Drinking of the Chalice: Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

in my flesh I am filling up
what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ
on behalf of his body, which is the church

These words from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians are part of the lectionary for this sixteenth Sunday in ordinary time and it gives me great joy to reflect on these words that over the past year have carved a special place in my heart.

The fear of, and the flight from, pain is one of those basic emotions that unites all humanity. No one wishes to suffer pain. And much philosophical questioning has engaged with the question of pain. If there is a God, and this God is love, then why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Even if, pain is a result of sin, why is it that the innocent suffer? Should not a caring and loving God spare and protect the innocent from pain?

Catholicism offers what I would like to call, an economy of pain, to help us understand the simultaneous existence of pain in the world and the presence of a merciful, loving God who actively intervenes in history.

In this understanding, all pain and suffering is the result of sin, caused by the sin of our first parents, and then subsequently all the generations that followed them. Even as we descended deeper and deeper into sin, God waited for the right moment until He could send His son, who through his passion, death and resurrection, did battle with the effects of sin. He resisted temptation, that is, he did not succumb to sin, and triumphed as a human being, making it possible for us to break the power of sin and reconcile ourselves with divinity. Henceforth, pain is not merely the domain of sin and the devil. On the contrary, pain can now be redemptive. Like Our Lord and Master who died on the cross for love of humanity, we too can offer up our suffering, uniting ourselves with His sacrifice on the cross, offering our pain as reparation for sin.

Some imagery that might help us contemplate this mystery. One of the challenges I face when contemplating the sorrowful mysteries is at the third: the crowing with thorns. How does one understand this mystery? A few days ago, when I encountered an image of Our Lady of Fatima, some part of this mystery fell into place.

Describing her vision of Our Lady in Fatima on June 13, 1917, Lucia, the visionary of Fatima, indicated that “In front of the palm of Our Lady’s right hand was a heart encircled by thorns, which pierced it.” With this information we can now make more sense of the Crown of Thorns.

Remember that the wounds that Our Lord suffered in the course of His passion persisted in His glorified and resurrected body. This allows us to see the Crown of Thorns, therefore, as more than some passing torture, but integral to His Passion and Resurrection. In this light, and that of the vision of Our Lady, we can see that the crown of thorns is the crown that Our Lord shares with those of us who, like His mother, willingly offer our sufferings to join those of His. In other words, Our Lord offers to us a crown of thorns, which, if we accept it, becomes for us the crown of martyrdom which we receive at the time of our judgment.

We are now potentially better able to understand the words of St. Paul. In the face of every trial and suffering we face, we have a choice. We can accept the pain, for love of Our Lord, assuming it as a part of His Passion which we would like to share in. We accept this crown of thorns, this cross, not merely for our own sakes, but for the sake of the entire Church which is the mystical body of Our Lord.

In Her apparition in Fatima on August 19 Our Lady instructed the little visionaries: “Pray, pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners; for many souls go to hell, because there are none to sacrifice themselves and pray for them.” If we make the words of St. Paul to the Colossians our own, we could well be one of those who prevent souls slipping into hell. May Our Lord grant us the grace to be so.

(This homily was prepared for a virtual audience in the hope that you will offer a prayer for the soul of my aunt Winifred Maria Menezes, who passed away on July 15, 2025.)

(Image reference: Saint Catherine Of Siena Receives The Crown Of Thorns, Alessandro Casolani via Fine Art America.)

To Know Him Is To Love Him: Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

This Sunday we are treated to the beautiful parable of the Good Samaritan. Too often, this parable is presented to urge love for our neighbour. And it is true, this is one of the messages. But to limit our understanding of the parable to just our relationship with our neighbour is to miss a crucial point and forget that the entire conversation between the lawyer and Our Lord takes place in the context of two commandments, the first being to love God!

Fr Rosario Oliveira, the Parish priest here at the Sé, has often pointed out that we cannot love God, if we do not know Him first. Similarly, we cannot love our neighbour properly, if we do not first love our God.

