Year , Lectionary
“Begin to think that whatever you have is from Christ and for Christ. It was given to you so that you might serve his purposes.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Master Has Need of You”
“Turning away from God means turning away from the source of life...If you turn away from the source of life, life is going to dry up”
Bishop Robert Barron “Trusting God in Dire Straits”
“Connection to God leads to life. Connection to God is like having a garden of flourishing life. When we sever the connection with God what happens is drought, is lifelessness.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Trust In the Lord”
“The ultimate food is this contemplative personal intimacy with the Lord...a real personal intimate encounter”
Bishop Robert Barron “Remaining Attentive to the Lord”
“The best of things, the worst of things. The light and shadowy side of religion. Are they both on display in the prophet Elijah?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Best and Worst of Religion”
“since God needs nothing, God is always pleased by what brings us to deeper life. It's not as though Solomon's answer gives God something God needs. No, no. When God is pleased in the scripture it means we're coming in deeper life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Solomon’s Prayer”
“When we know that our own ego is nothing then God can become our everything”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Man After God’s Own Heart”
“conscience is indeed the voice of God. God summoning us to be a righteous person and God summoning us to right moral action and warning us off of wrong moral action.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Voice of Conscience”
“Even in the midst of a disaster God is about his work of salvation”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Raises Up His Prophets”
“Is God a distant aloof power? No, no. God is intimately, personally involved in the life of his church, in the formation of his people.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Call of Samuel”
“You want to know the will of God? You want to discern the will of God? Well, wake up. First step, wake up. Make sure you don't fall asleep to the spiritual dimension of life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Speak Lord, I’m Listening”
“How do we know what’s going on? How do we read the signs of the times? We could do so politically, sociologically, culturally, or economically. But the Bible insists that...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Reading the Signs of the Times”
“All the work of the Church finally depends upon the goodness and kindness of people just like this Shunemite woman and her husband”
Bishop Robert Barron “Elisha and the Shunemite Woman”
“Everybody, that's the conclusion of any journey of healing. Healing from physical trouble, spiritual trouble, psychological trouble. The goal, having passed through humility, opposition both outside and in, the goal is the right praise of the living God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Humility and the Healing Power of God”
“Friends, the goal of all spiritual transformation is right worship. All sin born of pride is a falling away from right worship. Therefore, the goal of any spiritual healing process is to learn again to worship.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lessons of Naaman”
“What the brothers stress over and over again to their persecutors is that they expect a life beyond this one...What gives the torturers and and oppressors in any age their power is the conviction that this life and the goods in it constitute the whole of reality”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Martyrs and a Higher World”
“throughout his epistles Paul doesn't say a word about Jesus' teaching. What he says over and over again is anastasis; resurrection. That's the message that frightened them in the ancient world. That's the message that turned everything upside down...That's the message that gives real hope to the oppressed.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lordship of Jesus”
“How do we know about Paul? Well, from the Act of the Apostles, yes, but also from his letters written to these little churches...in addressing these churches he addresses all of us down through the centuries this message of Paul has come...because of his great witness”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul the Apostle”
“Paul realized that the promises made to Israel had been fulfilled...If he was waiting for Moses, he got a greater than Moses. If he was waiting for David or Solomon, he got a greater than David or Solomon. He got a crucified and risen Lord.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Being in Christ”
“dynamics and form...what we see in this reading is that a way to understand the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church is precisely in the maintaining of this beautiful but precarious balance”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church”
“For what is the life, teaching, dying and rising of Jesus but an expression of love to the nth degree...That's why to live in him and to be given gifts is above all to be given the gift of love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul’s Basic Message”
“What cuts to the heart is this announcement that Jesus whom you crucified, God raised from the dead and has made both Lord and Christ. He's the center of your life. Everything about you, your mind, your will, your senses, your body, your private life, your public life, all of it belongs to him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How to Proclaim the Faith”
“every single sermon should be a call to repentance, to turn your life around...that the message of Jesus has been presented so clearly that people naturally see how they've fallen short and they want to change”
Bishop Robert Barron “Apostolic Preaching”
“To be baptized, that means to be dipped under the water and immersed in the dying of the Lord. It means to die unto your old self and now to be configured unto him. That's what baptism means. Furthermore, it means inclusion in the Church.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peter Proclaims Jesus is Lord”
“What draws people to the Church from the beginning to now? Simple answer. Those 3 great things. Do we worship God? Do we serve the poor? Do evangelize? We do those 3 things, trust me, the Lord is going to add numbers to the Church.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Tasks of the Church”
“Friends, in today’s first reading, St. Peter tells us that there is no salvation outside of Christ. In this homily, I encourage you to let the truth of St. Peter’s...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Getting St. Peter's Sermon Right”
“Our first reading for today proposes a very serious challenge to the inclusiveness and non-judgmentalism that is taken for granted in our culture today. The chief of the Apostles says,...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Getting St. Peter’s Sermon Right”
“we have to find the delicate balance to be bold, assertive, public, ambitious in our faith without ever being violent, manipulative or imposing. We have to resist when the worlds turns dark and demonic...but we can never do it in a way that undermines the gospel itself”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Relentlessly Public Religion”
“The church growing but with growth comes conflict. But look at how beautifully that conflict was resolved. By a very interesting, healthy play between the authority of the Twelve and the involvement of the community.”
Bishop Robert Barron “An Icon of the Church”
“I would like to focus my attention this week on the magnificent first reading, taken from the pivotal ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. I say pivotal because...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Four Spiritual Lessons from the Life of Paul”
“a prophet is someone who speaks the word of God publicly for the sake of others”
Bishop Robert Barron “Proclaiming Christ in the Culture”
“You're a child of God. Made by God, for God's purposes, destined to live with him in eternity...how often do you aver to that fact in the course of the week? How often do you explore your deepest religious identity?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Loss Of A Sabbath Consciousness”
“What's he talking about but the kingdom of the Church. Jesus himself is this figure, the Church is his mystical body.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Daniel and the New Kingdom”
“Am I someone who really seeks the good and really seeks to avoid what's evil? Now again, you might say 'oh, that's obvious.' It's not obvious, not at all.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Natural Law”
“The voice of God is in us. What is it? It's the voice of conscience. It's the keen awareness of the moral law. It's the voice of someone who's commanding us, urging us to be good”
Bishop Robert Barron “Hearing the Voice of God”
“if your life is not about you, maybe it is about God and that's what initiated people begin to understand”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lessons of Qoheleth”
“we affirm the good things of the world, we don't run from them, make fun of them. But...When we base our lives on them then we collapse and that's why we need Qoheleth to say, 'ultimately, in the grand scheme of things all these earthly goods and pleasures are nothing compared to God'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wisdom of Qoheleth”
“the point is find your role in the theo-drama, take up your position, whatever it is, and get into this great fight because...the battle with Amalek is far too important”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Integrated and Variegated Body of Christ”
“Never read the Bible in such a way that it gives warrant to the claim that God is violent. If you're reading it that way you're not reading it in terms of 'the Lamb standing as though slain.'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Hard Texts of the Old Testament”
“Friends, reread these texts in light of the Book of Revelation, in light of 'the Lamb standing as though slain' opens the seals and then in your own way, according to your own gifts, in your own state of life, enter into this great struggle against Amalek”
Bishop Robert Barron “Moses and Amalek”
“Basic point, Christians, you're never saved alone. We never engage in the spiritual struggle alone. At least we shouldn't.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Struggle With Amalek”
“Friends, I have often said that Lent is a bit like basic training for the military or summer workouts for a football team—it is a chance to get back to...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Back to the Fundamentals”
“What do we hear? Not only the moral recommendation, don't, dont oppress aliens, but something even, even deeper, more abiding. Mainly, this empathy with the suffering of others.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Law of Israel”
“You see, before you can deal properly with God you have to be purged of certain things in your own psyche, ego, soul. Certain things have to fall away before you're ready for an encounter with God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Can’t Grasp—or Hide From—God”
“As God gets closer to you, you become more luminous and more beautiful and more radiant”
Bishop Robert Barron “Who is God?”
“How does God relate to the world? Not competitively but in such a way as to enhance and bring to fullness the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Burning Bush”
“And keep that in mind as you're moving through your day and you're making moral choice after moral choice, you're affecting your world, you're also defining the person you are becoming”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Kind of Person Will You Be?”
“listening to one's own voice always amounts to playing it safe. Listening to God's voice, that's always an invitation to adventure.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Listening to a Higher Voice”
“What began with Abraham, this man of faith who cuts a covenant with the Lord, who establishes thereby friendship with God, what begins with him reaches its culminating point in Jesus, this new and everlasting covenant”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Father in Faith”
“when we acknowledge that goodness and value lie outside of ourselves in God and in the objective order that reflects God's mind, in that case we look outward. We tend to forget the self. However, when we're convinced that our own freedom is the source of value, our own wills, then we tend to turn inward, protectively and fearfully.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What is the Matter With Us?”
“Nothing here below, even those things and people that we love the most are the summum bonum, the highest good. And therefore whatever we love here below must be loved, as Augustine said, for the sake of God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ordering of Love and the Awful Story of Abraham and Isaac”
“When we let go of our lives and we give them to God, offering them for God's purposes, our lives become richer, more joyful, more abundant”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Terrible Aqedah”
“The pious person knows what is owed to God and enters with enthusiasm into the act of worship”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit”
“this gift of fear of the Lord is a deep conviction in us, that we must not lose our connection to God because friendship with God is what matters above all things and so, yes, I'm afraid of losing that and I'm afraid if I engage in some activity or some way of life that compromises that”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit”
“The worship of God is the only true ground for peace”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mountain of the Lord”
“Happiness consists in nothing other than right praise. Worship of the true God. When we give glory to God in the highest, we rightly order all of our other desires.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God’s Holy Mountain”
“What is the mark of sin? That we don't see our connectedness and therefore that we live in violence.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lord’s Holy Mountain”
“When all of us together are looking away from ourselves and our own interests, and together are looking to God, what breaks out among us but peace”
Bishop Robert Barron “Isaiah and God’s Holy Mountain”
“The creator of the universe loves and cherishes all people and all things”
Bishop Robert Barron “Between Indifferentism and Tribalism”
“What's the purpose of the Church which is both the New Israel and the mystical body of Jesus? It's not to glory in itself. Not to exult in its own separateness but rather the Church, the body of Jesus, is meant to become the vehicle by which the whole world is gathered unto God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “It Is Too Little for You to Be My Servant”
“God gave his whole heart to his people but his people have not responded”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lord's Vineyard”
“Let that divine Word in all of its manifestations, through creation, yes, through the prophets of Israel, in Jesus and his Eucharist, let that prophetic Word invade you. Trust me, it will change you.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Word That Accomplishes Its Purpose”
“How come we suffer? You know, it's not a cop-out, it's just the truth to say 'Typically, I don't know.'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Strangeness of God”
“Why were you baptized? That you might become a missionary your whole life long. That you specially chosen might become the vehicle by which God would draw more and more people to himself.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Israel Is Chosen for the World”
“Precisely as divine, Jesus is the one now who can open the way to bring the God of Israel to all the nations”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jacob Neusner, Benedict XVI, and the Vocation of Israel”
“God hates our false worship but not because he's, he's hung up and he has emotional needs...He hates it because we are less alive when we do that.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Salt and Empty Earth”
“When you're rooted in God you're in the place of life, listen, even when life becomes unbearable, even when life becomes terrible, even when you fail, you're rooted in that source of life which is God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Where Do You Put Your Faith”
“What happened to Jeremiah, well you know what, it happens really to all the prophets up to today, including you when you speak the word of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Carrying the Word of God”
“So there you are, everybody, read this section chapter 20 of Jeremiah and it's like all the, all the texture of being a prophet is on display, all the emotion and experience of being a prophet. Profit from his experience and become yourself a great prophet.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Fire in the Heart”
“Once we've heard the word of God, we cannot unhear it. Right? Once you've heard it, you can't unhear it. You can't unring the bell. You can't pretend that you don't know it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jeremiah and the Word of God”
“Friends, one of the most fundamental beliefs of the Biblical Israelites is that God is a covenant-maker. He formed his people through a series of agreements and contracts saying, “I...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Writing the Law Upon Our Hearts”
“Jeremiah 31:31 contains the great prophecy that the Lord will one day place his law within our hearts. In the Old Testament, God’s law was written on stone and often...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Planting the Law Within Us”
“God’s ways will always be confounding to us and that shouldn’t surprise us”
Bishop Robert Barron “Why is Life So Full of Suffering?”
“When I resist what God wants me to do, what God wants me to be, that's trouble for me and for people that I am supposed to bring closer to God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Accepting Our Mission From God”
“Sometimes the worst experiences of life are taking you where God wants you to be”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Spiritual Drama of Jonah”
“God's call is always difficult. My life on my terms that tends to be relatively easy”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Reluctant Prophet”
“it's a time for honesty, it's time for spiritual truth here. Whom do you serve? Who or what is the center of gravity? And if it's not the Lord, we got a problem.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Gotta Serve Somebody”
“It's a paradox that people will often miss, I think. Identity for the sake of mission. Separation, if you want, but for the sake of connection.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Wall and Bridges”
“When the walls of the Church become too porous, when they're compromised, the Church can lose its identity, it can forget who it is”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Paradox of Walls”
“if we are to have this transformative influence on the world, we must know who we are. If we are to change the world, we must have a strong identity and purpose.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lessons of Nehemiah”
“So in light of this beautiful reading could I invite everybody listening to me now, when you go off to work, whatever that is...think of this now as collaborating with the purposes of God. See it as a spiritual act, a moral act, an act that brings you into union with the purpose of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Spirituality of Work”
“The saint is someone who through freedom integrates God's demands into his life so deeply that they become his own. They become second nature to him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Choosing to Keep the Commandments”
“Without gainsaying grace for a second...but see, we have to choose our way because heaven is a life of love and love is always a choice.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Choosing the Way of Love”
“God is about something, our task is to surrender to the divine will”
Bishop Robert Barron “How Strange Is the Power of God”
“Old Zechariah a long time ago makes this strange prediction. Didn't come true in his lifetime, didn't come true for 500 years and finally fulfilled in Christ the King whose reign now is meant to extend through us the Church to the ends of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Zechariah and the New David”
“thereby showing as fully and radically as possible how odd this story is, how odd these texts are, how counter-cultural, how unlike the assumptions of the world. And Christians, it's in that oddness of love, compassion, peace, nonviolence that we find our way.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Zechariah’s Strange Prophecy”
“we are being asked to make a decision. Is he right or is he crazy? And if he's right then I must change my life radically and become in every sense a disciple of this Jesus. The one thing I cannot be is indifferent in regard to this message.”
Bishop Robert Barron “He Is Risen!”
“what's that wonderful tensive place of balance where we find the love that the Holy Spirit is? That's what we ought to be focused upon and shooting for.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Unity in Diversity Actually Means”
“What sin has scattered the Holy Spirit, the Holy Breathe, the Holy Speech, precisely through the ministry of the Church is meant to gather”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pentecost and the Gift of Language”
“we acknowledge Christ now as ruler, Lord, governor, shepherd of the whole word and that risen and ascended Christ having sent his Holy Spirit into us his church now begins to reign. That, friends, is the power of this great feast Pentecost”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pentecost and Sinai”
“The Holy Spirit, which is a spirit of love, unites the people but without suppressing their individuality, without suppressing what makes them unique.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pentecost and the Tower of Babel”
“when you let the wind and the flame of the Holy Spirit in your life, you have a gift in you and the idea now is to share that with all you got for the upbuilding of the body of Christ. That's the Spirit alive in you.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Come, Holy Spirit”
“Why is the Holy Spirit compared to wind? Think of it as the inrushing of the divine life to establish or re-establish an equilibrium in the soul”
Bishop Robert Barron “Rushing Wind”
“There is no one present who is another me or another you and yet here we all are, perfectly diverse and deeply loved as God's own”
Danni Clark “The Ascension of the Lord”
“With the spirit of Jesus in them, they will start to bring heaven to earth and earth to heaven. They will become agents of this reconciliation.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Meeting of Heaven and Earth”
“This holiness, this set-apartness he's talking about it means precisely a union with Christ...to be set apart from the world in such a way that now you live in Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Knowing Who We Are”
“You're called to think differently, to act differently, to move differently, to react differently. Why now, why, why? Because you're called to think, act, move and react according to love. See, that's what Christ is, that's who God is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul’s Opening Words to the Corinthians”
“The Eucharist is the moment now, now in the middle of things, we purposely bring the energy of both beginning and end to now that we might have the courage, energy, the conviction to make our way through this present moment. That's why we celebrate the Corpus Christ”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus Yesterday, Today, and Forever!”
“This week we hear from St. Paul’s brilliant meditation on love. Everything in religion and theology revolves around love. It is at the heart of everything. Nothing matters without love,...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Primacy of Love”
“In the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul sings a hymn to love. He tells us that love is patient, gentle, kind, not snobbish and...”
Bishop Robert Barron “What is Love?”
“Our second reading for Mass this weekend is one of the most beautiful and oft-quoted in the Biblical tradition: Paul’s hymn to love in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians....”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Strange Path of Love”
“We Christians are those who live now under his lordship, not under the lordship of sin”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Revolution of the Resurrection”
“the divine love is bottomless, it's infinite, it's inexhaustible. That's why tapping into it is, is, it unleashes something that can change the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Suffering for Doing Good”
“What if you woke up in the morning and said 'my task today above all is to bring God to people?' Not primarily to be personally successful, not primarily to be chipper and happy, not primarily to do this or that, my job today and everyday is to bring God to people.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Royal Priesthood”
“Be bold in your speech, fellow believers, be smart, theologically informed. Always be ready to give a reason for the hope that's in you but always do it with love. Desiring to win a soul, not an argument.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Give a Reason for the Hope That Is in You”
“they don’t want to draw our attention primarily to these extraordinary moments, as great as they are, they’re much more interested in drawing attention to weakness”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Thorn in the Flesh: Why We Suffer”
“when you name that ‘thorn in the flesh’ in your life...maybe realize this principle...that our power might be reaching in perfection precisely in and because of this ‘thorn in the flesh’”
Bishop Robert Barron “Perseverance Produces Character”
“When you do authentic work of any kind, you are participating in God's ongoing creation and providence”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Theology of Work”
“and the spirit God has given us is no cowardly spirit. But when we draw on it in love, nonviolence, forgiveness, compassion we can bring down the greatest powers of the world. No cowardly spirit but the spirit of the Living God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “No Cowardly Spirit”
“Does Jesus have lordship over every room in your house?...Jesus the Lord, which is an implication of his resurrection from the dead, must dominate your life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul on the Meaning of “Gospel””
“boy, did Paul know the power of the gospel he preached. May we know it now 2,000 years later and may we with that same courage and joyfulness and panache proclaim it to our world”
Bishop Robert Barron “There is No Chaining the Word of God!”
