A Jesuit Adventure

  It was not easy to be a Roman Catholic in the early 16 th century in England after the Anglican Church broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics were persecuted by law and priests were imprisoned, tortured, and frequently executed. There were official ‘priest hunters’ whose job was to hunt down and capture Roman Catholic priests. To protect them the Catholics began hiding the priests in their houses and helping them escape. And therefore very soon a law was passed which made helping priests punishable by death. Yet, the laity continued to be faithful to their priests even at the risk of their own lives. One such person was St. Margaret Clitherow. Clitherow allowed secret masses to be celebrated in her home, where she also hid Roman Catholic missionary priests. She was imprisoned and executed. She was canonized in 1970 by Pope Paul VI as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. I present her life before you as it is closely linked ...

  One of the primary responsibilities of a priest or a deacon is to break the Word of God, and therefore when we prepare for a homily there is always a sense of anxiety about what the Gospel is going to be. You see it is relatively easy to preach about the love of God, forgiveness and the kingdom of God but when you get a passage about persecution it’s not that easy. And that’s because we all are afraid of dying and more so dying due to violence. Sometimes we believe that if we follow the will of God our life is going to be a bed of roses and there would be no difficulty. On the contrary, as we see in the readings, if we follow God’s will, we will have to face troubles, difficulties and persecution. In the 1 st reading taken from the prophet Jeremiah, we witness his struggle in trying to make sense of his mission. Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry is set at a short time before Judah was taken into exile by Babylon. Jeremiah warned Judah about this danger but the people criticised him. ...

My dear friends on this 11 th Sunday in Ordinary Time the readings highlight the link between being chosen by God and being sent as missionaries. The first reading taken from the book of Exodus presents before us a very beautiful imagery – an eagle carrying its young on its wings. After they escaped from Egypt the Israelites gradually made it to the wilderness of the mount of Sinai. Now this wilderness was a desert and there was little in the desert to sustain life. The Israelites were now completely dependent on Yahweh, who led the nation of Israel just as an eagle cares for its young one. We have at this juncture perhaps one of the most important events in the entire salvation history – the election of Israel and the forming of the conditional covenant. Yahweh through Moses tells the Israelites that they will be his segullah. Segullah was a kind of possession that was valuable and cherished. So when Yahweh called people His segullah He was saying that they were His richly adored, val...

  My dear friends today we celebrate the solemnity of The Body and Blood of Christ also known as Corpus Christi. This feast has its origin in the visions of Saint Juliana of Liège way back in the 11th century. Today’s feast of Corpus Christi is intended to make us value and appreciate the presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.  Recently when I was interacting with a group of youth, I asked them what they felt about the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Much to my surprise, though they believed in the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist it was a Symbolic Presence that they believed in and not the Real Presence. And this precisely is the teaching and belief of the Catholic Church – We believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.   So how does one understand the bread and wine which are completely natural things being transformed into the body and blood of Christ? To do this we need to know about two important concepts used in philosophy – Substan...