To love God, is to look for Him actively, and this is exactly what the Fathers of the Church did. They were Christological in their reading of the scriptures, i.e. looking for Our Lord, or a foreshadowing of Him, when they read the scriptures. And this is also what they did with the parable of the Good Samaritan, finding in this parable, not just the lesson to love our neighbours, but a relationship between Our Lord and ourselves.

Allow me, dear brothers and sister, to us address the parable one line at a time to see how this allegorical reading works.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.”

The Fathers read this line as a reference to Adam, our first father, who was expelled from the heavenly Jerusalem, with Jericho being the world in which we live. He:

“stumbled upon some robbers, who, after they had both stripped him and subjected him to a beating, went away and left him half-dead.”

Like Adam, we too are on the road to Jericho, and according to St. Ambrose, these robbers are the angels of night and darkness, who strip our souls of the clothes of spiritual grace that we have received. Remember that in baptism we receive a purified soul, a white garment that we are to present unstained to Our Lord on our death. If we preserve unstained the garments that we have put on, St. Ambrose teaches us, we cannot feel the robbers’ blows. Without this protective garment, however, these spirits can inflict wounds on our soul. Persistently wounded, we are left on this road, wounded and dying – because this is how our life, without the salvation that Christ provides, will end; condemnation to eternal death.

“a priest was going down [from Jerusalem] on that road; …. Likewise, a Levite, when he came upon that place and saw him, also passed by on the other side.”

According to the Fathers, the intention was not to critique priests and ritual. On the contrary, it points out that Our Lord can offer salvation, which the Law and the prophets could not.

The portion of the parable that comes next, is sublime:

“a Samaritan who was traveling on a trip came across him, and when he saw him he felt compassion for him.”

In the figure of the Samaritan, rejected and spurned by Jewish Orthodoxy, the Fathers recognized the figure of Our Lord. And they recognized Him by compassion He feels for the victim, i.e. humankind. Compassion, is what motivated Our Lord to come down from the heavenly Jerusalem to travel to Jericho to save us from eternal death.

He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them.

The bandages, oil and wine, are the sacraments that He offers to bind our wounded soul. Confession being the bandage, oil in the sacraments of baptism and confirmation and, wine which is transformed to His Most Precious Blood which sustains us on our journey.

Then he put him on his own mount, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him, and whatever you spend in addition, I, on my return journey, will repay you.’”

Origen, suggests that the mount on which the victim is placed, is in fact the body of Our Lord. And why not, since He has indeed offered His very body to carry us to heaven. The innkeeper is the Church, the provider of the sacramental care that Our Lord instituted, and the two denarii the Old and the New Testament, that guide us. And the final flourish, a reference that Our Lord will return, and repay the innkeeper for his troubles beyond what he has been paid for.

My dear brothers and sisters, the morale of this parable is that to love our neighbour is to have compassion for them, just as Our Lord had compassion for us. We can have this compassion, only if we bind ourselves to His own passion, which He shares with us through His Body and Blood. In other words, we can love our neighbour, only because we love Our Lord and imitate Him in his compassion for His neighbours, us. If we are faithful to our communion with Him, then we will be like the innkeeper, who will be repaid, on the Day of Judgement, on the return of the King.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the anticipated Sunday mass on 12 July 2025 at the Sé Catedral, Goa.)

(Image reference: Christ as the Good Samaritan, contemporary Russian icon.)

On Care for Our Common Home

On 8 June this year, the Dicastery for Divine Worship and theDiscipline of the Sacraments, the Vatican’s department that oversees the appropriate celebration of Catholic liturgy, issued the formula for a new votive Mass, the Mass for the Care of Creation. Those who had been following the pontificate of the late Pope Francis, will know that care for the environment was something close to his heart. He chose the name of a Saint, Francis (of Assisi), who has garnered fame universally, and not just among Catholics, for his love of the natural world – famously addressing the creations of God as brothers and sisters in his Canticle of Creatures. Pope Francis took his concern for the environment further in his second encyclical Laudato Si – another reference to St. Francis’ Canticle – which was subtitled “Care for our common home,” and raised a critique of consumerism and irresponsible economic development. In offering this critique, Pope Francis expanded the Catholic Church’s social teaching, offering Catholics concrete directions on how to lead their lives. Of course, Pope Francis was not the first Roman pontiff to do so, having been preceded by Pope Benedict XVI who similarly offered a critique of the modern developmental paradigm in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate. He was also known as the Green Pope for a variety of initiatives he encouraged toward expressing environmental care, including installing solar panels, promoting a ban on non-organic pesticides, and encouraging tree planting, all with a view to achieve carbon neutrality for Vatican City. His own predecessor, Pope Saint John Paul II was similarly aware of the connections between a degradation of the environment and our insistence on instant gratification and consumerism. As he pointed out in his message for the World Day of Peace on 1 January 1990, “the seriousness of the ecological issue lays bare the depth of man's moral crisis.”

