Reconcile the World! Twenty third Sunday in Ordinary Time

This Sunday the lectionary turns our eyes towards two of the seven spiritual works of mercy; third of which is: admonish the sinner.

In the first reading, from the Prophet Ezekiel we hear clearly:

[if] you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked from his way,
the wicked shall die for his guilt,
but I will hold you responsible for his death.

In other words, we are bound to the sin of our neighbour, especially if we can see that they are committing sin and have stood by doing nothing – as is, all too often, the case.

In the second reading St. Paul underlines that to counsel a friend, or a neighbour, that they are doing wrong is, in fact, an act of love.

Love does no evil to the neighbor;
hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.

To permit someone to remain in error, to continue in sin, is to do evil to this brother of ours. Listen to the words of St. Augustine who echoes St. Paul on this matter:

If you fail to do so, you are worse than he is. He has done someone harm, and by doing harm he has stricken himself with a grievous wound. Will you then completely disregard your brother‘s wound? Will you simply watch him stumble and fall down? Will you disregard his predicament? If so, you are worse in your silence than he in his abuse.

The scriptures and the teaching of the Church are quite clear; we may not stay silent in the face of a sin.

This formulation of love should give us pause to think. Too often today, love is understood as an absolute commitment to support those we purportedly love in their ways, even if their actions lead to evil. If a man leaves his wife, we feel obliged by friendship to support him. If a spouse is adulterous, we excuse it on the grounds that they needed the affirmation. If a person adopts a disordered identity, and there are so many of them available today, we are told that we must support them in this choice.

But none of this is love. This is merely the toleration of evil in the contemporary culture which promotes the idolatry of the self. Love is not love if it does not force our beloved to confront the truth.

And so, how do we take on this task? Our Lord offers us a series of steps in which the sinner may be admonished.

In the first place:

If your brother sins against you,
go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. 

Alone! In other words, we are not to humiliate our brother in public, or in private for that matter. We are to go and tell him about the fault, and get him to recognize his fault. And to enable us to not shame or be superior when we do this, Our Lord asks us to remember that we are sinners too! This is what He means when He says:

First remove the plank from your eye. (Mt 7:5)

It does not mean that we are to not care what people do and simply mind our own business.

To admonish our brother about his sin is to educate him about the nuances of the act. Perhaps he does not realise that it is a sin. For example, how many of us here recognize the fact that when we break the laws of the state – even the traffic regulations so casually broken by all of us – we are sinning grievously?

The calling of others that Our Lord subsequently recommends, is once again, not an attempt to shame the sinner, but to persuade him through numbers. Perhaps where one can be dismissed as too scrupulous, or crazy, the presence of two others will help the sinner recognize that the correction is not born from a personal opinion alone?

If the sinner still refuses to repent, Our Lord advises us to tell the Church. in other words, ask for a priest to counsel the sinner. If even this fails, then it becomes obvious that this person is no longer in communion with the Church. And this is a serious matter for the sinner risks losing his soul.

But Our Lord does not end there. He recommends:

Again, amen, I say to you,
if two of you agree on earth
about anything for which they are to pray,
it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father. 

What do we pray about in circumstances where our brother refuses pious counsel? That our errant brother be consigned to the flames of hell? No! We pray that they be saved, that Divine Providence step in to counsel them and bring them back to communion and salvation.

My dear brothers and sisters, I was recently present at the funeral of a person who battled Holy Mother Church all his life and absolutely refused to accept the final sacraments. The sacraments were finally administered, through the intervention of his brother, when he was unconscious and drifting into death. I was moved by the faith of this man’s brother who after the sacraments were administered, realized that his dying brother did not have a scapular. So, he returned home, brought a scapular, and tied it around his brother’s wrist. In so doing, he was binding Our Lady to Her promise to St. Simon Stock: “Whosoever dies clothed with this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.”

My dear brothers and sisters, I have no doubt that despite the stubbornness of this man, the faith and fervent prayers of his brother and all his family will ensure that this man’s final destiny is not hell!

The final spiritual act of mercy is to pray for the living and the dead, and this is precisely what the Gospel acclamation teaches us today:

God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Go therefore, dearly beloved in Christ, and pray, so that you may reconcile sinners with God, both those in the flesh, and those who languish in the fires of purgatory.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Pangim on 6 September 2026.)

(Image reference: Angel with lily and a putto handing the scapular, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1744, Scuola Grande dei Carmini, Venice.)

A Living Sacrifice: Homily for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God,

to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,

holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.

Brothers and sisters in Christ! These words of St. Paul were meant to appeal to the hearts of his readers, and they can, and must, also appeal to our own: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; offer to him your spiritual worship!

St. Paul reminds us that we are gathered here today, in church, to offer worship and sacrifice to God. The Sunday Mass, we must remember, is not a weekend social gathering of the faithful. It is most certainly not an opportunity to listen to a good homily! We gather on Sunday, the day indicated to us by God, to worship Him, and in thanksgiving, for the week past, and the week to come offer the sacrifice that is most pleasing to Him, His Son. In other words, we come to Mass not for an inspirational fix, but to offer living sacrifice!

Following ancient custom, we consume this sacrifice, which through the mercy of God is not a symbol of the Son, but His very Body and Blood, which conforms us to Him! We leave the Mass, therefore, armed with the grace of Our Lord so that through the rest of the week we may become, like the Son, a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God!

The ancient Christian thinker Origen observed: “We always carry in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. He calls it holy because the Holy Spirit dwells in it.”

The Christian is, or ought to be, adept at holding things in tension, and Origen points to one such binary: life and death. We must be dead to the world and alive to, and in, the Spirit! This tension is best played out in the virtue of chastity. Through the control of our biological urges, responding to the spiritual laws that have been revealed to us, we are able to hold the world and the spirit together, in this way, the chaste body becomes a living sacrifice!

