Son: Jesus Christ is Lord.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” The unity of the young Church that day was more than geographical proximity. They would not long remain together in one place, but even as the disciples were dispersed from Jerusalem and grew in number they remained united in one Church because of their union in one Lord, one faith, and one Baptism, and that is what Saint Paul is teaching the Corinthians today in our second lesson:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and all were made to drink of the one Spirit.” But what is this unity, and what purpose does it serve?

According to Saint John the Evangelist, during the Last Supper the Lord Jesus offered a solemn discourse in the form of a prayer which tradition calls the High Priestly Prayer of Christ both because the pattern of the prayer corresponds to the intercessions customarily offered in the Temple by the High Priest and because the Lord Jesus is the only High Priest of the new and eternal covenant.

This High Priestly Prayer is found in chapter 17 of John’s Gospel and contains three main parts: first, Christ prays for himself and his coming agony, second, the Lord Jesus prays for his disciples and the trials they will undergo, and third, the divine Redeemer prays for those who will come to believe in him in the future because of the witness offered by his disciples.

In that third section, the Savior offered these petitions for his disciples to God the Father: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth. I do not ask for these only (his disciples), but also for those who will believe in me through their word, they may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:17-21)

Think of that prayer when you consider the unity of the Church. The Savior prayed to the Father that because of the unity of the Most Holy Trinity, in whose image we are all created, his disciples “may be one … so that the world may believe you have sent me.”

Now, the struggle to maintain unity of doctrine and discipline among Christians began from the first days of the Church’s life, as the letters of Saint Paul bear witness. But the losing battle against disunity became a complete rout in the 11th century with the Great Schism, a rout which was made worse in the West five hundred years later by the many schisms of the Protestant Reformation.

In 1995, Pope Saint John Paul the Great published an encyclical letter called Ut Unum Sint or That They May Be One which addresses the imperative of seeking unity among Christians. Pope John Paul expressed his hope that as the second Christian millennium had been a time of schism and heresy in the Church, so the third Christian millennium might see the restoration of unity by conversion to the truth of the Gospel and reconciliation among Christians on the basis of the truth of divine revelation, which is the only true unity possible in the Church as the Savior himself teaches us.

Now that the first quarter of the first century of the third millennium is behind us, we must admit that so far there is little evidence that the hope of Pope John Paul is being realized. But the challenge of Christian unity in the truth still lies before us, and the evangelization of the world is at stake.

According to the Savior’s High Priestly Prayer, the unity of Christian believers which flows from the very unity of the Triune God is a primary motive for the conversion of the world to full, visible communion with the Church which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. And that is why disunity among Christians is an impediment to fulfilling the Great Commission and also why we must all dedicate ourselves to the search for an ever deeper conversion to Christ. And John Paul is not the only pope to see this imperative.

When a priest is consecrated a bishop, it is customary for him to choose a short motto which accompanies his coat of arms and is meant to convey the essence of his service to the Church. These words usually come from Holy Scripture or from the Fathers of the Church, and the motto bears witness to a dimension of the truth of the Gospel which is most dear to the new bishop.

When Father Robert Prevost was ordained bishop in Peru in 2014, he chose as his motto words from Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great fifth century bishop and theologian whose ministry inspired the Augustinian Order of which Father Robert was a member.

Bishop Prevost chose as his motto the words In Illo Uno Unum, meaning in the One (Christ) we are one, and when Cardinal Prevost became Pope Leo XIV just over one year ago, he kept that motto as an emblem of his desire to remind all Christians of our need for unity in Christ, a unity which is no less needful today than on that day in Jerusalem when the entire Church was contained in one room, a unity which serves in every age as an engine of evangelization for the salvation of the world.

Pope Leo’s motto is taken from a commentary on Psalm 127 written by Saint Augustine, and these words speak to the Christocentric unity of the Church described today by Saint Paul: as “all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into body … and all were made to drink of the one Spirit.”

God be praised, friends, it is Pentecost! And two thousand years after the manifestation of Christ’s Church to the world by tongues of fire, we still proclaim by God the Holy Spirit and to the glory of God the Father that the Son of Mary is God the Son, the crucified and Risen Savior of the entire human race, for

Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

This is the text of my homily for 24 May 2026, the Solemnity of Pentecost.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

At his Ascension to the Father, the Lord Jesus commanded his Church: Go and make disciples of all nations, and in our second lesson today we begin to glimpse how we are to fulfill the Great Commission.

Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians may or may not have been written by Saint Paul, and it may or may not have been written to the Ephesians. Or so it can seem to some observers because of the complexities of modern biblical studies.

For nearly fifteen hundred years, everyone in the Church accepted that Saint Paul was the author of the Letter to the Ephesians, but then in the sixteenth century the widely respected scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam noticed that the language used in Ephesians differed significantly from that of other letters written by Saint Paul.

Erasmus was a Catholic priest and a friend of both Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher. He was also an early and passionate advocate for reform in the Church, but he opposed all Protestant schisms and remained a faithful Catholic throughout his life.

Erasmus prepared a revised edition of the Greek New Testament and a new translation of that text into Latin. During the work of editing and translating the New Testament, Erasmus detected differences in vocabulary and style between Ephesians and other letters written by Saint Paul.

Nothing conclusive can be proven from these insights, but Erasmus started a trend in biblical scholarship of studying all Scriptural texts by means of linguistic analysis, a practice which continues to this day.

Erasmus pointed out that the oldest surviving manuscripts of Ephesians do not include a mention of the city of Ephesus and that the words “in Ephesus” were perhaps added to the first verse of the letter by a helpful editor some time after the text’s composition. Erasmus also noticed that Ephesians lacks all of the personal greetings that are a common feature of Paul’s letters.

Saint Paul lived in Ephesus for about two years, so it seems likely that any personal letter of his to the Christians in Ephesus would have included many remarks to individuals, so the conjecture is that this letter was meant to be read not only in Ephesus but also in other Christian communities of Asia Minor, now part of modern Turkey.

What is undisputed about the Letter to the Ephesians is that from the beginning it has been accepted by the Church as a divinely inspired text belonging to the canon of the New Testament and that it faithfully presents Saint Paul’s teaching about the Church of Jesus Christ as the chosen instrument of grace for the salvation of the world. And since no one in the apostolic age or the first Christian millennium objected to the authenticity of this letter, the Church has always remained certain that the Letter to the Ephesians is divinely inspired and properly belongs to Holy Scripture.

Perhaps this text was composed by Paul himself or perhaps by one of his collaborators based on the Apostle’s doctrine or dictation, but whoever put pen to parchment, this letter is beyond all doubt the Word of God.

And in any case, the letter faithfully conveys the teaching of Paul and was certainly read in Ephesus, so despite all the modern questions about the letter’s origins, it is entirely proper to call this text both Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians and the Word of the Lord.

Understanding this background is essential to grasping the Catholic way of acknowledging Holy Scripture to be the inspired and inerrant Word of God. Neither the Old nor the New Testament dropped down from heaven perfectly formed and ready to read.

The books of the Bible were written by many hands over several centuries and in ancient languages, and each of those books had to be compiled and redacted by others to reach us, to say nothing of the constant translations required for us to encounter the Word of God in our own tongue.

But the living God is the principal author of all Scripture, and guided by the Holy Spirit whom Christ sends to teach us all truth, the Church established the canon of Scripture and authentically interprets the sacred page in conformity with the Apostolic Tradition and the Rule of Faith to insure that the Gospel is proclaimed in every generation as the whole counsel of God.

That is why questions about the exact history of the Letter to the Ephesians and every other book in the Bible do not diminish in any way the Church’s confidence in the truth and authority of the Word of God. So, with that in mind, let us now look at today’s second lesson.

Ephesians opens with a magnificent hymn of praise in gratitude to God for the eternal plan of salvation, a plan which was decreed before the creation of the universe and then gradually unfolded in human history until being finally and fully revealed in and by the Lord Jesus Christ in whom alone we have redemption from our sins.

Next comes the second section of chapter one, from which we read today. The Apostle first explains the unity of the Church in Christ and then offers a prayer for Christians to receive the gifts of grace that enable us to live according to our calling as members of the Church of Christ.

Paul writes: “I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him …” Here the Apostle means that knowledge of the true God comes not from human wisdom but only by grace through faith as a result of divine revelation in Christ Jesus.

This letter was written primarily to Gentile Christians, who need to understand in every age that the God of the New Covenant is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the same God who gave the Law to Moses and made an irrevocable covenant with his people Israel. He is the Father of glory from whom alone we can receive the gift of faith which grants wisdom and knowledge by divine revelation to understand the eternal plan of salvation in Christ.

The Apostle then prays that by this gift of revelation Christians will have “the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you will know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come.”