And yet, despite these important steps, there is a need for a more critical look at the tiny details of our lifestyles. Take, for example, my experience in the Vatican City, on an Easter Sunday some years ago. Part of a choir that would sing at St. Peter’s Basilica before the morning mass on Easter Sunday, I was shuffling around in the portico of the Basilica, converted for the day into a sacristy of sorts, looking for water to quench my thirst – we had been up since very early in the morning. I spied a case of plastic water bottles and headed in their direction. Now, while I normally eschew drinking from plastic bottles, I was so crazed with thirst I was willing to let all my principles slide. Looking for someone who might be responsible for them, I asked a nearby service person if I could have one of those bottles. “No!” he responded, somewhat imperiously, “They are for the Holy Father!”

Now, I am sure that the Holy Father, after all his exhortations, was not going to drink from those very bottles; but this little episode said a lot about how much work needs to be done at the bottom of the pyramid if we are to take ecological responsibility and care for our common home seriously. It should also be said, that at least in Rome, one can safely drink from the tap, as well as the many public fountains where water flows freely and continuously, so that there is no need to carry or purchase the plastic water bottles that are the bane of contemporary existence.

Speaking of working at the bottom of the pyramid, there is much that can be done in parishes across Goa, at least at the level of formal worship. Directed by a misguided understanding of participation and creativity, most liturgical celebrations in our State unleash horrific amounts of single use decorations, which are invariably produced from very synthetic products that do not safely bio-degrade. One of the very succinct teachings of Pope Francis was his warnings, and indeed his condemnation, of the “throwaway culture” that treats people as if they were disposable. This disposable culture, where we treat human beings as if they were disposable, exists only because of the prior existence of a culture where precious resources are treated as if they were disposable – blindly throwing them away after a single use.

Traditional Catholic worship was not like this. Even until a few decades ago, bunting was carefully folded and stowed away until they could be used the following year. Altar decorations made of wood and silver or gold leaf, or silver repoussé would be brought out annually to lend dignity to the occasion. Things were even better before the age of plastics burst upon us, when decorations were made, not just of cloth, but of precious fabrics that were taken proper care of so that they could be used year, after year, after year, for decades.

A contemporary emphasis on creativity, has ensured that liturgical worship, rather than seeing quality products being used with spectacular effect, has become the staging ground for cheap, disposable products being used in a most banal manner. The producers are invariably congratulated for their mediocre productions and this only serves to entrench the illness further into our consciousness. Similarly, social celebrations are marked by distribution of trophies that owe their origins to silver cups distributed to winners but are now made of cheap plastic and tawdrier sensibilities. And then there is the gift giving, that marks every celebration, where we gift plastic objects that have no real value. And of course, it is recognized that they have no value, but are tolerated because they fulfill the requirements of the mindless social norms that we have set in place.

At the end of the day, it appears that we are faced with a choice between the solemn, the expensive and resuable, versus the discardable objects that are the products of a system that privileges spontaneity and creativity. The first is responsible, the second is responsible for a disregard for the creations of the creator.

“May the sacrament of unity

which we have received, O Father,

increase communion with you and with our brothers and sisters,

so that, as we await the new heavens and the new earth,

we may learn to live in harmony with all creatures.” – (Post communion prayer from the Mass for the Care of Creation.)

(A version of this text was first published in the O Heraldo on 9 July 2025.)

(Image reference: “St. Francis receiving the Stigmata,” Paolo Vernonese, ca. 1582, Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia.)