“trust me, everybody, when I tell you the spiritual life is always a fight. Not sometimes, not usually. Always a fight. Why? Because you're walking the path of Christ and that is always a path that stands athwart the path of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Finish the Race”
“Friends, sometimes as we compete, pouring out our lives, running the race, we can feel pretty alone. Sometimes we receive little or no support from our fellow human beings. But God stands by us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul at the End of the Race”
“Have you kept the faith? Have you kept your eyes fixed on Jesus Christ? Have you grown in your trust and love of him?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul’s Farewell Discourse”
“just as one system of the body can sometimes take up the work of another if that system is suffering or one organ can bear the burden of another which is ailing, so one member of the body of Christ can perhaps bear the burden of another”
Bishop Robert Barron “Paul’s Suffering”
“What Paul is saying is everything in nature, history, science, our lives, is summed up in Christ. When that sinks in, everything changes.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Summed Up in Christ”
“Friends, the most important element in the Great Story is the central character and the central character is God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Five Act Drama”
“I’m delighted that on this Pentecost Sunday, I can reflect on one of my favorite passages in the New Testament. It is taken from the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Walking According to the Spirit”
“St. Paul illuminates what it means to live in the Holy Spirit, acting and living out of love, and what it means to live outside of it, acting and living...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Living the Flesh, Living the Spirit”
“The clearest sign that you are living in the Holy Spirit is that you are a person of love. Why? Well, it's very clear, it's very simple. That's what the Spirit is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Fruits of the Spirit”
“The risen Jesus is this mystical body in which we are called, in Paul's language, to participate. Often in his letters he compares Christ to a living organism. He invites his readers and listeners not just to listen to him, not just to follow him, but to live in him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Boasting in the Cross”
“People of faith...They're people who listen to the Word of God and are willing to follow that Word, yes ,even into the darkness on a great adventure.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Is Faith?”
“the Bible tells the story of God's own hero's journey. God's willingness to let go of his own godliness. To empty himself in order to find us who have wandered into what Augustine called 'the land of unlikeness'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Hero’s Journey”
“Faith, listen now, properly understood is neither credulity nor intellectual naiveté”
Bishop Robert Barron “Trusting the Darkness”
“the line between faith and reason is not nearly as sharp as the avatars of the Enlightenment would have it...there is a mixing of faith and reason”
Bishop Robert Barron “Walking the Path of Faith”
“What is faith throughout our lives but a kind of preparation for, or better, a kind of practicing for the great leap we will take into the darkness of death”
Bishop Robert Barron “An Adventurous God, A Life of Risk”
“go back to the Letter to the Hebrews and realize how it's teaching us that the Mass is the pivot around which all of history turns”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Hopeful Vision of Mass”
“Can't we see readily enough that God would sometimes engage, or allow things to happen, or actively impose punishment so as to bring us back on line?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Does God Punish Us?”
“When God punishes, it is done as a discipline out of love”
Bishop Robert Barron “Training in the Divine School”
“what he means is the old sacrificial system is now obsolete because the new temple has arrived which is his own person”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ the High Priest”
“God's not in competition with us. He, he wants us now through our works of love to grow in salvation, in spiritual healing.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith Without Works Is Dead”
“Faith indeed is the prerequisite, it's the, it's the opening of the door but love is what it means to live in the house”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith Perfected by Love”
“For us sinners the game is always filling up, right? 'I got this empty, you know, cage that I got to fill up with the goods of the world.' That's why I'm not happy...but the weird truth of the very heart of our faith is that God is not about filling up but emptying out.”
Bishop Robert Barron “In the Form of God”
“Humiliation in the extreme, that's how low the Son of God went, friends, in order to find us. There's Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Let Go Rather than Grasp”
“It's not taking that matters, it's giving away”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus the Slave”
“everyone who comes into the world comes into the world for God's purposes, to find his or her vocation and destiny in Christ”
Bishop Robert Barron “May That Same Mind Be in You that Was in Christ Jesus”
“We want to be set right with God, we want our lives to be in order. And how do most of us do it? We do it through this clinging to our resume, to what we've accomplished...and Paul is able to throw all that off in a great liberating move”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Conversion of Saint Paul”
“Listen, that most of us spend most of our time fussing about, bragging about, defending and trying to achieve, Paul knew that all of that was lost compared to Jesus”
Bishop Robert Barron “All Is Loss”
“the world can give you a superficial happiness from time to time but only God can give you shalom, this deep peace”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Peace that the World Can’t Give”
“Jesus represents in the wheel of fortune, listen now, that place of contact with God. Being grounded in the eternity of God which indeed is the same yesterday, today and forever. Which indeed doesn't change even as my fortunes change.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Have You Found Joy?”
“One of the ways we can cultivate peace, finding this new center, is to bathe ourselves as it were in those things that are redolent of God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peace Beyond Understanding”
“The whole book of Revelation, friends, is going to unfold as a meditation upon the power and meaning of the resurrection”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Unveiling of a New World”
“The unveiling in question, the apokalypsis, has to do with Jesus and his resurrection from the dead”
Bishop Robert Barron “Apokalypsis”
“God has done his great work. So now, let's join forces with him as the new Heaven and new Earth are coming into being.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Rescued from the Depths”
“Jesus in his life, death and resurrection gathers all of the strands of God's rescue operation into one because in him, who's God's final and definitive rescue operation, the good order of creation is restored”
Bishop Robert Barron “The New Jerusalem”
“The Biblical God wants to share his life with us in the most intimate way possible. The divine life in us, the life of the Trinity in us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “New Heavens, New Earth”
“God has done his great work so now lets join forces with him as the new heaven and new earth are coming into being”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Heavenly City”
“There is no Temple in the heavenly city for the city itself in its entirety has become a temple, a place of right praise...and with that the Bible comes effectively to a close, for now we see what God, in Christ, has intended from all eternity to bring about.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Great Story Comes to an End”
“What God has wanted from the beginning is to shine the light of his love into every corner of life...The problem is that we put the divine life at best under a bushel of basket”
Bishop Robert Barron “No Temple in the New Jerusalem”
“I wonder at times if, if we baptized have any real appreciation of the privilege we have in being members of the Church”
Bishop Robert Barron “Come, Lord Jesus!”
“The Bible begins and ends with right praise”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Spirit and the Bride Say, “Come””
“a very legitimate way to characterize all sin is bad praise. Human beings begin to worship not God, watch how Adam and Eve stop listening to God, they stop following God's commandments, and we worship something less than God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Heavenly Praise”
“though it looks as though that worldly power holds sway, real power belongs to the army of those who have chosen to follow the crucified and risen Savior”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Imperialism of the Martyrs”
“His will belongs entirely to Christ. He lives according to Christ's desires and not his own.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Slave of Christ”
“We're relating to an infinite indefinable person who loves us, therefore, in him we place our trust”
Bishop Robert Barron “When God’s Ways Are Confusing”
“When dealing with God, first of all we are dealing with a person. And persons are always mysterious no matter how well we know them...Of course God's ways and judgments are going to be inscrutable to us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Inscrutable God”
“We're dealing with God himself and so we accept in faith that he is a god of love even when we can't begin to understand in detail precisely what he's up to and why. Inscrutable? Yes. Faithful? Yes. To live in that space is to live where the Bible wants us to be.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Inscrutable and Faithful”
“think of the moral life liturgically. Liturgically it's an offering of yourself to God and you want that offering to be as pure and perfect as possible.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Offer Your Bodies as a Living Sacrifice”
“It's only when I, through faith, open the door to Christ and allow him to begin living in me that I begin to live according to his mind...I begin to will with his will. I begin to move and act and react according to him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Are We Saved by Faith Alone?”
“Finding your own way isn't the point, defining yourself any way you want. That's not the point. Rather it's finding the treasure buried in the field. Discovering the way that God wants to define you.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Are Not Your Own”
“Jesus was in his own person the prophetic Word. He's not one more prophet speaking God's Word. He is God's Word made flesh. Jesus in his person was right praise. He was the temple.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Old Adam, New Adam”
“The saints are those who have conquered with Christ this great fear of death so they could live in forgiveness, in love, in compassion, in a simple enjoyment of the things of the world. Having let go of them they can now walk in newness of life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “No Fear of Death”
“God has given us the great solution to the problem. Don't rely on your own powers, don't rely on your own accomplishments but rather Jesus Christ has been given to us and the more we put our faith and trust and confidence in him we will be saved.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All Things Work Together for Good”
“Look how Paul describes for us everything in this world...and how he is telling us that Jesus Christ risen from the dead is greather than any of them”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Loop of Grace”
“The Eucharist is the moment now, now in the middle of things, we purposely bring the energy of both beginning and end to now that we might have the courage, energy, the conviction to make our way through this present moment. That's why we celebrate the Corpus Christ”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus Yesterday, Today, and Forever!”
“What's the purpose of Christian life? It's to find ourselves, sinners who have wandered far away from God, to find ourselves once again brought back to the right praise of the Father. How do we do that? By making Jesus our Lord.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All the Way Down”
“What's the purpose of Christian life? It's to find ourselves, sinners who have wandered far away from God, to find ourselves once again brought back to the right praise of the Father. How do we do that? By making Jesus our Lord.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All the Way Down”
“First of all, the Spirit strengthens us in our relationship to Jesus. Secondly, in our capacity to defend the faith. And thirdly, in our capacity to spread the faith. Those three strengthening come from the Holy Spirit and that's been true from the ancient church to the present day”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Holy Spirit and Mission”
“Christianity is a stubbornly historical religion. It’s not a philosophy, not a set of ideas, not an ethical system, and not a mythology.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Myth and History”
“What's the purpose of Christian life? It's to find ourselves, sinners who have wandered far away from God, to find ourselves once again brought back to the right praise of the Father. How do we do that? By making Jesus our Lord.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All the Way Down”
“John was assuming that the goodness, the blessing that was going to come down on Jesus was coming from his own goodness. And it wasn't because goodness doesn't come from us, it comes from God.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Giving out Blessings... Have at it!”
“Into this dreary situation John the Baptist asks us to notice that the Lamb of God is among us, that the Spirit of God dwells within you and that the Creator has worked to reconcile all the world”
Dianne Rayson “Second Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“So there were sacrifices of reparation for sin, yeah. Sometimes, though, simply sacrifices of communion or thanksgiving. But in any case something was returned to God as a sign of one's desire for union.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Behold the Lamb of God”
“That's what this reading is about. It's telling us who Jesus is in his deepest identity. “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The simple, humble servant who out of love has born a way from us that which most bedevils us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Disquieting Humility of God”
“While working in pastoral ministry for many years I was privileged to be invited into many homes that covered a huge range of styles and sizes, of varied decor and treasured photos and items. Some seemed cold and sterile, others exuded warmth and welcome. It gradually dawned on me that in each of them Jesus lived.”
Anne Dowling “Second Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Imagine the Lord is right in front of you and he turns and he says 'what do you want? What are you looking for?' Extraordinary isn't it? What would you say?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Staying With the Lord”
“Did not Jesus bring abundant life to the man born blind right then and there...Did Jesus say 'hang tight, power through and you'll get the good stuff later'? Or did he heal and love and forgive and rejoice right then and there? Abundant life is not an end-of-life promise. It's right now.”
Radhika Sukumar-White “Abundant Life Now”
“The scent that would linger afterwards, after an encounter with Christ is going to be some mix of gratitude and peacefulness that leads us towards us simply being humble and grateful for where we are in life and how things are going”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “We already know the Good Shepherd”
“the disturbing message of the Bible is that God has a voice. Now I don't mean he has vocal chords. What I mean is, that the true God communicates with us personally, directly, powerfully and with moral purpose.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Shepherd’s Voice”
“So Jesus, thank God, we have the Good Shepherd out in front of us, among us, behind us too”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Qualities of a Good Shepherd”
“perhaps we can consider a new metaphor in these lands, one that emulates the love, the care and the vulnerability, the message at the heart of the Good Shepherd story”
Naomi Wolfe “Fourth Sunday of Easter”
“Having and hearing a voice is a foundation for the two-way street of hospitality and relationship”
Gabrielle Sinclair “Fourth Sunday of Easter”
“sheep didn't respond to voices not belonging to the shepherd...they were able to distinguish it. So must we, amidst the cacophony of voices around us”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Good Shepherd”
“the invitation in the gospel is to gently welcome the presence of Christ into your life wherever it is that you most need him because that's exactly where he comes to meet you”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Martha's Redemption”
“The Easter story teaches us that we do not need to fear death. Death is not the most powerful force in our universe. Life is.”
Rachel Kronberger “Fifth Sunday of Lent”
“I don't care where you are, I don't care how far you've fallen, I don't care how dead you are. The voice of Jesus can call you back to life, can pull you out of the tomb.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Let Him Go”
“If we believe deep down that death does not have the final say then the nature of our fear would be transformed”
Bishop Robert Barron “Treating Death as a Trifle”
“You see what's being signaled here, friends, God's Word incarnate in Jesus Christ is more powerful than death. That is the incredibly liberating, uplifting word we're meant to hear in this great gospel.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Lazarus and the Power of Death”
“It is clear that the author of John believes that Jesus is alive and Jesus can change your life, turn it upside down in fact.”
Alison Ryan “Fifth Sunday of Lent”
“A God of love does not want the Gospel used to ruin lives”
Andrea Dean “Serving and Dying”
“Agape, love as Jesus commands it, is breaking free of the black hole of one's own egotism, right fellow sinners, that draws the whole world into me and my preoccupations”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Love That Jesus Commands”
“Am I living a life that reflects Christ's radical love for me? And am I radically loving others, living my life in a way that reflects the light and life of God so that others may see that I am a disciple?”
Erin Gillard “Our call to radical love”
“Jesus is our promised land. In him we find our true home, our dwelling now and in the eternal life to come. And the home Jesus invites us to move into is a home that is characterized by his perfect peace.”
Tania Watson “Fifth Sunday of Easter”
“Jesus never tried to escape his humanity, so when he says 'I am the way' he means that we are to live as he has lived. He has done, he has walked the walk and talked the talk, and he wants us to follow behind him.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Jesus is The Way, The Truth, and the Life”
“The whole point of his divinity is that we can now revel in the fact that he wants what's best for us. Here's the bottom line, the more we affirm the divinity of Jesus the more loving and inclusive and accepting we become of others.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Paradox at the Heart of Christianity”
“Do we have enemies? Sure we do. But what divides us is always less foundational than what unites us. What if you were to live out of that consciousness consistently?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Co-Inherence of the Mystical Body”
“Heaven is difficult to talk about for obvious reasons. We have no immediate frame of reference. Whatever we say about heaven is always symbolic, anthological, poetic sort of talk but at the same time heaven is everything. It's what it's all about.”
Bishop Robert Barron “In My Father’s House”
“God breathes the Spirit into you and you breathe out the gifts of the Spirit. God breathes the Spirit into you and you are recreated. You breathe the Spirit out to recreate life in your relationships and with Earth. Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into you and you breathe out, sent by Jesus, peace, forgiveness and love.”
Sue Martin “Sixth Sunday of Easter”
“When we make room in our hearts and minds and souls for the Word then we will find ourselves being dwelt in. We will find that the Spirit has set up home in us and we will find that God is indeed closer to us than our own breath.”
Rev. Susan Lodge-Calvert “Sixth Sunday of Easter”
“If Jesus is the true vine and we’re the branches, we’re not just joined but we’re made of the same stuff”
Roberta Hamilton “The vine grower and the vine”
“Friends, in our Gospel passage today, Jesus proclaims that he is the vine and we are the branches. There is give and take in this divine relationship. Not only are...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Becoming a Friend, Healer, and Teacher”
““I am the Vine, and you are the branches.” Jesus is not simply an inspiring teacher to whom we listen. He is a force in which we participate, a body...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Vine and the Branches”
“Another homily from Fr. Robert Barron and Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The True Vine”
“Our actions, our choice to act in a loving way shows us and others who we are. Moreover, our loving actions are witness to our faith in the God of love.”
Danielle Lynch “What is love Anyway?”
“Today’s Gospel presents the distinction between a generic spirituality, which emphasizes our decision for God, and authentic Christian faith, which is the recognition that God has chosen us in Christ....”
Bishop Robert Barron “God’s Marvelous Choice”
“all that I believe that God asks of us at any given moment is a surrender to his mercy so that we can become vessels and people who go out in his name and share his love with others”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Surrender to Mercy”
“How do we interpret that Word? Well, theologians and saints and scholars can give you insights, to be sure, but the best and finally sole reliable interpreter would be the author himself...the Holy Spirit operating in this interpretive manner up and down the centuries of the Church's life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Has Spoken”
“You might have the charism of evangelization but you might be carrying it out in your own family, among your own circle of friends, at your place of work”
Bishop Robert Barron “Life in the Spirit: Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, Pastors”
“Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus makes extraordinary observations about discipleship. He speaks about being enraptured by God, having exuberant joy, accepting scorn from persecutors, and being consecrated into truth.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life”
“Which kingdom are you in? The one that brought him to the cross or the one that he embodies on the cross?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Which Kingdom Are You In?”
“Jesus reminds us throughout his life that the kingdom of God is not an aspirational goal to be longed for without hope but a present reality into which we must learn to live”
Sarah Plowman “Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe”
“We all need to be on the side of truth. Truth and truth-telling will set us free.”
Di Langham “Feast of Christ the King”
“Through the cross and resurrection Jesus in fact defeated Pilate. The new king outmaneuvered the violence of sin, swallowing it up in the divine forgiveness.”
Bishop Robert Barron “There’s a New King in Town”
“Every politician, king, prime minister, president, congress person, must realize that finally their power comes from God and is correlated to God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pilate and Jesus”
“Christ is the king and, therefore, this nation like every other nation across space and time comes under the judgment of a higher authority”
Bishop Robert Barron “Feast of Christ the King”
“I am reminded that God is here already in our homes and in our streets. Whatever might happen, we don't face it alone.”
Christine Redwood “A Joyous Sign”
“The Wedding Feast of Cana is meant to anticipate, to mirror and parallel the story of Calvary. Now, why, why? Because on the cross Jesus transforms water into wine.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wedding of Heaven and Earth”
“The Church is now the body of Christ in the world today...God works through the Church but the Church does not control access to God”
Anne Frawley-Mangan “3rd Sunday of Lent”
“There is the divine dimension of the Church which remains immaculate, flawless. But the Church is at the same time a human institution, the Church is at the same time, therefore, always tainted by the sins of human beings.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Zeal for Your House Consumes Me”
“here we are the week after Easter and so many years after that greeting of peace, longing for shalom”
Tanya Wittwer “Second Sunday of Easter - Divine Mercy Sunday”
“The risen Christ is more powerful than our fear, more powerful than anything that frightens us. That's the good news of Easter, the good news of Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Agents of Divine Mercy”
“'Peace with you' is not just about fear any more than it's just about the absence of war, it's a greeting of hope for wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety.”