Here Saint Paul writes of the cosmic Christ, the eternal Word made flesh, who is restored to the glory which was his before the foundation of the world. This glorified Christ, the Risen and Ascended Lord Jesus, is the Pantocrator or King of all creation who rules the universe in majesty, world without end.

Today the Church rejoices in the holy mystery of Christ’s Ascension, which is both the exaltation of our human nature to the Throne of Grace and the final preparation for the mission of the Church to the nations, the beginning of which we will celebrate next week on the fiftieth day of the Resurrection, the Solemnity of Pentecost.

For now, notice that Paul describes the Church as the body of Christ in which dwells the fullness of Christ. The Apostle writes that God the Father “has put all things under (Christ’s) feet and has made him head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

So, Christ is the head of the body, the Church, of which we are made members by the grace of our Baptism. And more than that, the Church is the fullness of Christ, not just part of Christ, meaning that after Christ’s return in glory to the Father, the Lord Jesus remains with us and fills the cosmos with the light of his Gospel only in and with and through his Church, which is on earth the seed and beginning of the eternal Kingdom of God, the heavenly Jerusalem.

Of course, unbelievers see the Church only as a sociological reality, a human community like all others and usually an infuriating one. To unbelievers the Church might be accepted as a useful provider of social services but only if all the dogmatic claims of divine mysteries are set aside. And we Christians must acknowledge that our behavior is too often disappointing or even scandalous and then accept responsibility for the discredit we can bring to Christ and his Gospel.

But despite our sins, Christians must also see the Church as the mystical Body of Christ and the sacrament of salvation for the entire human race. Seeing the Church in this theological way is possible only with supernatural faith, and that is a gift of God that comes in part from reading Holy Scripture with confident assurance that it truly is the Word of God and not just the wisdom of men.

Forty-five years ago this October I came to know the God of glory while studying and praying with Saint Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians in just this way under the guidance of a college classmate, and that in part is how I came to faith in Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior and accepted his eternal plan for the world as being also the plan for my life.

The Lord Jesus says “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”

Friends, two thousand years after the Savior gave those instructions to his Church, it is our sacred duty and high privilege to proclaim the Good News of salvation that Jesus of Nazareth is the omnipotent and eternal Word by whom all things were made.

The Son of Mary is also God the Son and the eternal Word made flesh. Christ Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Holy One of Israel and the great I AM. The Lord Jesus is the long desired of all the nations and the divine Redeemer of the entire human race, and to Christ alone belongs all time and all the ages, for

Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

This is the text of my homily for 17 May 2026, the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

Why are you a Christian? Why am I a Christian? All disciples of the Lord Jesus must know the answer to that question before we can fulfill the instruction of Saint Peter given in today’s second lesson: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” The Apostle speaks, of course, about our hope for eternal life in Christ.

Here Peter is urging Christians to be prepared at all times to explain to others why we have become disciples of the Lord Jesus, but no one can give what he does not have. And this means that before we can explain our faith to others, we must first understand it ourselves.

Jesus commands us: Go and make disciples of all nations! That is the Great Commission given by the Lord to his Church forty days after his Resurrection, at his Ascension to the Father which we will celebrate next Sunday. But to fulfill the Great Commission, we must first know why we are Christians so that we can always be ready to explain our faith that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of the living God.

Put otherwise, it is not possible to be a private or hidden Christian. To be a disciple of Christ is to accept the sacred duty and high privilege of being a missionary, a public witness to the truth of the Gospel. And so we must ask ourselves again and again: Why am I a Christian? But to understand why I am a Christian also demands that I know those things which are not essential to my faith, even when many people assume that they are.

For example, no one is a Christian because his ancestors came from Ireland, or Italy, or Poland, or Lebanon, or Mexico, or the Philippines, or anywhere else on the map. Faith in Jesus Christ is not acquired from ethnicity or geography even when the culture of one’s ancestral homeland is or was profoundly shaped by Christianity, and no one will be a disciple of Jesus Christ simply because his parents or grandparents were. Any true act of saving faith must be my own faith in the Risen Lord. But how is such faith awakened?

In the first reading today from Chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles, we read that a man named Philip traveled from Jerusalem to the principal city of Samaria to proclaim the Messiah to the people there. But this Philip was not the Apostle of the same name; this Philip was one of the first seven deacons of the Church whose ordination was described by Saint Luke last Sunday in the first lesson from Chapter 6 of the Acts of the Apostles.