Too often, chastity is understood as a regime of sexuality. The single person does not have sex until marriage; the married person has sex only within the bounds of marriage, and the religious live celibate lives.

To understand chastity in this manner, however, is to miss the point! Chastity is not about sex, but about love! It is when we understand the practice of chastity as love that we then become more equipped to offer our bodies as living sacrifice!

That chastity is invariably seen as an absence – an abstention from sex – may be a good place to start from. As an abstention, it involves self-control. But self-control rather than a negative is, in fact, a positive – it allows us to master our instincts and passions so that may be exercised for our good. In other words, self-mastery enables us to act in total freedom, not in slavery to our senses. It is when abstain, or sacrifice, our disordered that we can give ourselves, or love, more  wholly to those around us. A love that is not chaste, is no love at all! Understood this way, the classical allegory for chastity, a virgin taming the unicorn – horses are often the sign of the unbridled will – makes sense.

It is when we understand chastity in this way that we can appreciate that chastity is not merely about abstention from sex. It is a guarding of the heart, and our senses, from those things that might derail us and those we love.

St. Philipe Neri, a saint dear to my heart, offered sage advice which is pertinent to our growth in chastity: practice custody of the eyes. This caution is derived from the advice of Our Lord:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent

has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Mt 5: 27-28)

Framed this way we realise that chastity is, as Bishop Erik Varden points out, not about a mortification, but “a reconciliation of the senses”: bringing our senses into harmony so that we can live freely and without distraction. Since chastity is about life, it is about bringing true beauty in the world. Bishop Varden believes that “To do something beautiful for its own sake, for the intrinsic delight of it, without thought of gain: this, is a way of beginning to live chastely in this world.”

To drive in conformity with traffic rules, to greet a stranger politely, to aim for excellence in our work, these, it turns out, are also features of the chaste life.

And so, dearly beloved:

Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may discern what is the will of God,
what is good and pleasing and perfect.

Santa Maria, Mater Castissima, ora pro nobis.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the chapel of Our Lady of the Cape, Cabo Raj Nivas, Dona Paula on 30 August 2026.)

(Image reference: Annunciation in a ‘Hortus Conclusus,’ Martin Schongauer & workshop, c1480 Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France.)

Confess Him! Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." 

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; this Sunday we have the privilege to hear with our own ears, what is known as the confession of Peter. In the face of multiple opinions about Our Lord, Simon, son of Jonah, confesses what we know to be the truth of the identity of Our Lord, He is the anointed one – what Christ means – and he is the Son of the Living God.

This confession has various implications for our faith. In the words of Epiphanius the Latin, “If Christ is the Son of God, by all means he is also God. If he is not God, he is not the Son of God.” The confession of Peter, therefore, is the admission of the divinity of Our Lord, and a testament to the relationship between Our Lord and God the Father. You can see here, already the dawning on the apostle that God is one but composed of multiple persons.

If Our Lord is God, then he is not, unlike what the people then, and some today, say, merely a prophet, or a good man, or a great teacher. This is to say, Our Lord cannot be compared with other figures to whom divinity is attributed, or for whom it is claimed. This is because there is one God, and He has but one Son (1 Cor 8:6). It follows, therefore, that divinity is attributed to these other figures mistakenly.

Our Lord’s response to Peter is also critical in understanding what Peter says,

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. 
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. 

In other words, Peter’s confession was not the result of any human wisdom, or insight. This knowledge of Our Lord’s identity was revealed to Peter. Catholic theology recognizes that while it is possible, through natural means, to recognize the existence of God, it is only through revelation that we are able to know His identity – One God in Three Persons. As the Catechism (§237) teaches us:

his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

Our Lord then goes on to say:

… you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church

We often believe that Our Lord was referring to Peter as the rock on which He will build His church, and this would not be an error in understanding. However, it would also be appropriate to recognize that “this rock” that Our Lord refers to is not Peter per se, but the confession of Peter. It is on this confession of the identity of Our Lord that the Church is built. The Church is Our Lord’s and it is the union of those who confess His divinity.

It is this confession that is the key to heaven. In other words, those who do not recognize Our Lord as the Christ, the Son of God the Father, who came down from heaven, died for our sins, was resurrected, then ascended into heaven, is seated at the right of the Father and will come, at the end of time, to judge the living and the dead, do not have the capacity to enter heaven.

One final word; the word confession is also the name given to the tomb of the apostle – we have the confessio of St. Peter, in the famous basilica in Rome which holds his remains, the confessio of St. Paul also in the same city. This name of the structure offers us a powerful lesson, that it was not just with his tongue that St. Peter confessed the divinity of Our Lord. He confessed this truth with his body, even unto a painful death. He confessed that Our Lord is the “Christ, the Son of the living God” with his entire body and through the rest of his life. In other words, he embodied his confession. It was not just cheap words, but he incarnated those words, that confession, in his own flesh.

It was because St. Peter, and all the other apostles, believed in this confession that they were able to give up their lives for Our Lord. They knew that the life we look forward to is not life in our material bodies on this compromised earth, but life in our immortal and glorified bodies in the heavenly Jerusalem. There is no other way that these men would have been able to suffer deprivation, and torture, in addition to painful martyrdom, if they did not participate in this confession of Peter.

And so, my dear brothers let us build our own faith, on the rock-like faith of Peter and repeat his words (Jn 6: 68-69):

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,

and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end; Amen.

(A version of this homily was first preached at the Children’s Mass at the parish church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Caranzalem, on 23 Aug 2026.)

(Image reference: Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter (detail), Bernardo Castello, 1598, The Louvre.)