Gail Gill and Tanya Wittwer “Second Sunday of Easter”
“I encourage you going forward, seek out Thomases. Bring to them the joy of how you have been brought to new life by Christ.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “What Thomas Sought”
“And when Jesus said three times “peace be with you” these words were the reality of the life lived in Christ. That the pain of loss and death is real but the comfort, hope and love for life beyond death can only be our reality in serving, living and believing in the life, death and resurrected Jesus”
Juliette Maua’i “Will you come to believe in Jesus in the face of death?”
“the one thing that finally matters is: have we breathed forth the divine spirit into the world?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Life in the Church”
“In this reading we realize how important it is that each one of us comes to the light in our own way and time”
Melinda Jolly “Transformative Faith Experiences”
“Why the showing of the wounds?...Because the peace that Jesus gives is not around death but rather through it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystical Union of Christ and His Church”
“We're sinners, yes, but much more importantly we are forgiven sinners”
Bishop Robert Barron “My Lord and My God”
“The wounds of Jesus are shown for a very simple but very important reason. He wants his disciples and us to know what sin has done.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mission of Easter”
“If you say 'I will accept, in a skeptical way, only those things that I can immediately verify...things that I can touch and see and measure,' you will have control over a very tiny portion of reality”
Bishop Robert Barron “Falling in Love With God”
“The resurrection is the emergence of God's redeeming and saving light in the midst of the darkness of sin”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peace Be With You”
“here we are the week after Easter and so many years after that greeting of peace, longing for shalom”
Tanya Wittwer “Second Sunday of Easter - Divine Mercy Sunday”
“The risen Christ is more powerful than our fear, more powerful than anything that frightens us. That's the good news of Easter, the good news of Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Agents of Divine Mercy”
“'Peace with you' is not just about fear any more than it's just about the absence of war, it's a greeting of hope for wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety.”
Gail Gill and Tanya Wittwer “Second Sunday of Easter”
“I encourage you going forward, seek out Thomases. Bring to them the joy of how you have been brought to new life by Christ.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “What Thomas Sought”
“And when Jesus said three times “peace be with you” these words were the reality of the life lived in Christ. That the pain of loss and death is real but the comfort, hope and love for life beyond death can only be our reality in serving, living and believing in the life, death and resurrected Jesus”
Juliette Maua’i “Will you come to believe in Jesus in the face of death?”
“the one thing that finally matters is: have we breathed forth the divine spirit into the world?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Life in the Church”
“In this reading we realize how important it is that each one of us comes to the light in our own way and time”
Melinda Jolly “Transformative Faith Experiences”
“Why the showing of the wounds?...Because the peace that Jesus gives is not around death but rather through it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystical Union of Christ and His Church”
“We're sinners, yes, but much more importantly we are forgiven sinners”
Bishop Robert Barron “My Lord and My God”
“The wounds of Jesus are shown for a very simple but very important reason. He wants his disciples and us to know what sin has done.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mission of Easter”
“If you say 'I will accept, in a skeptical way, only those things that I can immediately verify...things that I can touch and see and measure,' you will have control over a very tiny portion of reality”
Bishop Robert Barron “Falling in Love With God”
“The resurrection is the emergence of God's redeeming and saving light in the midst of the darkness of sin”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peace Be With You”
“here we are the week after Easter and so many years after that greeting of peace, longing for shalom”
Tanya Wittwer “Second Sunday of Easter - Divine Mercy Sunday”
“The risen Christ is more powerful than our fear, more powerful than anything that frightens us. That's the good news of Easter, the good news of Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Agents of Divine Mercy”
“'Peace with you' is not just about fear any more than it's just about the absence of war, it's a greeting of hope for wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety.”
Gail Gill and Tanya Wittwer “Second Sunday of Easter”
“I encourage you going forward, seek out Thomases. Bring to them the joy of how you have been brought to new life by Christ.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “What Thomas Sought”
“And when Jesus said three times “peace be with you” these words were the reality of the life lived in Christ. That the pain of loss and death is real but the comfort, hope and love for life beyond death can only be our reality in serving, living and believing in the life, death and resurrected Jesus”
Juliette Maua’i “Will you come to believe in Jesus in the face of death?”
“the one thing that finally matters is: have we breathed forth the divine spirit into the world?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Life in the Church”
“In this reading we realize how important it is that each one of us comes to the light in our own way and time”
Melinda Jolly “Transformative Faith Experiences”
“Why the showing of the wounds?...Because the peace that Jesus gives is not around death but rather through it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystical Union of Christ and His Church”
“We're sinners, yes, but much more importantly we are forgiven sinners”
Bishop Robert Barron “My Lord and My God”
“The wounds of Jesus are shown for a very simple but very important reason. He wants his disciples and us to know what sin has done.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mission of Easter”
“If you say 'I will accept, in a skeptical way, only those things that I can immediately verify...things that I can touch and see and measure,' you will have control over a very tiny portion of reality”
Bishop Robert Barron “Falling in Love With God”
“The resurrection is the emergence of God's redeeming and saving light in the midst of the darkness of sin”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peace Be With You”
“See, to walk the way of Jesus is to walk the way of 'washing of the feet.' It means embracing the cross of self-denial and love the other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Becoming a Disciple of Jesus”
“We show our love for God through feeding, providing, allowing ourselves to be instruments. We follow Jesus by being a conduit of his abundant love”
Beth Doherty “Third Sunday of Easter”
“So it always goes when the Church is operating on its own terms, according to its own likes, its own mind, our own efforts. We will catch nothing...The Church's task is to gather in the nations always under the direction of the Lord”
Bishop Robert Barron “Fishers of Men”
“Christianity is a relationship to a person. How wonderful that Jesus says...'do you love me?' Christians, that's the question we all hear. What is the quality of our relationship to him?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Structure of Discipleship”
“So what do these fish stand for? The universal quality of the Church's mission. Whom does Jesus intend to gather into his Church? Everybody. Every nation. There is no one that escapes his missionary outreach.”
Bishop Robert Barron “We’re All in the Same Boat”
“In the Old Testament the bridegroom is an image for God and the wedding symbolizes God's committed loving relationship to Israel. In John, Jesus will be the revealer of God and God's desire to be in relationship with all of us.”
Mary Coloe PBVM “Third Sunday of Lent”
“We have within us an enormous landscape and what God wants is for us to know that life is not like wilderness survival. Life is about an expansive experience of joy within him and trust in him.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Living in a Shelter of Shame”
“how do I allow myself to be found by the God who's always already looking for me?”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Master Class in Evangelization”
“How do we get our lives properly ordered? Well, we marry him. We listen to him. We drink from the living water he offers us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “One Who Is Greater Than Our Father Jacob”
“So at some point in this coming week when you feel a little bit overwhelmed, pause and ask God, ‘what can I give, what would you like me to give?’ You have a great riches, perhaps beyond what even you realize.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Not Shutting Down God”
“we can’t give God something he doesn’t already have but when we give to God what he doesn’t need he can return that gift, elevate it and transfigure for us”
Bishop Robert Barron “Where Heaven and Earth Meet”
“sometimes we must be like Jesus and ask questions of ourselves and our own communities. We must take into our heart the problems in front of us and ask of ourselves what solutions we might bring forth.”
Lana Hanley “Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“We’re all hungry for the bread of life, we’re all hungry for eternal life, nothing in this world can possibly satisfy the deepest longing of our heart. The only thing that can satisfy us is Christ himself.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What You Need To Know About the Catholic Mass”
“God always exceeds anything we say about God and constantly escapes our attempts to define, contain and grasp God. So too the reign of God.”
Teresa Brown “Scarcity and Abundance”
“The gathering at Mass, the very act by which we come together is a function of this ongoing attractiveness of Jesus, undiminished down through the ages to the present day”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystery of the Mass”
“When we all eat and drink Jesus Christ together we are conformed to him and therefore we are linked to each other”
Bishop Robert Barron “Food for the Journey”
“Order your whole life to Christ, he doesn’t fade away...And then in light of that fundamental love, order all the other loves and interests of your life”
Bishop Robert Barron “Everything in This World Passes Away”
“Listen, running after all these good things of the world, fine, fine, but they're not going to satisfy your heart. Christ, ipse Christus alone can do that.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Finding Lasting Happiness”
“Instead of condemnation God shows forgiveness. Instead of coming in force God came in weakness. And instead of a miracle God gives us God's own self”
Charissa Suli “The unexpected, audacious, a little shocking, and ultimately life-giving promise”
“Perishable food, what's that?...everything in this world, everything under the sun is perishable. Material things, honor, glory”
Bishop Robert Barron “Food that Will Never Perish”
“So today as we are drawn to God in our lives let us be eager recipients of the bread we are offered and be signs of life for others”
Anne Surtees “Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“God doesn't look at the world and therefore know it the way we do, rather God knows the world and therefore it is”
Bishop Robert Barron “Really, Truly, and Substantially Present”
“Who is Jesus Christ? Not one figure among many. Not, not simply another religious founder but he is God from God, which is why what he says is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Word of God Made Flesh”
“What God says is. God's word is not just descriptive, it's creative. Therefore since Jesus is God, what he says is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “My Flesh is Real Food; My Blood is Real Drink”
“don't think of heaven so much as a reward that anybody could enjoy, the good, the bad, the indifferent, think of it rather as a way of life that those who are adapted to it through grace can take in”
Bishop Robert Barron “Food for Eternal Life”
“God doesn't look at the world and therefore know it the way we do, rather God knows the world and therefore it is”
Bishop Robert Barron “Really, Truly, and Substantially Present”
“Who is Jesus Christ? Not one figure among many. Not, not simply another religious founder but he is God from God, which is why what he says is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Word of God Made Flesh”
“What God says is. God's word is not just descriptive, it's creative. Therefore since Jesus is God, what he says is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “My Flesh is Real Food; My Blood is Real Drink”
“don't think of heaven so much as a reward that anybody could enjoy, the good, the bad, the indifferent, think of it rather as a way of life that those who are adapted to it through grace can take in”
Bishop Robert Barron “Food for Eternal Life”
“Are we living as true disciples committed to Jesus, grounded in his words and recognizing his sovereignty in our lives?”
Heeyoung Lim “Lifelong Journey of Discipleship with Christ”
“Are you with the Eucharistic Christ or not? Do you accept this teaching or not? It's always been a standing or falling point in the history of the Church.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Time to Test Your Faith”
“Jesus is asking too much in asking them to say 'yes'”
Cathie Lambert “Enough bread talk! I'm outta here”
“Who do you think Jesus is and therefore what effect do you think his words have? If he is who he says he is, then his words can have this absolutely transformative effect.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Lord, To Whom Shall We Go?”
“we get access to the spiritual life of God precisely through the flesh, through the body of this Jesus”
Bishop Robert Barron “Really, Truly, and Substantially Present”
“Christianity has to do with him, with Jesus. Not his teaching, primarily, but with him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “True God, True Man”
“may our religion be a place where misery of sin meets the mercy of God. And may each one of us be an instrument of that”
Bishop Robert Barron “Refuse Scapegoating Violence”
“When in humility we acknowledge our sinfulness and our limitations we encounter Jesus and his healing mercy. It is an entering into the mystery of God's transforming love”
Clara Geoghegan “Fifth Sunday of Lent”
“What is the proper purpose of law, sacrifice, ritual, etc.? Well, it's always to bring people closer to God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Misery and Mercy”
“Allow that violence that you're about to send out to move inside and look honestly and seriously at your own sin. And then allow that stone to slip from your hand.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Scapegoating”
“We can be blind to the 'why' because we have tunnel vision to the 'what.' It is quicker and easier to judge another person's actions than to take the time to consider what is motivating them to behave in that way. Blindness comes in many forms.”
Danielle Anne Lynch “Fourth Sunday of Lent”
“we just resist healing. We just, we refuse to see it. It's right in front of us but we prefer it to be the way it always was.”
Bishop Robert Barron “And Now I See”
“To hold Jesus Christ as the supreme value of your life is the key to vision, salvation, happiness. To worship someone else or something else, that's blindness, that's sickness and deep unhappiness.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Coming to See”
“Jesus is the light by which we see the true nature of things. He's the light that provides vision. He's also the light by which we safely and correctly walk. How to see, how to move, how to act.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Coming to Spiritual Vision”
“Sin has weakened the will, yes. It's also clouded the mind. Clouded our vision spiritually. We don't see things as they are.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Man Born Blind”
“belief implies ethics and ethics is essentially the practice of faith. Belief is the fundamental first step in the art of creating right relationships with God and the world around us.”
Debra Snoddy “Fourth Sunday of Lent”
“Friends, our Gospel for today contains one of the most important lines in the entire Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Nicodemus Came at Night”
“Jesus makes clear that believing in our Creator and the divine presence of God in creation is key to understanding that which stretches beyond Earth, into the cosmos and in the realms of Heaven”
Jacqui Rémond “God's Salvific Call to Love Creation”
“There's always the possibility of coming back to God...but you gotta summon the courage”
Bishop Robert Barron “Everything He Has Is Yours”
“as individuals and as a church we need to get in touch within ourselves of a God who is more merciful, more healing and more loving than we can ever understand”
Melissa Dwyer FdCC “Coming Home”
“God's closeness to me awakens what is most beautiful and radiant in me”
Bishop Robert Barron “Theonomy”
“Learn the spiritual lesson: what you receive as a gift, give as a gift. It'll take you out of the chōran makran, the great emptiness, it'll bring you back to life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Prodigal Son Returns”
“What is the proper dynamic? That God gives, we receive, and we give back and in that loop of grace we come to life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Prodigal Son”
“When you grab the gifts of God but you divorce them from the source, they will dry up”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Father and the Sons”
“What's God like? Like a father who gives, and gives and gives. God's whole being is for giving.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lesson of the Prodigal Son”
“If we want to convince people of the truth and the beauty of our Catholic tradition, we would want to model for them the fruit of being faithful, a spirit that is generous, that is kind, that is merciful, that is patient with everyone wherever they may find themselves”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Lie #22 of the Evil Spirit - If I don't defend my faith in public, I'm a bad Catholic.”
“We're called to enter into the 'today' of Jesus himself. And that means allowing ourselves to be transformed by God, to receive God's healing power in our lives, God's forgiveness, God's care for us in our everyday concerns.”
Dorothy Lee “Third Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“We are all captives in some way to some thing. What is it that captivates you?”
Katy Gilles “Third Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Mary's story is often seen as a testament to the power of faith, strength and the capacity for individuals to play a crucial role in unfolding a greater plan”
Myree Sam “Fourth Sunday of Advent”
“God is not trying to put you down, suppress you but God is trying to elevate you to a place where you could go on your own”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Fiat of Mary”
“Mary is the new Eve. The new Eve. Now Eve in the Bible, the mother of all the living. Who's Mary? She's the mother of all those who are now living life in Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Why Mary Matters”
“May the narrative of the visitation, Mary and Elizabeth, remind us that even in expected circumstances and amidst emotional complexity we can find strength and comfort knowing that we are people through whom divinity flows”
Rena MacLeod “Leaping with Joy: Celebrating Divine Energies Embodied”
“In the silence of our hearts God speaks. How often do we sit still and spend time with him just listening?”
Racy Espino “Why is she in a hurry?”
“We're not consumed by God's presence, rather we are illuminated by it, raised and elevated by it”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Inexhaustibly Fascinating Figure of Mary”
“Every time you leave Mass you've been sent into mission country on mission territory. I don't know, I think we tend to internalize it all and privatize it. That's not Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Church’s Marching Orders”
“So when Jesus sends us out as lambs among wolves we have nothing to fear. We bear peace within us that others may receive or may reject. Either way, that peace remains within us.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Lambs and Wolves - What Drives Your Actions?”
“in the Bible, everybody, nothing great ever happens apart from prayer”
Bishop Robert Barron “How Will You Evangelize Today?”
“How would it be if we were to reimagine this Gospel passage as Jesus inviting 72 aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to go out in pairs and take their spiritual insights and proclaim the Kingdom of God to all of us who come across the seas and settled on this land? What might it look like? Sound like? Feel like?”
Elizabeth Lee “Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“You got a mission. It's to carry the Good News of Jesus Christ. It's to bring people into the fold. Have you brought somebody to the Church? Have you brought someone to Jesus Christ? If not, you're not fulfilling this mission. You're not sent by the Lord.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Portrait of the Church”
“once we understand this is about how Jesus heals a fallen humanity, that's now our job, we got our marching orders. Our job is to look around to see who are those who are lying helpless and wounded by the side of the road. And are we instruments of grace...?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ Can Heal Us”
“How have I moved outside my comfort zone and paid attention to the need around me? And what did I do to stay there?”
Lisa Bright “The Good Samaritan: Looking with fresh eyes”
“Christians, reread this story sometime today, identify yourself with the man wounded half-dead by the side of the road and then rejoice in the Christ who has come to save you, has come to redeem you”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Good Samaritan”
“it sounds like Jesus speaks kind of strongly to Martha...but he's not doing it to condemn her. He's doing it to defend the value of rest. He wants us to know that he values the time we take to rest, especially when it's a silent and a quiet rest in his presence.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Pause and Breathe”
“We are called to consider, 'am I a Martha or a Mary?' when it comes to my relationship with Jesus”
Gemma Thomson and Senior students from Iona College “Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“We're praying in union with the Son, we become sons and daughters in the Son. When we pray we're not outside of God, so much, petitioning, we're invited by Jesus inside, inside the very life of the Trinity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Lord, Teach Us to Pray”
“He want us to start by asking for what we know and feel drawn towards. Christ is encouraging us: never lose hope in prayer. Be persistent, ask for what you need.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Persistence and Insistence in Prayer”
“Read so many of the spiritual masters as they talk about the Lord's prayer but every step of it is opening up a window and a door to the spiritual life. Next time you pray it...I'd invite you to do it very slowly. As you do, meditate on each of these phrases”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Is the Lord's Prayer About?”
“as a friend suggested, maybe the insight is that what God offers in answer to prayer is beyond my imagination”
Moira Byrne Garton “Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“the same intimacy that Jesus has with his 'Abba' he invites us to share...we're not just praying the words he taught us, we're entering into his attitude and manner of prayer when we pray”
Bishop Robert Barron “Abba Father, Bring us Jesus”
“a desire to pray is planted very deep within us because prayer just means the conscious desire to communicate with God, to speak to God, to listen to him”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lord’s Prayer”
“the ultimate message of today’s gospel is to make space in your life to discern how do we invest in what really matters: love and connection”
Kate O’Brien “Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“By confronting and bringing back the word 'slave' into these parables and identifying with the slaves, I started to see Jesus doing what he so often does, taking something familiar and known in his world, like slavery, and subverting it.”
Rev. Dr. Christine Redwood “Slaves?”