Deacon Philip preached the Gospel in Samaria and many people accepted the Lord Jesus with saving faith and were baptized, but their full initiation into the life of grace was not complete until two of the Apostles, Peter and John, arrived and laid hands on the newly baptized to confer the gift of the Holy Spirit, an action which prefigures the Sacrament of Confirmation as the completion of Holy Baptism. And in this profile we learn that authentic Christian faith is always marked by personal knowledge of Holy Scripture, worthy reception of the sacraments, and living in full communion with the Church.

And here we can begin to perceive how Christianity spreads. Chapter 8 of Acts tells us that Deacon Philip left Jerusalem only after the martyrdom of Deacon Stephen at the feet of a Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus, the man who would become the Apostle Paul. Saint Stephen’s death signaled the beginning of the first widespread persecution of the Church, but even in the midst of persecution, the Church’s witness to Jesus Christ crucified and Risen can bring souls to saving faith in the Messiah. And everyone who is baptized into Christ is also called and sent to be a missionary disciple.

And now we come to the crux of the matter: we are Christians only because someone else introduced us to the Lord Jesus and bore witness to the truth of his Gospel, to the glory of his divine nature, and to the life-changing power of his suffering, death, and Resurrection. Just as there are no private Christians, there are also no solitary Christians.

For most Christians, the first witnesses to Christ in our lives are our parents, and as they teach us to eat, to walk, to bathe, to dress, and to speak, they also teach us to worship the living God in spirit and truth through saving faith in Jesus Christ. But while many of us have been Christians all our lives, for others faith comes only after a rupture or crisis of some sort, perhaps during adolescence or later in life when our illusions of autonomy are shattered and we are awakened to our own mortality.

At a moment of crisis we may grasp the necessity of finding the purpose of our existence and the source of all being outside of ourselves. And we can find these things only in the One who is the designer and maker of the universe, the living and true God who finally and fully revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth.

But such philosophical considerations, indispensable though they be, are not enough to lead most people to saving faith in the living God. Some people come to know that Jesus Christ is Lord only when their hearts are pierced with grief, or enchanted with beauty, or chained with fear, or lifted up with wonder. And even when people may be ready to hear and heed the Word of God, a Christian witness must still come to them as a missionary disciple to proclaim the Messiah.

But whether we receive the Gospel from childhood or accept it later in life, each disciple must make a personal decision to follow Jesus Christ in the Way of the Cross, something that is possible only when we know that Christ alone is our Passover and our peace. We must know that Jesus Christ is the divine Redeemer who alone can give us a share in his divine glory because he alone is the God-man who shares our human nature.

To arrive at that decision for Christ, each of us needs the assistance of other disciples who bear witness to the truth of the Gospel. But how do we do that for others? Listen again to Saint Peter: “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts. Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear.”

So, to be effective witnesses to Jesus and lead others to saving faith in him, we must sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts and keep our consciences clear by constant conversion from sin in the obedience of faith. Then by careful study we must know the Word of God revealed in Holy Scripture and explained in the Apostolic Tradition. And finally, with reverence and gentleness we must explain our reasons for believing the Gospel - reverence both for the holiness of God and for the dignity of the persons to whom we speak about the Lord Jesus.

That much has been true for Christians in every age, but in our time, when we are explaining the reasons for our faith, we must usually begin by clearing out a tangle of misunderstandings, non-sequiturs, logical fallacies, and absurd prejudices about Christianity which are part of the cultural air we breath. We must help modern scoffers see that there is no conflict between faith and reason or between religion and science. In this way, we may help them hear the Gospel as though for the first time and be changed by the living and active Word of God.

And in bearing witness to the goodness, truth, and beauty of God, we must not hesitate to speak of the grandeur of the Church and the humane civilization to which she gave birth. Inspired by the Gospel, Christians have produced art, architecture, music, poetry, and literature of unsurpassed beauty.

Christians invented hospitals and universities, discovered the notion of universal human rights, and saved the patrimony of classical antiquity from barbarian destruction even as we stand today against new barbarisms such as the transgender madness and killing children in the womb while calling it healthcare. In our theology and philosophy, Christians have produced the most extraordinary and coherent account of what the universe is and what it means to be human, and this too we must be prepared to explain to unbelievers.

So, Christianity teaches that because we are all children of the same Father, we have universal obligations to care for all people everywhere. Christianity teaches that we have a duty to preserve this earth and share its bounty with all people because we are but stewards of God’s creation. Christian humanism undergirds all the legitimate aspirations for freedom and dignity which are now taken for granted by most people, including contemporary unbelievers, who have long since forgotten the Christian foundations on which they stand.

The fact that too many Christians have fallen short of our ideals and behaved in disgraceful ways is not a reason to concede to unbelievers their frequent claim that Christianity is a malign force of superstition and ignorance in human history. It most certainly is not, no matter how many false claims and black legends are repeated about the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the Light of the world and the divine Logos who creates and sustains the universe and makes all existence logical, reasonable, and intelligible. And the Church of Christ is both the sacrament of salvation for the whole human race and the world’s foremost advocate for the power of right reason to know the truth of things and to govern human affairs in justice and peace.

In other words, when we give others the reasons for our faith, we have a very strong argument to make. But in bearing witness to Jesus Christ, we are not attempting to win arguments; we are instead hoping to win souls by opening the hearts and minds of all persons to the gift of divine grace. No one was ever bludgeoned or shamed into authentic Christian faith, and love is the only motive we should have in bearing witness to Christ.

In the Gospel today the Lord Jesus says to his disciples: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments … Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.”

Friends, such love in action is what allows us to lead others to faith in Jesus Christ, and so both our words and our lives should always bear witness to the revealed and saving truth that

Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Alleluia. Alleluia!

This is the text of my homily for 10 May 2026, the Sixth Sunday of Easter.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

In the Old Covenant, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob established three offices by which he could remain with his people to teach, govern, and sanctify them. The office of prophet was charged with teaching the Word of God, the office of king was entrusted with the authority to govern, and the office of priest was instituted to sanctify the people by divine worship and by the offering of sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins.

Over the centuries, various men came and went in those continuing offices, and so in the Old Covenant there were many prophets, kings, and priests. But by contrast there is for all eternity only one prophet, one king, and one priest in the New Covenant, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ.

As prophet, the Lord Jesus proclaims the Word of God, but he is also the eternal and incarnate Word who is proclaimed. As the Son of David, Christ is the King of Israel, but as God the Son he is also the King of all creation, the Pantocrator who governs the cosmos which he created and sustains. And as the faithful and true servant who offered once for all the perfect sacrifice of his own life for the forgiveness of sins, the Lord Jesus is the only and eternal priest of the New and Everlasting Covenant.

But although Christ is the only prophet, king, and priest in the New Covenant, he also shares those offices with his disciples in different ways through two of the seven sacraments: Holy Baptism and Holy Orders. Today we will look briefly at how these sacred duties are shared with all Christians in Baptism to allow us to proclaim the Word of God, to govern ourselves and shape the world with upright living, and to offer the sacrifice of divine worship and holy lives.

The New Testament contains two letters which are identified as having been written by the Apostle Peter, and today is the fourth of five Sundays on which the second lesson is taken from the First Letter of Saint Peter. So at home later today, please read all of First Peter which runs to just over three pages in your Bible.

From the second Christian century this text was accepted as having been written by Simon Peter, or at least dictated by him to an assistant named Silvanus who might have polished the plain language of a Galilean fisherman into refined Greek. And despite some scholarly quibbling about this text in the nineteenth century, the Church remains confident that this letter is indeed the teaching of the Apostle Simon bar Jonah, who was given by Christ the name of Rock or Peter.

The First Letter of Peter is addressed to Gentile Christians living in several communities in modern Turkey, most of whom received the Gospel from Saint Paul. In these local Churches, the young Christians were experiencing the challenge of remaining faithful to Jesus Christ while being persecuted and ridiculed and living among a majority of people who believed the Gospel to be an absurd fairy tale.

Peter’s first letter begins by reminding his readers of the power and dignity of their Baptism which unites them to the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Apostle teaches us that by the sacrament of second birth all Christians have been called to holiness of life and equipped to withstand rejection and ridicule as we persevere in faith and live in this world as sojourners, aliens, and exiles who are just passing through to our true home, the heavenly Jerusalem.

In today’s second lesson, Saint Peter is teaching these Gentile Christians about the nature of their identity in Christ by reference to the unique dignity of the children of Israel and the irrevocable promises made by God to his Chosen People. Peter makes this point in part by quoting extensively from the Old Testament.

Speaking of the Lord Jesus in the second lesson today, Peter writes “Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God’s sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house.”

Here a key image of the Church is that of a vast building in which the Lord Jesus is the cornerstone, the Apostles are the foundation, and all the baptized are the walls of the spiritual house, made of living stones built on Christ and the Twelve. So, Saint Peter continues, “like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

Now all the sacrifices of the Old Covenant were fulfilled and completed by the one perfect sacrifice of the true Lamb of God who was revealed to be both the priest and the victim, both the one who offered the sacrifice and the sacrifice which was offered.