“if life is a gift, everything is a gift. What's our proper attitude toward God?...gratitude for what's been given and expectation for what might be given.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Giving and Receiving”
“Perhaps one day our churches, our communities, and our world will be able to move beyond the divisions and see the value inherent in every single person”
Michelle Eastwood “Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“the master who has locked the door. It can only be opened from the inside, which is to say God's help will be necessary. It's not something that we need to do on our own nor can do on our own.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Feet on Earth, Heart in Heaven”
“It seems to me the man asked, 'are there only a few who will be saved?' Meaning the few of us insiders. Jesus is saying expand your imagination. Expand your sense of what is possible.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How Many Will Be Saved?”
“being the women and men God wants us to be is not easy. It is strenuous because we have to change. We have to change our hearts...To be holy there has to be a continual surrender of our wills to God's will. Our plans to God's plan.”
Andrea Dean “Twentyfirst Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“The 'narrow gate' is what? It's the path of discipleship which Jesus described famously as 'taking up your cross everyday and following the Lord'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Narrow Gate”
“What does it mean to be saved?...to participate to the fullest degree possible in the very life of God. It means conformity to love. It means surrendering to the grace of God and then allowing that grace, listen, to invade every aspect of your life so that grace flows through you and into the wider world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Narrow Gate”
“And one of the reasons that I think humility is such a difficult virtue to teach is that humility primarily, chiefly comes about when we are thinking less about ourselves and we're doing less ourselves”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Learning Humility”
“what truly matters and what truly makes you happy is right in front of you in the simplest things all the time”
Bishop Robert Barron “Ignatian Detachment”
“In our fallen world we forget so readily that we are creatures. We forget so readily that we've been made from nothing. We come to expect things, to assume that they are owed to us. At the end of the day we start assuming that we are gods, center of the universe.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Humility, Queen of the Virtues”
“Dining is a most important biblical symbol. God created us out of love and for the sake of sharing his life. The more we surrender to him the more we are connected to each other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Addiction of Honor”
“That's the test that you are not the slave of ambition or honor. That you can be generous, listen now, purely because you love the other as other. Not because you are loving yourself through the other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Taking the Lowest Place”
“do we sinners have the tendency to make of very good things the ultimate good?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Are You Ready for Serious Discipleship?”
“The cost of discipleship is the price of admission and it may seem high at times, it may seem high but it's nothing compared to the fruit that is reaped on the other side.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “The Steep Cost of Not-Discipleship”
“in the measure that mother, or father, brother, or sisters have become in your life the supreme good, that's a nightmare. That's a problem. That's a huge stumbling block.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Fair-Weather Fans of Jesus”
“no spiritual person sets out to follow the will of God unless and until he's rid himself of attachments. Otherwise he will find zero success.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Cost of Discipleship”
“are we in that crowd of thousands following Jesus during happy times or are we willing to follow him all the way to the cross?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Awful Gospel of the Cross”
“What makes us happy on the Biblical reading of things? Forgetting the ego and its needs and desires. Opening our eyes and our minds and our hearts and letting reality in. Breaking free of the prison of the ego and all of its treasure chest of possessions”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Path of Dispossession”
“Hate what the world tells you to love. Love what God tells you to do. That's peace.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Spiritual Shock Therapy”
“One of the marks of sin is that we turn the gracious world around us into our possession. It usually comes from fear.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Hate Your Mother and Father”
“if we allow ourselves to be embraced by that love, maybe if we have the gift of the courage of the younger brother we'll find that we are in an incredible position to help other people”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Some Sons in Trouble”
“If we can just sink into our hearts, everybody, that God is “pazzo d’amore”, he's, he's crazy in love with us then, then we be willing and able to respond with an equally extravagant gift of love”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Is Crazy in Love with You”
“God's nature is nurture”
Julia Perry “Twenty-fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“If we were caught in a strict logic of justice, God help all of us, we'd all be lost. Thank God that we have a God that is indeed just but who is above all a God of love and a God of grace.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Logic of Justice, Logic of Grace”
“I know it might sound strange or counterintuitive. God does not need our moral excellence. God is not diminished by our moral depravity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Reckless Abandon of God’s Love”
“this is how God behaves towards us. Setting aside all that hinders us coming to God to enter into our complex world, flesh of our flesh in Jesus, to show us that we are all invited to become friends of God, or at least some indebtedness to God and freed to love as extravagantly, as inclusively as God loves.”
Colleen O’Reilly AM “Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Are we convinced that a threat to our spiritual welfare can be just as grave, in fact, graver than threats to our financial well-being, threats to our physical health? And are we willing accordingly to act?”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Warning Bell in the Night”
“This is the virtue of the unjust steward. His vision is clear, his judgment is right and then his action is now. I think in all these ways, Christians, we can learn even from this kind of funny, despicable character. He sees, he judges and he acts.”
Bishop Robert Barron “See, Judge, and Act”
“Decisive action is the end result of awakening to crisis and I think that's what Jesus wants us to see today”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Unjust Steward”
“We need to listen to the prophets that call us to live on this planet without overconsumption that leaves people at the fringes hungry...Rather, we are to live this life with justice, integrity and sustainability listening to Moses, the prophets and the words of Jesus.”
Ruth Mathieson “Twenty-six Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“There's a difference between receiving a gift and recognizing it and being able to give glory to God and to give thanks for that gift received”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Receiving and Recognizing Gifts are two Different Things”
“Faith is an attitude of trust in the presence of God. It's an openness to what God will reveal, what God will do and what God will invite us to become.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What it Means to Live by Faith”
“We need that spiritual strength to do as Jesus says, to pray always and not lose heart...maintaining our trust in God who loves us and will always attend to our needs”
Jenny Close “Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“The tax collector knows what he is but he also knows what God is, who God is. The tax collector's prayer is to the God who gives justice to his chosen ones.”
Natalie Ray “A Tale of Two Men”
“how often have we used the Law, and again be honest, to attack someone else? Have we wielded the Law as a weapon? Turn the question around, how often have we used the Law to accuse ourselves?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Prayer and Pride”
“If you're alienated from God you will be ipso facto alienated from all of God's creatures. Therefore, we need to be tied back, religare, tied back to God but how often the very practices and beliefs that are designed to foster connection actually end up fostering division.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Finding Justification”
“Christians, let's be honest, most of the time we relate to each other in a selfish way. That means I'm kind to you or I listen to you or I'm good to you because somehow I'll get something out of it. I'm loving you for my own sake. That isn't love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Real Prayer”
“Jesus is not sharing his stature, he's giving it away. He is losing stature by associating himself with Zacchaeus. He gives away his own stature and it gives Zacchaeus a chance to show himself to be someone people didn't think he was capable of being.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Giving Away Stature”
“Jesus' gaze goes beyond sins and prejudices. He sees the person through the eyes of God who does not stop at past faults but sees the future good.”
Trish Madigan “Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“All Jesus needs is the smallest move on our part. He always respects our freedom. This is never a game of coercion but, but he is ready to pounce the minute we are ready to open ourselves to him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Salvation Has Come to This House”
“Salvation from sin never comes from our own efforts. Oh, grace can prompt it, sure, it takes some steps to get close to Christ but salvation never comes through our efforts.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Zacchaeus”
“God has arrived, holy and humble at the cost of God's blood, not ours, to invite all to walk the path to a better world”
Laura Tharion “Holding Hope”
“My prayer for each and every one of us, myself included, is that we may have the patience and the dedication that Anna showed, the willingness to keep going to the Temple to pray, the willingness to fast so that we may remain close to God that he may remain close to us”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “A Cameo Worth Noting”
“Well could you imagine what a rose was going to look like when you were only looking at the seed? What we have today and what we know of what that will look like is like we're looking at the seed. We cannot imagine what comes beyond it.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Avoiding the Question Trap”
“The woman in this story is not to be remembered for the 7 husbands she had but as embraced by God who remembers her for the 7 times she became a victim of her social context and the 7 times she suffered grief and degradation and unfulfilled hopes”
Julie Trinidad “I have come to set you free”
“suprarational things we don't see because they shed too much light, they overwhelm reason. Jesus' strategy here is to show that the resurrection of the dead is a suprarational reality”
Bishop Robert Barron “Eternal Life”
“Precisely because the world is created, nothing in the world is God. It all reflects God, yes. It all speaks of God, of course. But none of it is God. That means I should never make anything in this world the ultimate value of my life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Celibacy: An Eschatological Sign”
“Often we will say that Advent is a season of waiting but perhaps the little apocalypse tells us it is really a season for enduring”
Gillian Moses “First Sunday of Advent”
“This idea of Jesus coming back in a scary or judgmental way doesn't work when this text is read in light of Daniel. Instead we see this hopeful image of people coming before God amidst everything, of God being there and present to people in the midst of everything.”
Teash Taylor “Preparing for the Apocalypse”
“Give your worldly success if you have it to Christ, give your family to Christ, give your fame if you have it to him. He's the fixed star.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A New Fixed Star”
“Keep your eyes fixed on the Son of Man, to the Christ who links you to the very power of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The End of the World as We Know It”
“But the Gospel, the Good News, the euangelion, it's that something so fresh and new and unexpected and strange has happened that the whole world that we knew is marginalized, is relativized, and something new has emerged”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Old World Has Been Shaken”
“So don't orient your life...in terms of the natural necessities. No, no, they're not ultimate. The God of Jesus Christ is ultimate.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Shaking of Three Worlds”
“So Jesus offers us more than mere existence. He offers us life that is full, rich, abundant, and here and now.”
Judith Norris “Now is the Time”
“It's the new world of your life lived now on the foundation of Jesus Christ, under the lordship of Jesus Christ, feed by the food of Jesus Christ. Will it cause a lot of struggles, earthquakes, famines? You bet, but that's just the birth pangs of a new world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Birth Pangs of the Messiah”
“Reorient your life in such a way that the ultimate good is God, then you will relate properly to all those other matters. But when they become god and when you stand bedazzled by them then your life is disordered.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Not One Stone Upon Another”
“This is the path to salvation: admitting that we're sinners”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Forgiveness of Sinners”
“‘I admit that I have done wrong. Jesus help me.’ That's all he does. ‘I admit that I have done wrong, Jesus help me.’ And in doing that he's allowing Christ to wear the crown and he’s allowing Christ to be the king of his universe.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Who is Wearing the Crown?”
“For when we allow a kingly God to be in control of life and of our heart, when we trust that this king is also our dearest friend, wanting only the best for us, things start falling into place”
Nimmi Candappa “Friend in High Places”
“The last thing the powerful person wants is to succumb to love. Love means giving up power, it means, it means focusing on the other. The face of sin is the separation of love and power.”
Bishop Robert Barron “An Odd King”
“The passage is a reminder that although we may presume that we have been left on the wayside by God, abandoned by God, it is not so. For the spirit of God travels with us even if we do not recognise it as spirit”
Debra Phillips “Third Sunday of Easter”
“I think that maybe the reason they were prevented from seeing him yet was that they just weren't convinced that God was indeed as good as Jesus had claimed he was during his lifetime and they didn't have yet the testimony of the resurrection as we have it now”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “When God Seems Disguised”
“In the Genesis story, Adam and Eve disguised themselves so God won't find them. In Luke's narrative, God as it were disguises himself...He's not doing it, obviously, out of a desire to distance himself from them. But rather, what? To lure them gradually back into discipleship.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Emmaus and Genesis”
“Even as we walk the wrong way Jesus comes and walks with us. Even when we're confused he comes and meets us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Pattern of Love”
“the gospels have one great overarching question: who is Jesus Christ? Their question is not so much what did he do, what did he teach? But, who is he? The attempt to grasp him, to understand him with at least relative adequacy, that's the heart of the New Testament.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Emmaus and the Pattern of Redemption”
“How you're walking in the gospel matters. All the momentum of the Gospel of Luke is toward Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the city of the cross, the city of the resurrection, the city of the sending of the Spirit.”
Bishop Robert Barron “On the Road”
“To me this text speaks of impact of encounter with the risen Christ”
Maureen Gaul “The Resurrection for Transformation”
“Saint Luke is brilliant in his use of human senses and the role of women in this story which bring the whole resurrection to life”
Tau’alofa Anga’aelangi “Third Sunday of Easter”
“hoping that he may once again be born into our world, not outside and beyond us but within our hearts because if he's not born within our hearts how can he be possibly be born by us to others and outside of it?”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Hiding from Forgiveness”
“Get focused on the coming of Christ into your life. Build the highway that makes it easy for him to come into your life and that means 'knock down some mountains and fill in some valleys.'”
Bishop Robert Barron “Mountains and Valleys”
“The Lord has come, everybody, he's really arrived in history, adventus, and therefore everything is different”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Has Really Arrived in History”
“Friends, sometimes we need a keen sense of the finitude and futility of the world in order to grasp that it's God's steadfast love that sustains us”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Steadfast Love of God”
“The Gospel demands nothing less than love in action”
Robyn Whitaker “Third Sunday of Advent”
“Something more than a prophet is arriving. And listen, something more than mere moral reform is being predicted and called for.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Baptism in the Holy Spirit”
“Repentance and conversion have to do with action. Our lives have gotten off the rails in different ways, we need to do certain things to get them back.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Should We Do?”
“Today I invite you to consider, how do you live out your baptism call? Is baptism merely a milestone or historic event? Or an active response to making tangible the reign of God in our world today?”
Geraldine Vytilingam “Baptism of the Lord”
“In being grafted unto Christ, you become identified with him as priest, as prophet, and as king...You're anointed too, the day of your baptism.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Priests, Prophets, and Kings”
“Jesus identified himself as being unified with all those John had baptized and with all of humanity. Jesus is one with those he had come to save. Similarly, our baptism identifies us as being one with God and one with God's people. Our identity is from God and of God.”
Monica Dutton “Part of who we are”
“The game is not getting God to do what I want. The game is surrendering to God's purposes, yes, even when I don't fully understand them.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Questions to Ask Yourself During Lent”
“step into the wilderness this Lent, let go of a comfort even a small one and see what unfolds. The desert won't offer false comforts but it may lead you to greater strength and trust in God's spirit, a spirit that carries us through all our wildernesses.”
Andrea Dean “First Sunday of Lent”
“Set aside this sort of bloated self-importance of the ego, that just leads to trouble and keep yourself focused on God, what God wants for you, what God desires for you”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Levels of Temptation”
“May we always think and behave as Jesus has shown us today. That when we get tempted, we put ourselves second and continue to put God first, the God to whom we give all glory, praise and honor”
Eseta Meneilly “First Sunday of Lent”
“We learn that what is most basic is always the will and purpose of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Questions from the Desert”
“You don't manipulate God. God uses you for his purposes. If you want to be a conduit of the divine love to the world, the last thing you can do is turn yourself into God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The True and False Messiah”
“How do you live? What's your central desire?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Three Temptations”
“Christians, part of knowing who you are is knowing who you're not. Part of knowing what your life is about is knowing what it's not about.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus is Tempted in the Desert”
“Jesus calls us in the depth of our messy stories and draws out the fullness of who we are”
Steph Jorna
“How different might our spiritual journey be if we got used to the idea of discerning before responding?”
Annemarie Reiner “Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“the single most important decision you'll ever make is this: will you cooperate with Jesus once he decides to get into your boat? When grace invades, do you cooperate or not?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Duc In Altum!”
“when you let Christ into your life you must expect the fact that he's going to direct you”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Three Paths of Holiness”
“For God's people, then and now, being called blessed isn't about making someone else jealous or establishing that you're more well off than another”
Bei-En Zou “Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“all of us go through periods of our life where we feel in some sense or another poor, hungry, weeping, insulted, discarded. And God wants us to know that in those moments we are valued.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Woes to Freedom”
“It is through transcending the trappings of this material world that we live in that we are truly blessed in finding our ultimate reward in Christ Jesus and the Kingdom of God”
Toni Janke “Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Jesus on the cross is the picture of the blessed one. Why? Because he is hooked on to the will of God which is the ultimate good. Jesus on the cross is the sign of the blessed life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Blessed Detachment”
“What would it look like to live as though we share our dignity with those on the outside of our church and our world?”
Mikali Anagnostis “Love your enemies be compassionate”
“For if we treated everyone who comes across our path with the same respect, dignity and love that we wish for those closest and most special to us, imagine how that might transform our society”
Pip McIlroy “Love your enemies”
“The whole program in Jesus' teaching is predicated upon the assumption that we in him and through him can be supernaturalized and thereby love with the love that he is”
Bishop Robert Barron “Grace and the Aporia of the Gift”
“In this sense, Christians, the one we think of as the enemy could be an emissary from God who's sent to reveal to us what's off in ourselves”
Bishop Robert Barron “Four Reasons to Love Your Enemies”
“So what might these parables ask of me and of us today? Perhaps just to live more honestly and face the truth of our lives more courageously...to be people open to constant conversion”
Kate Englebrecht “Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Is the person to whom you've entrusted your soul, blind or a visionary?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Danger of Blind Guides”
“I find myself asking, 'what are my loaves and fish? My small offering in my family, relationships, neighborhood, workplace?' And then I ask God to help me discern the Spirit's presence and leading in my blessedness and brokenness daily and dutifully in prayer.”
Anne Muirhead “The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ”
“Sleep in the Bible is not good...sleep in the bible is a sign of spiritual inattention”
Bishop Robert Barron “When the Eternal Breaks Through”
“before Jesus there was the Law and the prophets; Moses and Elijah. Things were pretty clear-cut and simple. It was written in stone or they had said it...But after Jesus our goodness and life becomes about a relationship with God directly and that means that things that seem to be written in stone may no longer be that way.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “The Gift of Doubt”
“This Lent, may you see like never before, take the journey which isn't about giving something up but about change, and practice deep listening”
Brooke Prentis “Second Sunday of Lent”
“When you enter into this holy cloud, hear that voice: 'this is my beloved son, listen to him'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The More”
“Even the highest moments of mystical union are meant in the end to conduce to doing God's work in the world, becoming a conduit of the divine grace”
Bishop Robert Barron “Transfigured Prayer”
“There's an either/or quality to Jesus and there's an either/or quality to Christian discipleship”
Bishop Robert Barron “Following Jesus Comes First”
“We, like Jesus, are on our way to our destiny which is paradoxically our center and every choice we make, every action we take, grows us into that way or keeps us by the way. Sometimes we may have to make definitive decisions that set our direction on the heart of God.”