But after his Resurrection, Christ Jesus literally incorporated his disciples into himself - that is, drew them into his body - by making them into the spiritual house of his Church, and so the Savior has shared his unique priesthood with us so that we too can offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God the Father who sees and loves in us what he sees and loves in Christ.

Christians participate in the unique priesthood of Jesus Christ through Holy Baptism, and having been conformed to Christ’s death in Baptism so that we can share in his Resurrection, we have also been made priests in the one priest, able to worship God in spirit and truth and to offer the sacrifice of holy lives.

That is what Saint Paul explains in chapter twelve of his Letter to the Romans where he writes: “I appeal to you brethren by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

And so Saint Peter instructs us about the power and dignity of our Baptism: “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

In this way, Holy Baptism unites us not only to Christ the priest but also to the only prophet and king of the New Covenant. So, if you have been born again by water and the Holy Spirit, then you are a prophet, a king, and a priest in Christ.

All the baptized are sent to teach the Word of God and call the world to saving faith in Christ Jesus. All the baptized are given royal dignity to govern their lives, especially their unruly passions, with sovereign freedom and to help shape just societies by living in the truth. And all the baptized are commanded to offer the spiritual sacrifice of their bodies given in divine worship and holy living.

Have you ever hoped that the Church’s pastors would be wiser, holier, and more effective teachers of the Gospel and better celebrants of the sacred mysteries of human redemption? If you haven’t hoped that, then you haven’t been paying attention to the Church’s condition!

But if you have hoped for that, then understand that you too are called, not by Holy Orders but by Holy Baptism, to the sacred offices of prophet, king, and priest in the New Covenant. And if you want the Church to be reformed and purified, then decide today to live in greater fidelity to these noble offices, not by your strength but by the faith, hope, and love poured into us at Baptism by our divine Redeemer and the Savior of the world. And remember all of this is possible only because:

Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!

This is the text of my homily for 3 May 2026, the Fifth Sunday of Easter.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

“Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice, and proclaimed.” In the first lesson today from the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Luke is describing the Jewish feast of Pentecost which takes place fifty days after Passover and celebrates the children of Israel receiving the Law of Moses at Mount Sinai.

The setting for today’s reading is Jerusalem, fifty days after Christ’s final Passover, when the Holy City was once again filled with pilgrims who had come from all over the Holy Land and the Mediterranean to offer sacrifice to God in the Temple.

At this point seven weeks after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Apostles were called the Eleven rather than the Twelve because Judas Iscariot killed himself on Good Friday, and although Matthias had just been chosen to replace Judas, he had not yet begun his ministry. Sacred Scripture tells us that all of the Apostles had serious character flaws and made bad decisions, and the Gospels are remarkably candid about that fact.

During the three years when the Apostles were students of the Lord Jesus, they more often than not misunderstood what Christ was trying to teach them. They quarreled among themselves about who was the most important, they were often both ignorant and arrogant, some were nakedly ambitious and wanted to hold power in the coming kingdom, and they were boastful about their loyalty to Christ.

But when Jesus was arrested, they were all terrified that they would die with him, and so they ran for their lives. And all of this messy humanity is on full display in the Sacred Scriptures. Imagine what modern spin doctors would attempt to do with this story to advance the cause of Christ, smoothing over the obvious flaws of these twelve men to offer a more attractive vision of life in the Church.

Such misdirection would surely attempt to explain away the greed and treachery of Judas Iscariot, a man chosen by Christ himself to be one of the Twelve foundation stones of the new Jerusalem. But instead, the Scriptures present the unvarnished truth about the sins of the Apostles because that too is part of the Good News of salvation, both for the Twelve and for all of us.

“Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice, and proclaimed.” Friends, the words of Peter that follow this introduction are the first public proclamation to the world that Jesus Christ is Lord, and our reading this morning contains only a portion of Peter’s powerful Pentecost sermon, so please open your Bibles at home today and read all of Chapter Two of the Acts of the Apostles to hear again the words of salvation: “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Saint Luke goes on to describe the reaction of those who listened to Peter’s proclamation: “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart.” But why? Why were they cut to the heart? Well, that is the power of the Word of God, which the Letter to the Hebrews teaches us “is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.”

But even if we are cut to the heart by the Word of God, we must still make a decision for Christ or against him and then shape our lives by that decision. Some of us on hearing the Word of God cry hot tears but then later turn away and try to forget what happened so that we can return to our old lives and our cherished sins.