Jill Gowdie “Together on the Way”
“Are we willing truly and completely to walk with him? Truly and completely in every way to let all worldly goods fall aside to follow him?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Walking Truly and Completely with Him”
“We are those who have believed this euangelion, this Good News about a military victory won by this new kurios, this new leader, this new Lord who is Jesus the crucified criminal, he's the son of God, he's the center of our lives, he's the one power that finally matters”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Gospel of Jesus”
“I think that we sometimes try to capture God, box God in, putting tight boundaries around our understanding”
Elizabeth Dowling “Proclaiming the Kin-dom of God”
“do something this Lent. Pray, fast, give alms”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pray, Fast, Give Alms”
“sin always involves some kind of dividing, some sort of separation”
Bishop Robert Barron “Angels and Wild Beasts”
“Have you ever considered the privilege, the enormity of the gift of being called by God, the creator of the universe, the King of Kings, the Lord of the Lords? Have you ever sat with that reality alone? Wow. That could be enough.”
Angela Gorman “Third Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Well friends here's a challenge, we're Simon and Andrew, we are James and John. We are the inheritors of this biblical sense of time. We know the time of fulfillment has arrived...and now it's time for you to make a decision.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Time of Fulfillment”
“Jesus is making a powerful statement here about who we listen to and it reminds me of the Good Samaritan story, a story of an outsider showing us that it's not always those in the in-group or the expected who show us how to love and how to live the gospel message”
Vicky Gonzalez Burrows “Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“this is a story that can reveal to us the limits of our own compassion and challenge us to love more deeply and to help more sacrificially and generously. Here is also a call to think through the complex effects of suffering in whatever form it takes”
Megan Powell du Toit “Indignant Hearts”
“The number of possessions we own is irrelevant, it's rather the significance we place upon them that Jesus is asking us to relinquish”
Angela Marquis “Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“what the Gospel of Mark makes abundantly clear is, when we accept Jesus' sacrifice for ourselves, there will be something asked of us in return...The life of a disciple of Jesus is a life of sacrifice.”
Louise Gosbell “Who Then Can Be Saved?”
“To live in the household of God is to live a life of radical love. Therefore, certain things in your life that are egregiously repugnant to the path of love have to be eliminated.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Rich Young Man and the Hunger for Eternal Life”
“Because, see, eternal life begins even now as we find our mission. 'So what must I do to gain eternal life?' That is a really good question.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Necessity of Spiritual Heroism”
“The bottom line, in this whole process surrender your life to the grace and mercy of God. That's the path of eternal life in a nutshell.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Rich Young Man”
“Marriage is meant to soften our hearts”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Marriage is meant to Soften our Hearts”
“Sometimes it seems as if the teaching of church institutions around marriage is less to do with God and far more to do with upholding patriarchal and often deeply political structures of power and authority”
Penny Jones and Josephine Inkpin “Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“I find this amazing, that an ancient writer living in a patriarchal world has the insight to realize that patriarchy is sinful, patriarchy is not of God”
Mary Coloe PBVM “Original Love”
“You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love and you can be that servant.”
Ann Rennie “Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Real prayer, the real spiritual life is always about a decentering off of the ego onto God. Not about us, it's about God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Do You Really Want What God Wants?”
“I need to be a servant like Jesus was a servant and how he served and I need to do that in my community”
Erica Bernard “Know Your Place”
“When you serve others, when you become the least, you're accessing the power of God and you're seeking the honor of God. And that's real power and real honor.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Real Spiritual Power”
“Always a bad sign, may I say, when you start telling God what to do”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Voice of Ambition”
“Sin is a kind of violence born of fear”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Ransom for the Many”
“Jesus heard the cry of the poor, the cry of the outcast of society and turned the table on those who tried to stop him getting to Jesus by asking them to call the blind man to him”
Helen Cunningham “30th Sunday Ordinary Time”
“So Bartimaeus is evocative of all of us. Blind, beggars, sinners, seeking salvation and now being called into the Church to find it”
Bishop Robert Barron “Are You Blinded By Cities of Sin?”
“Are we willing to see with new eyes the abundance of what God offers us”
Jo Hart “Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Many times in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is presented as the stillpoint in a chaotic world”
Bishop Robert Barron “Master, I Want to See”
“sin is a problem with the will and with the mind. They become perverse and twisted. Therefore if the mind and the will are the problem then more mind and more will aint going to be the solution.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Seeing the World Anew”
“I don't care how much you got in the eyes of the world, I don't care how rich and famous and popular, successful you are, if you have not surrendered to the grace of God you are blind”
Bishop Robert Barron “Called From Darkness Into His Light”
“I think true love is having absolute trust with another. It is a safe place to be your authentic self, reaching the deepest intimate connection with someone with honesty and vulnerability.”
Di Langham and Belinda Langham “Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“This widow is perfect discipleship material because...she gives her whole life to God. Tragically, she gives it to the wrong thing, a religious system that Jesus has just demonstrated exploits people just like her”
Michele Connolly, RSJ “Mark’s Poor Widow: A Cautionary Tale - And an Exhortation”
“It was the dying and rising of Jesus that pulled back a veil, everybody, to reveal the deepest truths of things. That God's love is more powerful than death and more powerful than all those institutions that are based upon the fear of death.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What is the Apocalypse?”
“The truth of the matter was that what we called 'good violence' was really just 'our' violence and what we called 'bad violence' was really just 'their' violence”
Rev. Radhika Sukumar-White “Jesus, violence and chaos”
“Apocalyptic is not depressing language, not meant to frighten us, just the contrary. It's meant to show us a way out.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The End of the World”
“Apparently the hearers of this Gospel are supposed to know who Alexander and Rufus are…What would it have been for them to hear Jesus in Mark’s Gospel say that his followers must “take up their cross and follow him” when their father had carried Jesus’ actual cross?”
Catherine Playoust “Palm Sunday”
“I believe that we need to accept that our theological reflections are shaped by our experiences”
Debra Zanella “Corpus Christi”
“The theology and spirituality of the Ascension is essentially summarized in these words: refuse to cling to what once was, let it go so that you can now recognize the new life you are already living and receive its spirit”
Sharon O’Keeffe “Ascension of the Lord”
“Our faith is not just about getting to heaven but following Christ to embrace and transform this earth right here and now”
Elizabeth Young RSM “Ascension”
“There will be a harvest of our faithful efforts. The birds of the air, even we ourselves, will shelter in the generous shade we enable to grow.”
Michele Connolly “Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“The center of the story is God and God’s purposes. Our place is relative to God rather than God existing to satisfy our needs.”
Amelia Koh-Butler “Lessons from the Land”
“find comfort and joy and vindication in the Christ who’s gone all the way down but then rises up to become the commander of the waves, he’s the Lord over sin and death. And find your peace in him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peace in the Storm”
“Our shortcoming is that just like the disciples we do not trust God, we have doubt that God cares”
Dominique Galea “Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Maybe our faith is to know that God is with us through the storms and that no matter what the external conditions are all will be well”
Elizabeth Lee “Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Jesus is the very incarnate power of God who can hover sovereignly over even the greatest difficulties of life. Cry out to him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The ‘De Profundis’ Prayer”
“It seems like time is too short, there is not enough of it. And yet Jesus in his lifetime which was 33 years, only 3 years of which were really active ministry, transformed and changed the entire world”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “When time seems too short”
“Is there somebody in your life that you know who's really walked down this terrible path? They can’t summon faith but your faith will bring Jesus to them.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Reach Out in Faith”
“Is the Church listening to the stories of the women and the children and the grieving parents? And how can we listen better?”
Naomi Cooke “Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“The Lord knows what he’s doing”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith When You're Frustrated With God”
“How would our Church be changed if our leaders stopped and listened to the truth of women stories? How much would the voice of women in the assembly enrich our understanding of God’s saving power?”
Patricia Gemmell “Jesus invites a woman to preach”
“How do you overcome that isolation? You reach out and you touch Jesus Christ and you allow him to touch you. In that personal contact with him, life flows, life is restored, the community is created.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith and the Law”
“The Church…is being defined now in relation to Jesus. It’s not so much the regulations of Leviticus that matter, now it is our relationship to him, that we do what he does.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Daughter of Jairus and the Book of Leviticus”
“It seems that for whatever reason they could not get past the fact that divine God-sourced wisdom, power and authority can coincide with ordinariness, with this rather ordinary man”
Jennifer Wakeling “God of the ordinary”
“Who am I not hearing because I think I know what the other is saying? To whom and to what am I closed?”
Catherine McCahill “Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Rest isn’t for its own sake though, as some kind of reward for the hard work...Rather it's designed to nourish us to continue the mission, to continue proclaiming the Gospel, serving others and working for justice and peace”
Clare Schwantes “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“To rest in oneself often requires compassion for oneself”
Linda Chapman “Extending the mince”
“Christian religion is never this sort of lone ranger business. It's a corporate identity so even as they go out on mission they go out two by two, they're connected to each other and they're connected through each other to Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Earliest Moments of the Church”
“Christianity is just inescapably a communitarian religion. We’re implicated in each other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Twelve and the New Israel”
“Christianity is a missionary religion, we’re sent just as Jesus was sent into the world by the Father, so we are sent by Jesus on mission”
Bishop Robert Barron “Sent out Two by Two”
“What is important in the reign of God is not people observing laws but people who are like God and try to be as God is, who have a compassionate heart as God does”
Mary Margaret Dalmau “Tradition, transition and divine life”
“In my view healing is not about building ability or regaining physical health or attaining success or material wealth. Healing is about returning to love and choosing to love.”
Moira Byrne
“In order to respond to the Gospel we have to be able to hear it. Are we people of hope, open to receiving God's love in the goodness available to us right now?”
Fiona Dyball “Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“We in our culture, this Decapolis of today, are often deaf to the voice of God...We are inarticulate in our capacity to express these truths. Because we can't hear them, we can't speak them.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Have You Stopped Listening to Jesus?”
“What do we need to be in the presence of God's word? Hearers of the word. We need to be listeners to God's word. What's our problem spiritually? Deafness. That we don't hear.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Ephphatha”
“He's the true image of God, not the image we crafted to reflect ourselves or our society. And sometimes that can be uncomfortably challenging.”
Melissa Conway “Sacred Spaces – Where Human and Divine Meet”
“Not only does Jesus's identity include his eventual death and resurrection, it will finally be defined by those things”
Rosa Speranza “The person of Jesus”
“the way of God is always the path of suffering love”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Way of the One”
“Where do you go to replenish, to open yourself to transformation that you will carry with you when you come down from the mountain?”
Sarah Agnew “Second Sunday of Lent”
“The transcendent supernatural mystical is a contact with a person. It's the realm of God and God is a person who speaks to the heart.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystical Transfiguration of Christ”
“Maybe life is about something completely different than the rat race for honors”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ladder Doesn’t Matter”
“Who are the others we are called to love in deeds and words as much as Jesus is seen to love here?”
Maeve Louise Heaney VDMF “Something Worth Dying For”
“What is the point of your life therefore? To be who God intends you to be.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Unless You Change and Become Like a Little Child”
“This profound truth compels us to honor the unique gifts and contributions of all women, including Aboriginal sisters whose rich cultural heritage and wisdom have greatly enriched our society”
Mayrah Yarraga Dreise “Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Jesus' leadership illustrates the power that brings light. The disciples' misuse of leadership power casts a shadow of exclusion.”
Gail Gill “Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“One of Joseph's great virtues is that...he is willing to listen to this voice that comes from a deeper part of his soul. He's willing to be a person of faith in that sense to think and to feel out of the box.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Joseph the Just”
“When we have entered into friendship with God we have now bound ourselves to the power that makes the whole cosmos, that transcends space and time...then we can look back at any and all of the goods of the world and see them in their proper perspectives. None of those should be the center of my life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Fear No One”
“every time that we receive the Eucharist...It's the source of our faith because of that, we are loved. But it's the summit as well because in accepting and realizing that we are loved as we are, we are actually also compelled, pushed by a growing desire to become yet greater, to fall more deeply into that love”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Accepting as God does”
“Where is someone right now whose carrying a burden around and what can I do to lighten that? Whose cross can I pick up the way Simon of Cyrene helped Jesus carry his cross?”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Can’t Be Neutral About Jesus”
“It's because he loves me so much that he becomes one with me. It's almost as though Christ enters me because he can't resist on account of his great love for me. And the same applies to you and everyone else. Christ's love is so great that he, as it were, can't hold back from union with each one.”
Frances Maguire “One with Christ”
“God will not be, cannot be set aside. He must be that which is loved above all things.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Demands of Discipleship”
“Because the one I seek is right here in our midst. What joy.”
Margaret Scharf “Third Sunday of Advent”
“rest, it doesn't mean like lying in a hammock. It means fulfillment, it means peace, it means the joy that we all want. How do you get it? You get it by imitating the rhythms and dynamics of the divine life, by entering into this love between the Father and the Son”
Bishop Robert Barron “Enter the Inner Life of God”
“Jesus calls us to him, invites us to tie ourselves to him like the disciples without fear because he is gentle and humble of heart and learn from him. This will be easy and in doing this we'll find rest for our souls, the rest that comes from knowing that he is with us always until the end of time.”
Wendy Goonan “Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Finding rest in Christ, the outpouring of the divine life, there's the path to joy. Those are the things that Jesus knows the little ones are able to take in.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Little Ones”
“The only way to receive the divine life is to become conformed to that life”
Bishop Robert Barron “Take My Yoke Upon You”
“Jesus is not in command of his life but he receives his life as a gift. This I think is what it means to be a 'little child'...to have an attitude of receptivity where you allow yourself to be moved by God and by God's way.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Have Revealed to the Merest Children”
“rest, it doesn't mean like lying in a hammock. It means fulfillment, it means peace, it means the joy that we all want. How do you get it? You get it by imitating the rhythms and dynamics of the divine life, by entering into this love between the Father and the Son”
Bishop Robert Barron “Enter the Inner Life of God”
“Jesus calls us to him, invites us to tie ourselves to him like the disciples without fear because he is gentle and humble of heart and learn from him. This will be easy and in doing this we'll find rest for our souls, the rest that comes from knowing that he is with us always until the end of time.”
Wendy Goonan “Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Finding rest in Christ, the outpouring of the divine life, there's the path to joy. Those are the things that Jesus knows the little ones are able to take in.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Little Ones”
“The only way to receive the divine life is to become conformed to that life”
Bishop Robert Barron “Take My Yoke Upon You”
“Jesus is not in command of his life but he receives his life as a gift. This I think is what it means to be a 'little child'...to have an attitude of receptivity where you allow yourself to be moved by God and by God's way.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Have Revealed to the Merest Children”
“Let us not shy away from the demands of our environmental responsibilities but instead nurture our hearts through education, awareness and meaningful action”
Alice Dunlop “Seeds of Transformation- Cultivating Hearts for Our Common Home”
“True love gives even when nothing is given back. It isn't calculating and measured and careful, it's reckless, free, indifferent. This is just the way that God loves.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Fecundity of Your Heart”
“To know the will of God, to know the mind of God, to understand his purpose and path is all important. Without it you lose your way amidst all the conflicting voices and inclinations of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Sower”
“at the end of the day, some evils can be dealt with only by God. It's only God who has the delicacy and the wisdom to separate the wheat, the wheat from the weeds. Maybe sometimes in the presence of terrible evil we have to be patient and allow God to do his work.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Parasite of Evil”
“What is the risk of including people and getting it wrong? Mistaking weed for wheat? Actually, is there much of a risk because God has it all in hand, we do trust that right?”
Greer Hudson “Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Like it or not, weeds and wheat grow up together in this world. Tearing up the weeds isn't always the right answer. In fact, the wheat can be compromised.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Wheat, Seed, and Leaven”
“God's purpose is not to destroy the enemy but to change him, not to destroy the enemy culture but to convert it. Why doesn't God just eliminate his enemies, just get rid of them? Well because God loves his enemies.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Parables; Three Spiritual Lessons”
“when you see evil in your parish, you see evil in the national church, you see evil in the church internationally, be careful, be prudent, the extrication of that evil is always going to be a delicate business lest you compromise the good in itself”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystery of the Wheat and the Weeds”
“sometimes in the face of evil, the best thing to do is, in prayer and in patience, let the delicate hands of God do their work”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wheat and the Tares”
“can we see that if we're really focused on this Kingdom of Heaven, we have the freedom to bring from the storehouse both the old and the new?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Both the Old and the New”
“no matter how you find the Kingdom of God, whether it comes to you as a bolt out of the blue, as a gift, as a grace, or whether you find it after a long and diligent search, you must sell everything you have and buy it”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Treasure, a Pearl, a Net”
“The movement of sin is always in the direction of dispersion”
Bishop Robert Barron “Loaves and Fishes”
“Where does the courage to be come from? It comes when we borrow from the divine Christ something of his divinity. When we participate, yes, even in the stormy times in his divinity, we find courage, we find peace.”
Bishop Robert Barron “In the Storm? Look to Christ”
“I have a lot of people say to me, you know, 'how can you be aboriginal and Catholic?' Well, we see Jesus' story and we affiliate it with somebody that's been persecuted for doing nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong in this country. You know, we had God with us since the beginning of time.”
Sherry Balcombe “19th Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“God has lordship over the waters, yes, and so can you, so can I if we have faith in him. If we look to him, we make him the center of our lives, we keep our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our eyes fixed on him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Walking on the Water”
“Sometimes we complain about what we do not have but in reality we don't use what we do have”
Anne Pattel-Gray “Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“God's concern is with all of his creation and with all of humanity”
Bishop Robert Barron “Chosen for the Sake of the World”
“Are we being tried and tested the same way by the same Christ? Yeah, I think so. What's our response? Discouragment? Walk away? No, no. May our response be that of this woman. Perseverance in prayer, perseverance in faith that we might be ready to receive the gifts that God wants to give us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How Great Is Your Faith”
“How come God doesn't give me what I want when I want it? How come he seems silent sometimes? Maybe he's giving my faith something hard to press against, something hard to resist because in that very trial, in that very struggle my faith becomes stronger and stronger and stronger.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Testing Our Faith”
“If we're nothing but humble, we're nothing but deferent to God, well then somehow you're just too distant. If we're nothing but intimate, nothing but in-your-face, well then we're not acknowledging that God is God. The attitude of prayer is her attitude that combines both these elements.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Witty Response”
“Has our faith in Jesus grown stronger through our experience or the experience of others around us? Where has Christ been in our own life journeys?”
Toni Janke “An Unshakeable Faith in Christ – Son of the Living God”
“To be with Christ is to know what you're not. It's to know what you left behind.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Gates of Hell”
“We don't choose Christ, Christ chooses us. We don't join his club, he joins us to his body. We've been called personally by him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Ekklesia”
“they've been given this special charism to confess accurately and truthfully who Jesus is...The one who as true God and true man guarantees salvation. In that confession Peter and his successors have this infallible charism. In that regard they constitute a rock upon which the Church is built.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Thou Art Peter”
“A focus on technological solutions...often seems like a good idea to maintain our current standard of lifestyle but like Peter's efforts in the Gospel, might it also give us a temporary sense of control over global challenges that need a deeper more transformative and local solution?”
Sally Neaves “22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Worldly success or worldly failure. Popularity, unpopularity. Honor, dishonor. Rightly ordered, the soul can handle all of those situations”
Bishop Robert Barron “Losing One’s Soul”
“What is your final frame of reference? Is it 'how do I avoid pain' or 'how do I love'? See, how you answer that or how you determine that will shape everything else in your life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “But for Wales…?”
“Path of discipleship is the path of self-sacrificing love and that means, again in the high paradox, it will be a path of suffering, yes, but it's the only way past suffering to real life”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Problem of Suffering”
“Why does he rebuke Peter? Well, because he doesn't get the cross. Christians, it's always the same story. It's always the same story in the Gospel. Those who don't get the cross don't get him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan”
“Are not my daily transformations the degrees by which I turn my face towards Jesus? The degrees by which I'm being changed into his likeness? The way in which I increase my depth and capacity to receive love itself? The degrees of holiness made possible by my attentiveness to the little things and faithfulness to my vocation over time?”
Trish McCarthy “The Transfiguration: for a purpose and a promise”
“these moments where that divinity shines forth through humanity, come forth a lot more frequently and a lot more near to us than we might realize”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Have no Fear When God shines forth through Man”
“We're not meant to be simply nice people, we're meant to be sons and daughters of God. We're meant to be citizens of heaven. We're meant for an elevated transfigured life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Transfiguration and Deification”
“How do we have access to the glory of Jesus Christ? We have access through our love for him. Christianity is about falling in love with Jesus.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystery of Light”
“Christians, this world we believe is real but not ultimately real. It's beautiful and good and true but it's not ultimately beautiful, good and true. In fact, it's a kind of symbol of a world that is much richer, more perfect, more intensely real.”
Bishop Robert Barron “That Mysterious Light”
“Now is the time for us to call on all members of the community to help restore right relationships on planet earth”
Janet Galos “23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“forgiveness from those who we had forsaken when partnered with our own behavioural change builds trust between ourselves and those we have wronged”
Alice Carwardine “24th Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Herod's whole existence was conditioned by, predicated upon what was good for Herod. Joseph's whole existence and behavior are conditioned by obedience to the word of God. See, this would make all the difference.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Herod and Joseph”
“This is not some drudgery that we're forced to go through in order to get some reward. But rather we must see the path of love as itself already an anticipation of Heaven.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How Not to Think About Heaven”
“Who are the latecomers in our lives that we have trouble accepting?”
Eleanor Flynn “Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“How much time I waste fussing about things that don't matter at all like: who gets more credit? Who's at the front of the line? Rather we've been given this stunning privilege of contributing to the mission of the kingdom of God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Privilege of the Mission”
“The Bible wants us to enter into a true friendship with God whereby we fall in love not with his benefits but with him”
Bishop Robert Barron “Going Beyond a Mercenary Love for God”
“One of the beautiful things about God is his enduring grace, forgiveness and love for us. God doesn't give up on us even when our backs are turned and we keep saying 'no.' God patiently waits for the 'yes', our 'yes' in whatever form that 'yes' takes.”
Jo Curran “Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Our faith is not a passive acceptance but a deliberate choice to follow Christ wholeheartedly”
Padmi Pathinather “28th Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“You can't serve the God of love by hating people”
Bishop Robert Barron “Caesar and God”
“Even as we render to Caesar what's legitimately his, it acknowledges, people of faith, that Caesar, politics, law, belongs to God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Render to Caesar”
“This command to love God has to involve love in action, rather than just feelings. Jesus embodied this in his resolute journey to the sacrifice of the cross.”
Nicki Bowles “30th Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“How much do I love the person I love least? That, answering that question is a litmus test. It gives us a general sense of where our relationship with God is. Because Jesus does not separate God and our neighbor, nor ourselves.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “A Litmus Test for our Relationship with God”
“The love of God conduces to the love of neighbor, it dovetails with it because Christ is both divine and human”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Greatest Commandment”
“God is not taking, God is a 'letting be.' Therefore, you have to learn how to give if you want to have God. Let that sink into your heart.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Parable of the Talents”
“It's not a competition. The point is to do what you can with what you have. Some get 5, some get 2, some get 1. Okay, that's the way it goes in life. But we're not competing with each other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Great Spiritual Law”
“You want your faith to grow? Give it away. Spread it. Invest it. You want your faith to disappear? Bury it. You bury your faith in the privacy of your own life...what will happen is that faith will eventually fade away.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Burying the Talents”
“Cling to your life you'll lose it in the same way you lose the money you cling to. Invest your life in love and you will find it 30, 60 and 100 fold. That's the key to sainthood.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Life is a Risk”
“Jesus goes into sin as God's obedience, God's fidelity and he thereby absorbs the power of sin and takes it away. How do we usually deal with sin? We sin in return.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Into the Cacophony of Sin”
“So I ask myself: what does a change of heart mean to me? Where is the change of heart present in my life? Where is the change of heart absent?”
Frances Tilly “Second Sunday of Advent”
“Stop thinking about your life as your project. Start thinking ‘my life is not about me.’ Start thinking ‘my life belongs to God and serves God’s purposes.’ See, all of our diversion and attachments are subservient to the basic position that my life is about me. My life is a project of self-satisfaction.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Bracing Figure of John the Baptist”
“he wants us to be dipped into the Divine Life. That's what it's about, that's what it's about. Repentance, confession, the desert, getting rid of distractions, diversions, all of it, is a preparation for that great baptism.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Repent!”
“Try this, to go through a day and see it not from the standpoint of your ego but to see it from the standpoint of God and God's will...Do I see them as opportunities for me, success and failure for me? Or do I see them as invitations to move into a deeper relationship with God? It's the converted or repented mind that can see it that way.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Voice in the Desert”
“The world is made right through the humility of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Bending Low of the Son of God”
“What's revealed here by the banks of the Jordan is the deepest truth about God that has been the case from before all time. The play of love between the Trinitarian persons, Father, Son and Spirit, is now revealed to us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “An Icon of the Trinity”
“Jesus gave up so much power. Not just in this story but just in becoming human. He embraced being human and all that that entailed. And so what might we be called to give up not just for Lent but to take a better path?”
Teash Taylor “First Sunday of Lent”
“Because unless the problem of sin is dealt with, no amount of physical well-being will bring us salvation. Moreover, unless the problem of sin is dealt with, the very condition that make possible the exploitation of the poor will remain in place.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Shortcuts from the Cross”
“Once we discover and encounter these new ways of being and doing we see a completely different future. A light dawns and our worlds are changed. So why would we go back?”
Steff Fenton “Third Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“The conviction of the gospel writers I think is that unless and until you find Christ at the center, unless and until you're ready to give everything up and follow him you haven't yet begun to live”
Bishop Robert Barron “Following the Lord”
“Once we see now what Jesus' program is, we know what our program is and it's time to get to work”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Work of the Messiah”
“Your spiritual joy and your perfection will be found in the measure that you seek out those who are lost and bring them into the communion of God's life”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Irresistable Call”
“What's holiness? It's friendship with God, friendship with God. That's the one thing you should want above all.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Key to Happiness”
“Jesus spent his lifetime seeking out those who needed him the most and he offered them healing, company, inclusion, love and eternal reward in heaven”
Tania Waring “Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“If you want to be happy well then you want the divine life in you...the divine life is mercy, hesed, love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Blessed Are We”
“You want to be happy? Seek mercy and peace. Become a conduit of these two things.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How to Be Happy”
“Be like unto Christ Jesus, that's what it means to follow the Beatitudes. And you know what? You'll be happy when you do.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Beatitudes: A Spiritual Program”
“When you make God the center of your life it means that God is everything, not your own control. It means that in some ways you will be powerful and in other ways you will be altogether weak. That doesn't matter so much when you made God the center of your life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Program for Freedom”
“To be the 'salt of the earth' we must be present and active in the world. To be 'light of the world' we need to share ourselves with the world. We cannot claim to be followers of Jesus and yet remain bystanders, looking on, understanding what is going wrong but doing nothing about it.”
Liz Little “Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“What's my job in the world? Well, it's to, precisely as a Christian, preserve, highlight, season what's best in the culture and to get radically in the way of what's dysfunctional in the culture.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Responsibility of Christians During Troubled Times”
“What does it mean for the Church to lose its saltiness? It means to lose its distinctiveness, its spicy particularity, its slightly annoying uniqueness. When the Church simply blends in with the world, it doesn't help the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Light of the World, Salt of the Earth”
“Where do our bad actions come from? That's what Jesus is interested in. He wants the Law to go all the way down there.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be a Saint!”
“Once we have the gift of faith we are duty-bound to pass it on and make it relevant in our lives and to the world”
Marilyn Hatton “Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“The Church, yes, makes an extraordinary ethical demand. It wants us to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect. And at the same time the Church makes a radical offer of forgiveness.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Extreme Demand, Extreme Mercy”
“Where as the ancient sages of Israel focused on actions, Jesus will focus on the interior space from which actions come. That's why we can say he's radical in his speaking for he gets to the roots of things. Radix in latin means root.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Preaching the Radical Word”
“God's love, listen now, is not something that is doled out according to our categories of justice”
Bishop Robert Barron “Love as God Loves”
“embrace the truth that no one life is worth more than another in God's sight and this includes our enemies”
Sally Longley “Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“The very difficulty of this approach throws one necessarily back on God and that's always a good thing. Compelling us to rely on grace. Because finally what Jesus is recommending here is a living out of the divine life. This constant, consistent path of love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Perfect”
“Yes, Christ could I suppose shepherd the whole Church by himself but he gives us the privilege and prerogative of sharing in his work”
Bishop Robert Barron “Shepherds, Warriors, Healers”
“Compassion is relational, it's engaged, it's not a pity that allows a distance to be kept but a mucking in together to share experience, to learn with and from and not just about others. Compassion draws us towards solidarity.”
Bec Lindsay “Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Christians, it's all about gift. Christ's compassion to us is a gift, now we in turn must become gift for all those around us. In this we are Apostles. In this we are the Church.”
Bishop Robert Barron “And His Guts Were Moved”
“My hope and my prayer is that each of us at the end of each day, as we lay our head down to rest, no matter how messy it may be at any given moment, may be able to say...'thanks be to God for the life that I have'”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Embracing the Messiness”
“When looking for the power of God, do not look in the places the world tells you to look. To see what is of great importance, don't listen to the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Great Reversal”
“God's power is a power of self-emptying love. The love that is willing to become small and powerless for the sake of the other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God’s Subversive Ways”
“What's real power? Real power is a love that gives itself away, becoming weak and powerless for the sake of the other.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christmas Surprise”
“strength became weak that weakness might become strong seeking peace in unfailing hope and truth-telling love”
Kay Goldsworthy “Christmas Day - The Nativity of the Lord”
“As First Peoples we honor the Creator and know the Creator was moving amongst us, with us, besides us, through us, well before the invasion of his land they now call Australia”
Alison Overeem “Weaving the laritja/threads that sit in the ever present basket”
“The Word becoming flesh, therefore, is God coming to dwell definitively in his world in such a way that the effects of sin are turned away”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ-Mass”
“See friends, that's what it's about. It's the Word of God, with God from the beginning, the Word that is God does not remain in splendid isolation but now comes down, joins us and lifts us up.”
Bishop Robert Barron “In the Beginning was the Word”
“We tend to say power means 'I'm independent, I'm in nobody's hands. I rely on nobody.' The true God, the power that sustains the whole universe is just the opposite. God lets go of himself in love and places his own life in our hands offering us his friendship.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Word of God in Our Hands”
“Mary is precious to us all. Her attributes of wisdom, discretion, knowledge and love make her a truly precious matriarch to us all.”
Di Langham “Mary, Mother of God Solemnity”
“One of the central tragedies in the spiritual life is we know what God wants but we don't do it. We know what God wants but we procrastinate...we make excuses.”
Bishop Robert Barron “To Treasure Revelation”
“strength became weak that weakness might become strong seeking peace in unfailing hope and truth-telling love”
Kay Goldsworthy “Christmas Day - The Nativity of the Lord”
“As First Peoples we honor the Creator and know the Creator was moving amongst us, with us, besides us, through us, well before the invasion of his land they now call Australia”
Alison Overeem “Weaving the laritja/threads that sit in the ever present basket”
“The Word becoming flesh, therefore, is God coming to dwell definitively in his world in such a way that the effects of sin are turned away”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ-Mass”
“See friends, that's what it's about. It's the Word of God, with God from the beginning, the Word that is God does not remain in splendid isolation but now comes down, joins us and lifts us up.”
Bishop Robert Barron “In the Beginning was the Word”
“We tend to say power means 'I'm independent, I'm in nobody's hands. I rely on nobody.' The true God, the power that sustains the whole universe is just the opposite. God lets go of himself in love and places his own life in our hands offering us his friendship.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Word of God in Our Hands”
“Think of the magi, they came to Christ not despite science. They came to Christ precisely through their science.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Science Points to God”
“Something's been shown to the whole world, that we have this King of Peace who draws all of us together”
Bishop Robert Barron “The King of All the World”
“Once the Lord breaks through into your life, savor that moment and follow it all the way to the source of what is true and good and beautiful. That's the best way to respond to an ephiphania, to an epiphany”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Attentive to Epiphanies”
“Being attentive to God's presence...has more to do with a way of being in the world that involves openness to the unexpected and a critical and careful, personal and communal dialogue between our life experience and our faith tradition”
Veronica Lawson “Epiphany of the Lord Solemnity”
“Epiphanies and wisdom are found in the child and the adult. The child in Bethlehem and the adult on the way from Galilee to Jerusalem.”
Coralie Naida Ling “Epiphanies of Wisdom”
“No matter the cost, no matter the embarrassment, no matter the difficulty, follow the tug of Christ which is leading you to eternal life and to the things of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Herod and the Magi”
“Let's overcome this old mythology of the war between religion and science. Science at its best is revered by religion and religion is the proper source and goal of all the sciences.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Religion, Science, and the Journey of the Magi”
“Who's that baby? The manifestation of the divine love which made the whole universe and which seeks us out with the passion of a mother or a father...Finally our spiritual seeking must give way, must surrender, and must allow itself to be found.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Epiphany”
“the magi stand for this coming together, a properly constituted reason which knows how to surrender itself to the source of all reason”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith, the Friend of Reason”
“these magi, they left their home country and came back changed. Why? Because they had found a king who made them citizens of a nation that was greater than their own nation”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ and the Nations”
“The Church is the great international organism anticipated by the magi who come to Christ at the beginning”
Bishop Robert Barron “Magi Came From the East”
“The more you surrender to Christ Jesus, the more you break open the coffers of your heart, the more your life will be transformed and revolutionized”
Bishop Robert Barron “Breaking Open the Coffers of Your Heart”
“the journey of magi, Christians, is our journey. Five steps I pointed out, first, be attentive...Secondly, when you see the sign of Christ go for it...Thirdly, expect opposition on the way...Fourthly, when you come to Christ give him your best...Finally, expect that you will be different”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Journey of the Magi”
“God trusts very imperfect people to tell his story...and it has taken some wild twists and turns of interpretations over the centuries but God continues to allow us to tell his story just as he did with the first disciples.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “A Missing Detail on Resurrection Sunday”
“Where do you look to find Jesus? Like these disciples are you looking in a tomb? Is Jesus a figure of past history? A person you hear about in a church? In a building? Or is Jesus a living person you can glimpse in your current life?”
Dr. Mary Coloe PBVM “Easter Sunday”
“Friends, a very blessed and happy Easter to you all! The Resurrection of Jesus is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Lessons of the Resurrection”
“We don't take in the resurrection as some 'oh, that's an interesting fact from long ago'...we take it in as the definitive sign of the lordship of Jesus. The definitive sign that he's God from God, light from light. The definitive sign that God's love is more powerful than anything in the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Breaking Out of the Tomb”
“Faith isn’t a set of propositions to be rattled off and defended. Faith, belief is a relationship.”
Patty Fawkner “The Empty Tombs of our Lives”
“what he showed thereby was that the divine manner of reestablishing order has nothing to do with violence, retribution or eye-for-an-eye retaliation. Instead it has to do with the love which swallows up hate with a forgiveness which triumphs over aggression.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God’s Great Yes to Humanity”
“The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the be-all and end-all of the Christian faith. Friends, if Jesus didn't rise from the dead all of us priests and bishops should go home and get honest jobs.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Easter Lessons”
“the one thing you would never expect in a cemetery or a grave is action or novelty. See and that's why the grave at the center of our Gospel today, at the center of Christianity is so weird and powerful.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Empty Grave”
“The Church’s Easter proclamation is the strangest message ever delivered: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. His resurrection is not merely a symbolic statement about Christ’s historical importance or...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Impossibly Good News of Easter”
“Graves are usually places of peace, repose, and meditation. We sit by a gravesite or we stroll through a cemetery in order to reflect on lives well lived or on...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Disquieting Grave of Jesus”
“this mission to announce this startling fact: 'Jesus risen from the dead' which changes everything. Changes the way you think, live, see, act. Changes the hope that you have for this embodied and transformed spiritual life”
Bishop Robert Barron “Victory Day”
“In a word, the resurrection is the Gospel. It is the Good News. When the first Christians, when Peter and Paul and John announced this message they didn't talk primarily about Jesus' teaching...what they talked about was Jesus risen from the dead.”
Bishop Robert Barron “He Has Risen”
“the final words of Jesus on the cross 'it is finished' potentially connect with the first words of the risen Christ to the assembled disciples: 'Peace.' Two terms of phrase that completes Christ's death and resurrection.”
Rachel McLean “Pentecost”
“God has arrived, holy and humble at the cost of God's blood, not ours, to invite all to walk the path to a better world”
Laura Tharion “Holding Hope”
“My prayer for each and every one of us, myself included, is that we may have the patience and the dedication that Anna showed, the willingness to keep going to the Temple to pray, the willingness to fast so that we may remain close to God that he may remain close to us”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “A Cameo Worth Noting”
“Are not my daily transformations the degrees by which I turn my face towards Jesus? The degrees by which I'm being changed into his likeness? The way in which I increase my depth and capacity to receive love itself? The degrees of holiness made possible by my attentiveness to the little things and faithfulness to my vocation over time?”
Trish McCarthy “The Transfiguration: for a purpose and a promise”
“these moments where that divinity shines forth through humanity, come forth a lot more frequently and a lot more near to us than we might realize”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Have no Fear When God shines forth through Man”
“We're not meant to be simply nice people, we're meant to be sons and daughters of God. We're meant to be citizens of heaven. We're meant for an elevated transfigured life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Transfiguration and Deification”
“How do we have access to the glory of Jesus Christ? We have access through our love for him. Christianity is about falling in love with Jesus.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystery of Light”
“Christians, this world we believe is real but not ultimately real. It's beautiful and good and true but it's not ultimately beautiful, good and true. In fact, it's a kind of symbol of a world that is much richer, more perfect, more intensely real.”