Some of us respond with anger and bitterness because we will not be changed, even by the Word of God. Some scoff and deride and pretend that the Word did not pierce us, hoping that the feeling will pass so that we can surrender once again to cynicism and tell ourselves that religion really is ridiculous, that Christ is a fake, and that his Church is bogus, as of course all rational people know.

But on the Day of Pentecost, when those who heard the Gospel were cut to the heart and asked “What are we to do, my brothers,” Simon Peter, now forgiven for his follies and failures and emboldened by the Holy Spirit, answered: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is made to you and to your children and to all who are far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.”

Remember that the Lord Jesus began his own preaching with a call to conversion: “The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel.” And now Simon Peter, the vicar of Christ and the head of the Apostolic College, takes up the call and begins to fulfill the Great Commission: “Repent, and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins.” Then Luke tells us that “Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand persons were added that day.”

And thus did the Church grow from a tiny number of people to a multitude. But as we know from our long history, that multitude can too easily become a mob of baptized pagans instead of an assembly of faithful disciples unless each and every one of us constantly hears the Gospel of salvation, is cut to the heart, repents of our sins, and makes a daily decision to follow Christ Jesus, who is described today by the First Letter of Peter as the shepherd and bishop of our souls.

But for the Gospel to be heard it must first be proclaimed, and that requires preachers to be sent, preachers who themselves have been cut to the heart and who have surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith.

Just as Judas was replaced by Matthias, just as Mark learned the Gospel from Peter, and just as Paul gave to Timothy and Titus the sacred duty to continue the ministry of Word and Sacrament, so men are still called in every age to be shepherds in the Church and servants of Christ the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep.

Each year on this Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Church asks us to pray for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. In other words we asking the Lord to call men to offer themselves for the ministry of Word and Sacrament as presbyters or priests and to call young men and women to follow Christ in the vows of consecrated living in religious communities.

Each Wednesday afternoon here at Saint Mary’s during an hour of eucharistic adoration, we offer that same petition to the Lord for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, especially from our parish. And in seven weeks we will see a beautiful fulfillment of those prayers.

On Friday 19 June, Deacon Reyes Palomares, a son of Saint Mary’s, will be ordained to the priesthood for the Diocese of Charleston along with three other men with whom he has been in priestly formation for many years.

These four new priests will take their places in parishes around South Carolina, and Father Palomares is being assigned to Saint Andrew’s Church in Clemson while also having the care of the Spanish-speaking community at Saint Paul’s Church in Seneca. Father Palomares will celebrate his first solemn Mass here at Saint Mary’s at 1 pm on Sunday June 21st and other Masses here on July 4th and 5th.

Now, in our Wednesday afternoon Holy Hour we pray not only for vocations to the priesthood; we also pray for young men and women to embrace religious life and express the grace of their Baptism as witnesses to the radical demands of the Gospel through the vows or evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And now that prayer has also been answered.

A young woman of our parish made her first vows yesterday among the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama. Miss Gabrielle Braud is now Sister Maria Caritas of Jesus Our Redeemer, and we give thanks and praise to God for the grace of this beautiful vocation of contemplative life in his Church.

These four new priests coming to our diocese and the new Poor Clare in Alabama remind us that even now the Church and the Gospel she proclaims are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to change lives because Jesus Christ is Lord, and he calls us to follow him in the Way of the Cross.

But why should we accept the easy yoke and light burden of Christ’s authority in our lives? Because, as Saint Peter tells us in our second lesson, Christ Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds (Peter concludes) you have been healed.” By the wounds of the Good Shepherd, we have been healed.

Friends, we know that the Church in our time is a shambolic mess, but when has that ever not been the case? We must never allow the scandalously frail humanity of the Apostles or their successors to distract us from the fact that when we make a decision for Jesus Christ by grace through faith, when we believe in his Gospel and repent of our sins, when we receive God’s mercy through Word and Sacrament, and when we live in Christ’s Church as faithful disciples, then we lose nothing what is authentically human and we gain everything in the abundant life of grace, including our place in the new creation and the promise of everlasting glory because:

Christos Anesti. Alithos Anesti!

Christ is Risen. Truly He is Risen! Alleluia. Alleluia!

This is the text of my homily for 26 April 2025, the Fourth Sunday of Easter.