Bishop Robert Barron “That Mysterious Light”
“Where do you go to replenish, to open yourself to transformation that you will carry with you when you come down from the mountain?”
Sarah Agnew “Second Sunday of Lent”
“The transcendent supernatural mystical is a contact with a person. It's the realm of God and God is a person who speaks to the heart.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mystical Transfiguration of Christ”
“Sleep in the Bible is not good...sleep in the bible is a sign of spiritual inattention”
Bishop Robert Barron “When the Eternal Breaks Through”
“before Jesus there was the Law and the prophets; Moses and Elijah. Things were pretty clear-cut and simple. It was written in stone or they had said it...But after Jesus our goodness and life becomes about a relationship with God directly and that means that things that seem to be written in stone may no longer be that way.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “The Gift of Doubt”
“This Lent, may you see like never before, take the journey which isn't about giving something up but about change, and practice deep listening”
Brooke Prentis “Second Sunday of Lent”
“When you enter into this holy cloud, hear that voice: 'this is my beloved son, listen to him'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The More”
“Even the highest moments of mystical union are meant in the end to conduce to doing God's work in the world, becoming a conduit of the divine grace”
Bishop Robert Barron “Transfigured Prayer”
“May we use our outside voices in our work for justice for the uplifting of the lowly and excluded of our time. Or better still, may we be the ones who bless and encourage and who make way for them to make a proclamation of their own.”
Natalie Acton “Women of the word: Blessing and proclamation”
“What's holiness? It's friendship with God, friendship with God. That's the one thing you should want above all.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Key to Happiness”
“Jesus spent his lifetime seeking out those who needed him the most and he offered them healing, company, inclusion, love and eternal reward in heaven”
Tania Waring “Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“If you want to be happy well then you want the divine life in you...the divine life is mercy, hesed, love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Blessed Are We”
“You want to be happy? Seek mercy and peace. Become a conduit of these two things.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How to Be Happy”
“Be like unto Christ Jesus, that's what it means to follow the Beatitudes. And you know what? You'll be happy when you do.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Beatitudes: A Spiritual Program”
“When you make God the center of your life it means that God is everything, not your own control. It means that in some ways you will be powerful and in other ways you will be altogether weak. That doesn't matter so much when you made God the center of your life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Program for Freedom”
“The Church is now the body of Christ in the world today...God works through the Church but the Church does not control access to God”
Anne Frawley-Mangan “3rd Sunday of Lent”
“There is the divine dimension of the Church which remains immaculate, flawless. But the Church is at the same time a human institution, the Church is at the same time, therefore, always tainted by the sins of human beings.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Zeal for Your House Consumes Me”
“Mary's story is often seen as a testament to the power of faith, strength and the capacity for individuals to play a crucial role in unfolding a greater plan”
Myree Sam “Fourth Sunday of Advent”
“God is not trying to put you down, suppress you but God is trying to elevate you to a place where you could go on your own”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Fiat of Mary”
“Mary's story is often seen as a testament to the power of faith, strength and the capacity for individuals to play a crucial role in unfolding a greater plan”
Myree Sam “Fourth Sunday of Advent”
“God is not trying to put you down, suppress you but God is trying to elevate you to a place where you could go on your own”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Fiat of Mary”
“Jesus has proved God's limitless love all the way to the end, which we discover is no longer death but eternal life”
Elizabeth Young RSM “Easter Sunday”
“If we see it simply as a nice happy day, we can dress up and enjoy the nice weather, we haven't experienced it...Only when it shakes the foundations of our lives have we sensed its power and its importance.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Earthquake and the Light”
“There is good news in the radical solidarity of God with us, in the most difficult and heart-breaking spaces in our lives and in our world. But Mark also gives us hints that this is not all.”
Kylie Crabbe “And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid”
“The surrender to God is what makes me fully alive. And the Bible is trying to get us, look, out of this little puny space of the self-centered self.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Are You Willing to Surrender to God?”
“Your expectation of the Lord doesn't make you passive, it draws you up out of yourself in a active anticipation”
Bishop Robert Barron “Waiting in Action”
“Waiting is turning one's life, sometimes painfully, over to the purposes of God...not the life I would lead of my own volition but the life that God wants me to lead. That involves waiting.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Season of Sacred Waiting”
“Listening to God's voice, that's what's paramount when it comes to proper spiritual leadership. You don't listen to God's voice, you'll be a lousy leader.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Marks of Spiritual Leadership”
“we're meant to be now the water that flows forth from the side of Christ for the renewal of the world”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Place of Right Praise”
“Faith is an acceptance in humility and trust of God's vision, plan, purpose”
Bishop Robert Barron “Trust in God’s Plan”
“How often do we sort of let the sufferings of the world just kind of roll past us?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Love for the Poor”
“May the power you legitimately exercise always be animated by love”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Use – and Abuse – of Power”
“Can you see the cross, everybody, as God's descent into the very thing that is most wrong with us?...And then it's a remaking of it from the inside.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ, and Him Crucified”
“We're not saying everything in this world is bad. No, no. What we're saying is nothing in this world finally lasts.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All Things Must Pass”
“When God appears to you, you don't sit around, you don't wait til tomorrow, you don't put it off because there's something more important”
Bishop Robert Barron “Are You Anxious and Worried About Many Things?”
“What's brought the Church down? Nothing, nothing has brought it down.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Church Is Built on the Rock”
“the body and blood of Jesus that become present to us in every Mass is our participation anew in this magnificent moment of acknowledging our sin and receiving the forgiveness of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Join Your Life to Christ’s Sacrifice”
“We live now in the era of the Church, the great revelation given to us by Jesus is now developing and unfolding like a river, like a tree, like a plant...it's happening we trust under the guidance of the Advocate, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Holy Spirit Will Teach You Everything”
“The Lord Jesus Christ knows you and his voice echoes in the depth of your soul through the conscience. Listen to him, follow him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Voice in the Depths of Your Soul”
“could we start thinking about our Christian lives that way, as I make my way through today, what's my purpose? It's to be a bearer of the shalom of the risen Jesus to everybody I meet.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Everything Has Changed”
“What did he come to believe? Not that someone had broken into the tomb...but the far weirder fact that somebody had broken out.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Something Happened on Easter!”
“Christianity is not just about changing your ideas or changing your moral behavior. Christianity is about becoming a new creation...Jesus came to divinize us. To make us divine. To make us sharers in his own nature.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Heavenly Banquet”
“Are you ordering your life so as to be popular with everybody? Trust me, if you speak God's truth you will necessarily annoy some people. So how blessed are you if you're not hung up on the approbation of the fickle crowd.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Place Your Heart in God”
“God is ungraspable, yes, but God is also at the same time unavoidable. I can't control God but at the same time I can't run from God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Graced Sinners on Mission”
“How does the Lord return to his temple? In, in you know, vengeance and with mighty displays of power? No, no, no. He comes back as this little tiny helpless child.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Returns to His Temple”
“if you've allowed your identity to become compromised then you won't have a word to announce”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Can’t Give What You Don’t Have”
“What brings divinity and humanity together? Well, Jesus is in his own person, listen, the marriage of divinity and humanity. And that's why it's appropriate symbolically that the first of his signs would take place at a wedding.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Marriage of Divinity and Humanity”
“but if our preaching and teaching isn't drawing you closer to Jesus and closer to your neighbors, we preachers are not doing our jobs”
Radhika Sukumar-White “The Epiphany of the Lord”
“Doing the will of God in both cases, the case of Samuel, the case of Jesus, doing the will of God is more important, listen now, than even the most strongly felt family connections”
Bishop Robert Barron “Freeing Your Family for God”
“we are all exiles, every one of us, in the measure that we sin, in the measure that we are stuck in the slavery of sin, we find ourselves in a distant land, lonely, isolated, alienated”
Bishop Robert Barron “Have You Wandered Away from God?”
“So let's keep awake and alert, both to the message we carry and the message we may receive from others, God's unlikely heroes”
Keren Terpstra “Second Sunday of Advent”
“It's not bad news the Second Coming of Jesus, don't read it that way. It's the Good News that God from the beginning has had a purpose for everything.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Dimensions of Advent”
“Something's fallen apart, something's fallen away and a new world has emerged. The world of the resurrected Christ where we're not governed by the fear and the threat of death...We see things now within the horizon of God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A New World Unveiled”
“The danger is that we can become like the scribes and Pharisees, proud of our religious practices and commitment to the Church but blind to what is outside our door”
Bernadette Mercieca “How can we be more generous with what we have?”
“What's Christian theology? It's to order your life according to the love that God is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Highest Good Is God Alone”
“He's being summoned, ekaleó, into communion with Jesus. That's the Church, everybody. It's not a bureaucratic organization, it's a relationship to the one who's called us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Answering God’s Call”
“Real power, real glory, they look like a willingness to enter into the suffering of the world and with Christ...yoked to him to help him bear the suffering of the world”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Real Power Looks Like”
“You can be the most courageous person in the world but if you don't know how to apply your courage or when to use it, well, what good is it?”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Do You Ask God For?”
“In basic biblical anthropology...the fundamental building block of society is not the individual but the family”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Biblical Vision of the Family”
“Everything in the Church is meant to facilitate the flow of grace, so if grace is flowing don't get in its way”
Bishop Robert Barron “Whoever Is Not Against Us Is For Us”
“For us to love others without self-interest is not easy but love is oddly reciprocal. The more we give, the more we have to give.”
Patricia Smith “Exploring His Gentleness”
“What does God want? He wants his creation to recover its lost integrity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Opened!”
“Biblical Christianity is about conforming ourselves to the Son of God. What the Church Fathers called 'deification'”
Bishop Robert Barron “Do You Accept This Teaching?”
“The question isn't so much who is willing to eat and drink at this wise table...but who is willing to be that body, to remain in that body and be real food and real drink for the life of the world?”
Carmel Posa “Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“I'm meant even now to eat the bread that prepares me for eternal life and it gives me strength for the journey”
Bishop Robert Barron “Strength for the Journey”
“So today as Christians ponder the Bread of Life discourse, may they be aware of just how deep of the depths of the story which shape their Christian lives. May Christians treasure this sacred memory of the manna in the wilderness”
Teresa Pirola “Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“we’re united in seeing our sin on that cross and we’re united all of us in seeing our forgiveness coming from that cross”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Shepherd Has Arrived”
“The true prophet calls out injustice and social hypocrisy, exploitation and oppression wherever it exists”
Jenny O’Brien “Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“People of faith see things differently, not just what’s right in front of them, not just what’s obvious to any even canny observer, they see according to God’s plans and God’s purposes”
Bishop Robert Barron “See Things Differently”
“Alienation from God leads to shame which in turn leads to blame”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Is Sin?”
“And so with confidence we approach the table. We come not as individuals but as one united body in communion”
Carmel Pilcher “Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ”
“The concept of the three persons in one being of the Trinity has consequences not just about who God is but also who we are called to be”
Cristina Lledo-Gomez “Holy Trinity”
“So this is the Spirit who helps us to know and understand Jesus even more deeply than those who knew him in the flesh”
Mel Williams “Feast of Pentecost”
“Lent is precisely the time when we put ourselves to that test, when we ask ourselves that question: do I love the benefits of God or do I love God?”
Bishop Robert Barron “When Your Faith Is Put to the Test”
“See, what's one point of the fasting and abstinence and discipline of Lent? It's to, it's to discipline the body lest it try to dominate the self too much.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Are Your Soul and Body at War?”
“So may you and I, each of us, be witnesses to the power of God, what he can do in our lives because we trusted in him enough to take one step after another”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Of course I will it. Be healed.”
“just as Jesus long ago, violating all the social and religious conventions of his own time, reached out to those who are compelled to say 'unclean, unclean' so now, now in the life of the Church he reaches out still to us”
Bishop Robert Barron “Reaching Out to the Lepers”
“the more you are in touch with God the more devoted to love you will be. Or better, the more that divine love will start flowing through you into the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pray, Serve, Evangelize”
“So when Christ, for whom none of these difficulties present difficulties...he easily cast it out and what we find on the other side is a whole new life that we wouldn't have even imagined before”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Attitudes That Harm Us”
“Sometimes we need to recognize that so often we have multiple voices going on within us and as we progress in prayer we hope to see these multiplicities fly out to make room for us to become more ourselves, more simple, more filled with the pure voice of Jesus”
Dawn LaValle Norman “Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“What would your life look like if Jesus is unambiguously the center of your life in every way?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Listen to the Voice of God!”
“Every time God's goodness revealing Christ Jesus touches yet another heart and mind, there is a new epiphany”
Trish Hindmarsh “The Epiphany of the Lord”
“might I suggest on this Holy Family Sunday focus on St. Joseph, this dreamer, this man that saw at a higher level of perception, this protector of the body of Christ. Reach out to him in prayer”
Bishop Robert Barron “Go to Joseph”
“And it is the body with its appetites, its pleasures and all its various functions that God has chosen to make his love known among us. God's very self did not despise the human body but chose to inhabit it and to share in all its fullness, in all the messiness of human existence.”
Marian Free “Holy Family”
“This is Jesus who, yes, is the fulfillment of the Torah, yes is the fulfillment of the Temple, yes is the fulfillment of all the longings of the prophets...and perhaps above all is the new and definitive David, the king, the king who has come”
Bishop Robert Barron “He Will Rule Forever”
“Friends, for this Third Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to focus on John the Baptist, who of course is one of the great Advent figures. It’s as though...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Voice of One Crying Out in the Desert”
“So when he says 'stay awake' what he means is for us to begin here and now or to continue reflecting on our own lives. And this is a grace and a gift to ask for from God, both to have the presence of mind to make the effort and to have this inspiration guide us when we do it.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “How to Grow in Wisdom”
“Each day is a gift, an opportunity to recognise and appreciate the grace of God's love and to embrace the faith that has been entrusted to us”
Tessie James “33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“Jesus' radical challenge continues to call to us. To whom do I belong?...whose image and identity do we carry within us?”
Pina Ford “29th Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“If Christ is our cornerstone, we have nothing to fear. If Christ's word is our cornerstone, we have the knowledge of what we are called to do.”
Carey Anne Moylan “27th Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“The Transfiguration is the manifestation even before the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus' deepest identity”
Bishop Robert Barron “The True King Has Come”
“Our minds alone cannot see God revealed. We have to engage our imagination, all our senses and emotions so that the presence of God is encountered”
Angela McCarthy “The Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord”
“What's the hidden treasure? A wise and discerning heart. What's the hidden treasure? It's Christ dwelling in you.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Wise and Discerning Heart”
“Jesus invites us to ponder and learn from this parable to find in our hearts the treasure that may be hidden or the pearl of great prize that will enable us to divest ourselves of attitudes, fears and distractions that prevent us from experiencing God's unconditional love”
Catherine Mead “Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time”
“You can't read the Bible without being changed. If you just a little bit open your mind and your heart to this word, this word that made the universe, you won't be the same person afterwards.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Has Spoken; Are You Listening?”
“you can listen to the voice of God because he desires to tell you that 'I love you' and that you have no need to fear what anyone else thinks of you, however any one else may judge you, so that you can live each day out of the fullness of the life that he gives to you.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Telling Lies Telling Small Little Lies”
“I got failures and fears and anxieties all around me but at the level of my soul I am connected to that power which is here and now creating the universe”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Not Afraid”
“I don't hear Matthew saying in this text that we should not fear, I don't hear him saying that we will always be protected. Rather I hear him saying 'speak the truth even if your voice shakes' because the only way justice has a chance to survive is if it moves from being whispered in the dark into being spoken in the light”
Michelle Eastwood “Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“At the heart of John's reinterpretation of the manna story is an understanding of the importance of wilderness experiences in Jesus' life and the events in the life of the evangelist's community”
Alexandra Banks “Corpus Christi”
“There are so many reasons to fall into despair and to give up hope and the possibility of redemption for humanity, yet this is not how God saw the world”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “God has judged the world”
“It's because God is a trinitarian play of persons we can be saved. Not just outside of God begging for mercy but now through God's grace inside the dynamics of God's life, gathered by the Son into the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Bishop Robert Barron “To the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit”
“The world is loved by God. We are not saved in order to be saved from the world. Salvation is relational. We are saved for relationship with God, for eternal life with God.”
Teresa Brown “The Most Holy Trinity”
“You want the real thing, authentic power, surrender your life over to the Holy Spirit...you will find you will tap into this source of power to change things for good, change things for the better in your life, in your family, in your place of work”
Bishop Robert Barron “Surrender to the Spirit”
“Do we believe in the power of the Spirit in today's world working in and through us? You? Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit has been sent. Our Advocate is with us and we are guarded by the Spirit of truth and we dwell in the spirit of love.”
Elissa Roper
“what we mean is...he's gone into this higher realm, he's actually closer to us, more available to us than he was before”
Bishop Robert Barron “Why Did Jesus Ascend to Heaven?”
“Jesus had to leave because what he wanted were witnesses, not warriors”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Jesus had to leave”
“See, we're members of his mystical body. Shift the metaphor a little bit, we're the living stones that make up the temple that he is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be a Holy Priesthood”
“the ultimate thing that, that binds us is the fear of death. One day we'll hear the same voice calling us to come forth from our graves and have us rise from them. The Christ who wants to liberate us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Is Death the End?”
“the water Jesus is giving is the water of the divine grace and that never runs out. Provided that as we receive it, we give it. And then we get more of it. When we get more of it, give that away.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Thirsty Soul”
“there are kind of two types of people in the world. Some who suck air out of a room, others that breathe life into a room.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Friend of the Lord Jesus”
“Genesis Chapter 2, the great permission and then that one prohibition. Do not make yourself the criterion of good and evil. And then watch perhaps all during these 40 days of Lent: What's my relationship to pleasure, to honor, to power? Always submit yourself to God and then put the rest in relation to God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Time to Get Back to Basics”
“God prefers to give and to receive love through humanity. Every time that we love each other, however we may express it, we are glorifying God. We glorify God within us and we glorify God within the other.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “God is saying, “I love you.””
“This baby who is God has been placed in our laps this Christmas and as we look down into the face of that baby we are looking into the very face of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Became a Baby”
“our histories stand in continuity to this great biblical history. David to Ahaz to Joseph to Jesus to Paul and that trajectory continues now to us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Promise of Emmanuel”
“Put into practice the gifts of the Holy Spirit that God gifts to us so that when it comes to Christmas morning you can enjoy and have what was indeed worth striving for the entire time: love, peace and harmony among a group, among a community of persons.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Striving for What is Worth Having”
“Concentrate, everybody, during this Advent giving God highest praise, making Mount Zion the true pole of your life and you'll find peace breaking out more and more within you”
Bishop Robert Barron “An Advent Challenge”
“We do not know when the Son of Man will come. As Christians we do know we at least should not, must not, and cannot remain oblivious to the call to be Advent people.”