Fr Jay Scott Newman

In February 2024, Miss Gabrielle Braud of Saint Mary’s Church entered the novitiate of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in Hanceville, Alabama - the community founded by Mother Angelica - and received the religious name Sister Maria Caritas of Jesus Our Redeemer. On 25 April 2026, the Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, Sister Maria Caritas, PCPA will make her first Profession of Vows, and this is my homily for that Mass.

“The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” (Mark 1:15)

Saint Mark tells us that after the Lord Jesus was baptized by John and after John was arrested by Herod, the Savior then returned to Galilee and began the three years of his public ministry with this proclamation: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”

And today on this Feast of Saint Mark, we behold one of the many ways in which disciples of the Lord Jesus fulfill his summons to live in the Kingdom of God even now by grace through faith, hope, and love - a way of life made possible only by the radical reorientation of everything we are through our ongoing surrender to the Law of Love by means of constant conversion to Jesus Christ crucified and Risen.

Sister Maria Caritas, your journey in consecrated life began here in this sacred place in February 2024 on the day of your Investment with the habit of the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. Now more than two years into this quiet adventure of hidden prayer, the time of your first preparation is fulfilled, and you can see ever more clearly what it will cost you to live the Kingdom life to which the Savior summons you here in this monastery. It will cost you everything.

Saint Mark’s Gospel contains a small detail found only in his account of the arrest of the Lord Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. In chapter fourteen of Mark, we read that after the armed mob laid hands on the Messiah and seized him, all the Apostles left Jesus and fled. On this point all the evangelists agree. But then Mark alone tells us that “a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.” (Mark 14:51-52)

Now here I offer only conjecture, but this speculation has a noble pedigree and is worthy of consideration. Many authorities suspect that the Upper Room in which the Last Supper took place was in the home of John Mark’s family, and it is further suggested that the teenaged John Mark was in that house asleep in his night clothes when he was awakened by the din of the mob going to arrest the Lord, a mob he followed in the hope of warning the Savior about the approaching danger.

If true, that would explain why a boy was in the garden in the middle of the night, scantily clad in a linen cloth, the word for which in Greek also describes the garment used to clothe newly baptized Christians and to shroud bodies for burial. This theory concludes that the young man who wriggled out of his light clothing to run away naked was none other than Mark himself who added this detail to his Gospel as an autobiographical note which confirms his eyewitness account.

In any case, for disciples of the Lord Jesus, the break between our old life of sin and the new life of grace requires that we be stripped of illusions and disordered desires of every kind and then be clothed with Christ. And that process of being clothed with Christ begins for all Christians in Holy Baptism.

The profession of the evangelical counsels, although a way of life highly esteemed and encouraged by the Church, is not one of the seven sacraments instituted by Christ. It is, rather, the living out of one’s baptismal consecration in the most radical way possible, and in this sense, religious life is sacramental: a public witness to the hidden life of grace that begins with Holy Baptism and draws the religious man or woman by the tether of divine love to share even now in the life of the Kingdom of God in which there is no marriage but where there is perfect love, everlasting joy, and the intimate communion of persons made one in Christ.

The Scripture lessons chosen for this celebration testify to the mystery of divine love and the ways in which it binds us together. Those who look to the Lord are radiant and filled with joy because his perfect love for us enables us to love one another and find the unity and peace which the world cannot give - a unity of faith, hope, and love which then bears witness to the world that Jesus Christ is Lord and draws others to seek and find in Christ the peace which passes all understanding.

For all the Poor Clares here, daughters of Saint Clare of Assisi, the gift of this Profession takes place within the Franciscan Jubilee Year which marks the 800th anniversary of the Transitus to heaven of our Seraphic Father Francis. And for you, Sister Maria Caritas of Jesus Our Redeemer, let the grace of this Jubilee Year remain in your heart as a perpetual witness to the power of divine love to transform not just individual lives but entire civilizations.

And even though all the days of your life should be passed in this sacred enclosure, your love - your caritas, dear Sister Maria - will be a radiant witness and powerful instrument of grace helping that transformation to occur in other souls beyond number, most of whom you will not know until you stand at the Throne of Grace with all the saints and angels and rejoice world without end in the glory of the Lamb once slain who lives forever.

Sharing in that perfect love and everlasting joy is the very reason we were all created by Love, redeemed by Love, sanctified by Love, and will be - we pray - glorified by Love, the Love who is the long desired of all the nations and of every human heart, the Love who is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. He is the Son of Mary and God the Son, the Word made flesh and the Way, the Truth, and the Life, our divine Redeemer and beloved Savior: the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fr Jay Scott Newman