Cecilia Francisco-Tan “First Sunday of Advent”
“it's those who believe as those 7 heroic brothers did in the Old Testament, those who believe as Jesus did in life after death that are most committed to justice”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Reality of Life After Death”
“But all God needs is one little spark of interest and his infinite desire for you is expressed”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Have Been Loved Into Being”
“the healing was not the end in itself as good as that was for him. What was the real goal here? Was to move to the praise of God. Having been cured, having had the door opened through his own suffering and humility he finally comes to the right praise of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Where You Stumble, Dig for Treasure”
“Faith is a key element of being part of salvation. Salvation means being aware of our God who has set us free. And a response to salvation is giving thanks to God and giving praise.”
Angela McCarthy “Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Ours is to keep the vision before us, accept and embrace the mission we have been given to care for and to look after with all the strength and the inspiration that God gives us each day trusting in God, being one with all of creation and listening to the wisdom of creation that we are so grateful to serve.”
Jacqui Rémond “Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Try to adopt, everybody, some concrete practice that makes real your commitment to the poor. Let Amos the prophet and let the story of Lazarus bug you today.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How Are You Caring for the Poor?”
“voluntary poverty is about much more than living a simple material existence. It is about giving up self-centeredness for a greater good, what some might call the Kingdom of Heaven or the Body of Christ. One day we may even realize that the common good is actually our own individual greatest good.”
Patricia Gemmell “Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“Jesus' words call us to humility and care. His action in voicing those words calls us to speak up. This gospel urges us to ongoing conversion in our hearts, in our church, in our society.”
Christine Burke “Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time”
“When we think about faith like belief...it becomes a question of our willfulness. But I think that a much better word for faith is trust. And trust is something that can only develop over time. It's not even something that's in our control.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Growing in Faith is like Watching a Sunrise”
“Do we have the courage to listen to Jeremiah? To listen to Jesus? To let Christ light a fire in us and burn away what needs burning away? To break up the phony false forms of community so as to allow the true community of the Kingdom of God to be born?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Let Christ Light a Fire in You”
“Do I despair? No, I just kind of learn to live in the present moment, savoring what I can but also letting go. Why, why? Because I realize that the true good, the truly beautiful belongs to a higher world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Can’t Take It With You”
“once you know you're dealing with God he deserves all of your attention. Your life is about him. All your thoughts, all your moves, all your actions they're about him. They're focused and centered on him. It's the priority given to God in life. That's what we're meant to see here.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Focus on the One Thing Necessary”
“in our fallen sinful world we need psychologically and spiritually ways to express our contrition, our sorrow. The fact that we have altars in our churches, that priests come out in the vestment of temple priests and they perform a sacrifice on that altar, the holy sacrifice of the Mass, that's exceptionally important”
Bishop Robert Barron “Sacrifice, Covenant, Banquet”
“this divine life, this community that God is, wants to communicate now with us...God does it out of a sheer generous desire to communicate his life and with us human creatures he wants us to become sharers in the very life that he is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Is the Trinity?”
“The masculine Trinity has imprisoned our imagination for too long. Our tangible, static nouns and pronouns must be released. Our vision set free.”
Angela Marquis “Trinity Sunday”
“You've received the Holy Spirit. Now breathe it forth to your world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Seek the Mark of the Spirit”
“What Jesus demonstrated and showed in that act is that vengeance, violence, anger, resentment, fear, anxiety have nothing to do with God. He doesn't want any of those things for us and he doesn't want us to do any of those actions on his behalf.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Jesus Wants Witnesses, Not Warriors”
“All of us experience our own ascensions and that of others. It's all part of letting God do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Giving us new life and new spirit in all our relationships. Christ Jesus shows us that our lives can only be fully received after we ascend.”
Patricia Thomas “Ascension of the Lord”
“So Jesus is saying...I will send my spirit to dwell within you, the spirit of love to help remind you that what I came to give you is forgiveness. You don't need to earn my approval. I give you my forgiveness.”
Fr. Juan P. Ruiz “Not as the World Gives Do I Give”
“The claritas, the luminosity of holiness, and so our resurrected glorified bodies luminous with the holiness of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Awaiting Resurrection”
“the heart, your deepest center, the organizing principle of your life needs to be grounded, not in those ephemeral passing states of mind but in God”
Bishop Robert Barron “To What Does Your Heart Belong?”
“Friends, Jesus tells us his messiahship is one of service, not self-interest. As sinners, we have a tendency to understand our religious lives in a self-interested way, but the grace...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Give Away the Grace You’ve Been Given”
“Listen, when you bring the water, you bring what you have and you give it to Christ, you're going to find it elevated, intensified thirty, sixty, a hundred fold”
Bishop Robert Barron “Your Water Into God’s Wine”
“What do families teach us? One lesson I think is, we don't always get to choose the people we love but we're given people that we're then called upon to love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Love the Ones You’re Given”
“once I discovered my role...in God's drama, well then, I'm linked to everybody else who's found his or her role in that same Theo-drama. It's now we come together in common purpose.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Give Up the Ego-Drama!”
“With Christ's spirit to fire us, we are called to face up to and to challenge as best we can the cruelty and injustice we see at home and abroad, while all the time acknowledging our own human vulnerability”
Trish Hindmarsh “Third Sunday in Advent”
“John brings a message of repentance, a message that things must change, we must change if we are to see the salvation of God”
Emily Hayes “Second Sunday in Advent”
“How come our lives are still so fraught with danger and anxiety and failure? Well, because we're still waiting for the definitive coming.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Look Back, Look Around, Look Forward”
“God is not satisfied to be in the deep background of one's life”
Bishop Robert Barron “No God But the Lord Alone”
“Life expands as God gives us space for growth”
Janine Luttick “Who is the God you love?”
“But wisdom in the Bible means seeing life from the perspective of God, it means having an intimacy with God by which I now understand the world and live my life”
Bishop Robert Barron “It's Time for a Radical Choice”
“So remember the story of Eldad and Medad and let's overcome any type of ecclesial jealousy that would put formal structures above the grace of God. The formal structures serve the grace of God, not the other way around.”
Bishop Robert Barron “We Just Don't Get It”
“We know that as we listen to Jesus all our lives talk to us about the Paschal Mystery, we're preoccupied with who's getting ahead...so keep this image before you: Jesus with his arms around this little child, that's what the kingdom of God is about”
Bishop Robert Barron “Envy Will Destroy Us”
“It was precisely in his suffering that he accomplished this great act of justice”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Suffers for Us”
“The more we reverence something the more we surround it with laws. Laws are not oppressive. Laws are beautiful ways that we protect and enhance those things that we consider valuable.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Beauty of the Law”
“God never fights with the puny weapons of the world, that ends up just being self-defeating. God's a warrior indeed, Christ is a warrior, Mary's a warrior indeed but they don't fight with the weapons of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God's Warrior Queen”
“Ahead of his people, with his people, behind his people, the Good Shepherd continues to guide us”
Bishop Robert Barron “How To Be A Good Leader”
“God does not deal with puppets, he doesn’t want us to be puppets. God wants us fully engaged, listen now, cooperating with his purposes.”
Bishop Robert Barron “You Are Called To Be A Prophet”
“as the kingdoms of the world come and go God has been building this mighty kingdom with branches that stretch all over the world and peoples of every stripe and ethnic background and nation come and make their nest in these branches”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Last King Standing”
“Friends, for this feast of Corpus Christi, today’s readings run red, dripping in sacrificial symbolism. When we gather together for Mass, we are not calling to mind some disconnected historical...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lifeblood of God”
“Friends, Trinity Sunday serves as a wonderful opportunity to unpack the life-giving relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
Bishop Robert Barron “How to Understand the Trinity”
“For if the shape of community in the Church is always to be a work in progress, so too is mission. Both must be continuously focused on Christ in the diverse experiences of our world.”
Josephine Inkpi “Trinity”
“If we’re created in the image of God then we’re created to be in relationship too, with God and with each other”
Di Rayson “The Spirit of Pentecost”
“Friends, with these fabulous readings for the sixth Sunday of Easter, we discover an embarrassment of riches through the exploration of God’s care and concern for us. In this sermon,...”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Does God Want for Me?”
“Remaining in Jesus’ love, remaining attached to the vine is what allows life to flow through us”
Trish Madigan, OP “Fifth Sunday of Easter”
“Friends, Christ acts as an advocate for our souls through the cosmos-reorienting events of his death and Resurrection, the forging of a connection between heaven and earth. Our brother who...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Strangeness of the Resurrection and Why It Matters”
“What Holy Week are we being called into? What Holy Week are you being called into?”
Cristina Lledo Gomez “What Holy Week are you called into?”
“the greatest evangelist is the one who says 'I've been healed by my contact with this Jesus and now I want you to have the same experience”
Bishop Robert Barron “Go Tell the Priests”
“Friends, what if the dominant concern of your life is bringing people to Christ?”
Bishop Robert Barron “How to Evangelize”
“It's the divinity of Jesus revealed in the exousia, the authority by which he speaks and acts, that we are meant to see. Because embracing this Jesus, the prophet greater than Moses himself, is what Christianity is finally all about.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Prophet Greater Than Moses”
“though he's not a sinner he stands shoulder to shoulder with sinners, identifying with them”
Bishop Robert Barron “The God Who Enters Our Muddy Waters”
“Joseph subordinated his compassion for his family to the will and purpose of God. He didn't stop loving Mary and child but he situated his love for them within the framework of his love for God and that my friends is what made him holy and what made his family life holy. Love of God came first.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Makes a Family Holy?”
“The providential God, true to his promises is the Lord of history. The unfolding of his design, however, might not be what we expect and certainly will not be on the time table that we expect but in an attitude of hopeful anticipation we wait for its fulfillment.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Building a House”
“The third Sunday of Advent is traditionally called “Gaudete Sunday.” “Gaudete” is a Latin imperative—it’s a command—which means “rejoice.” The Church is telling us to be happy. And in the...”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Year of Favor from the Lord”
“In the spiritual order God's initiative is always first. The one thing the God of the Bible is not doing is passively waiting for us to come crawling to him...the biblical God is actively pursuing us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Clear a Path”
“Our first reading for this weekend from the book of Wisdom might easily slip past or through your mind, but it shouldn’t. It articulates what is arguably the central principle...”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Is Looking For Us”
“Trust me, when you hunger and thirst for righteousness, when you want one thing, your clean of heart, when your whole life is about hesed or tender mercy, you will produce peace around you”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Meaning of All Saints Day”
“Forgiveness is bearing the burden of the other. What the other should carry in justice you carry for him. Hard? You bet.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Hugging Anger”
“we are part of a mystical body so we can't retreat into privacy”
Bishop Robert Barron “Correcting a Brother”
“whatever power you have, whatever keys you've been given, use them everybody to unlock the doors that will lead to deeper life, use that power not to draw air out of the room but to breathe life into it”
Bishop Robert Barron “Shebna and Peter: The Nature of Authority”
“So grace first, yes, then our cooperation with grace. There's the spiritual life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Come to the Water!”
“What we want is eternal life. That's the promised land. That's the promised land. That's the life on high with God. What gets us through the desert journey there? What sustains us in that heavenly place? It's the supersubstantial bread.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Super Substantial Bread”
“The love that God is from all eternity is made manifest in his covenantal love for Israel but it's made unsurpassingly manifest in this great act by which the Father sends the Son into the world to gather us into his life”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Strange Doctrine of the Trinity”
“So Jesus is indeed the new Abraham, he's the new David but he's also the new Moses and that means he's a liberator”
Bishop Robert Barron “By the Waters of Meribah”
“God places his human creatures in a garden. Not a desert, not a lifeless ground, not a prison, not a place of isolation and exile. But precisely in a verdant and lively place...the original blessing comes before the original sin.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Disobedience of Adam and Eve”
“Our job is not simply to make our way through a difficult world or even to be noble of agents of conventional justice. Our job is to be light and salt and image of God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Holy”
“getting in touch with God and staying in touch with him, listen, will cause you to live in a place of ultimate safety where no one and nothing ultimately can harm you”
Bishop Robert Barron “Love as a Panacea”
“In his simplicity, in his humility, in his nonviolence, purity and docility this baby refines us and purifies us...When we gaze on him as Simeon does we're meant to find our salvation.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Lord Returns to His Temple”
“The people who walked in darkness did see a great light precisely in the one who declared himself 'light of the world'”
Bishop Robert Barron “In the Land of Zebulon and Naphtali”
“To be a Christian is to be grafted unto Christ and hence to be drawn into the very dynamics of the inner life of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Vitae Spiritualis Ianua”
“Though they didn't realize fully the other nations were in fact hungry and thirsty for the God of Israel”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Light of the Nations”
“The problem, and here we come to the heart of the matter, it's not that God is reluctant to give but that we are reluctant to ask. Not that God hesitates to give us grace but that we hesitate to receive it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Dream Big”
“Jesus' forgiveness of our sins...Knits God's creation back together, restores us to life. And so in this Advent season as Christmas approaches can I recommend this, to all of us, it's to present our infirmities and weaknesses to the Lord. Physical, yes, but spiritual maybe more importantly.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What You Hear and See”
“What does sin do? Again, Genesis couldn’t be clearer on this. It causes trouble in us, yes indeed, it causes trouble among us human beings and it causes trouble at the cosmic level. There’s a breakdown of what should connect all things together.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Messiah’s Work”
“So when should we prepare, everybody, for the coming of Jesus? Now. Now. When should we get our spiritual houses in order? Now. When should we do the searching moral inventory? Now. When should we knock down mountains that are higher than the Lord's mountain? Now. See, that's Advent”
Bishop Robert Barron “Getting the House in Order”
“What went bad from Adam onward, bad kingship, is now set right by the kingship of Christ. But this king wants an army, he wants us to join him and to participate in his work.”
Bishop Robert Barron “March in the Army of the True King”
“It's not because he was repentant that Jesus loved him, no, Jesus loved him and therefore he became repentant”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Love of Predilection”
“The key to obtaining what is good is prayer and the key to prayer is faith. When faith runs out, prayer fails. When prayer fails we don't get the good things that we want”
Bishop Robert Barron “Persistence in Prayer”
“His suffering, his embarrassment, his great thorn in the flesh was healed precisely through the quelling of his pride and the submission of his will to God's will. Easy? Hardly...but the only way to spiritual healing is through humility.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Path to Healing Is a Humble Path”
“Faith is a confidence in God, a reliance upon God even when we can't adequately see or understand what God is about”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith the Size of a Mustard Seed”
“the conclusion is be converted, now. Do something for the poor, now.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Don’t Forget the Poor”
“if you say economic and political power precisely for the purposes of God, good. Now exercise that power as much as you want. There's the subtle, balanced approach to power that we find in the Bible.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Yes and No to Power”
“See, God operates in myriad ways depending on the situation of his children. He finds, he carries, he welcomes. And in each case he rejoices.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Coin, A Sheep, A Son”
“He means that forms of false community have to give way in order for the true community to emerge...The one who speaks this word is the prophet. Now remember though, everybody, the one who dares to light a fire on the earth will meet the prophet's fate.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Fate of the Prophet”
“The only thing you'll have in the heavenly realm is the love you cultivated here below”
Bishop Robert Barron “Bigger Barns or Treasure in Heaven?”
“Trinity Sunday, when we talk about the persons within the unity of God, this is not just some arcane theological preoccupation but rather belongs to the very heart and the very essence of the faith.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Begotten Not Made”
“the preaching, miracle working, ministry, sacrifice of Jesus was not the end, it was the beginning of something...which is now going to continue in the Acts of the Apostles”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ascension of Jesus”
“It's not a question of your worthiness, it's a question of God's grace, God breaks into our experience”
Bishop Robert Barron “Invasion of Grace, Confession of Sin, Acceptance of Mission”
“Friends, when we're hooked up to the divine life, when we are married to God life never runs out”
Bishop Robert Barron “The First of the Signs”
“Surrendering to the will and purpose of God, finding your mission, that's what makes a family holy.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Hannah, Her Son, and the Holy Family”
“Therefore, rejoice. The king is now in our midst and we have no more disaster to fear.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Rejoice Always!”
“Don't think the spiritual life is a democracy. Don't think we can vote Jesus in or out. We don't surround him with checks and balances. We don't make him subject to our whims and passing moods.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Does It Mean to Say that Christ Is King?”
“When you are linked to God who is nothing but gift, then you can give and give out of that deep space and it will never run out”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Tale of Two Widows”
“figuratively speaking, we're all exiles in the measure that we've wandered away from the Lord”
Bishop Robert Barron “Coming Home from Exile”
“Isaiah we got 'suffering servant', Hebrews we have the 'temple priest' and the 'day of atonement', in the gospel we have the 'redeemer'. They're all types of substitutionary sacrifice.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Substitutionary Sacrifice”
“Without wisdom we won't know what to do with the goods of the world and they will eventually turn on us. With wisdom we will know how to use and enjoy even the simplest things that we have”
Bishop Robert Barron “Riches and Wisdom”
“the Bible focuses on the human being as irreducibly social. 'It's not good for the man to be alone.' So I mean, connectivity, community, reaching out to the other is just key in the Bible.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Biblical View of Marriage”
“We can get so tied up in our little games, protecting our little turf, making sure things go according to the little bureaucratic structures that we recognize, that we forget what the mission is about”
Bishop Robert Barron “Would That Everyone Could Be a Prophet”
“What Jesus does, remarkably, is he puts a child in the center of attention. In this beautiful gesture he shows us, it seems to me, the wonderfully upside down world we're meant to inhabit, the world that represents the overturning of original sin”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Undoing of Original Sin”
“We love the Law but we don't allow the Law to stifle the essence of the spiritual life”
Bishop Robert Barron “Law and Laws”
“Well if we want to live in this eternal realm we have become eternalized. We do that by internalizing God's wisdom made flesh.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Wisdom’s Meal”
“Lack of nutrition and proper exercise in the spiritual sense will be as debilitating to your soul as those things are to your body. We don’t feed the soul...the soul will hit the wall when it’s under duress”
Bishop Robert Barron “Spiritual Food”
“What's eternal life? That's a symbol for pure liberation, pure spiritual liberation.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Food for Freedom”
“What’s the right response to evangelization? Submit to his lordship and you’ll find rest.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Looking for a Shepherd”
“Authentic prophecy, when you’re speaking the word of God, always comes from the spirit of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mission of the Prophet”
“God sees death as a dormition, an anticipation of the greater life to come”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Did Not Make Death”
“Don’t be afraid to do small things at the prompting of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mustard Seed Principle”
“God never loses sight of us but it's a beautiful symbolic expression of the fact that sin always involves an alienation from God, a wandering away”
Bishop Robert Barron “Sin and Blaming”
“To truly understand what Jesus did at the climax of his life—and what the Catholic Church does at every Mass—we must understand the importance of blood sacrifice to Judaism in...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ultimate Blood Sacrifice”
“It’s often joked that Trinity Sunday is “the preacher’s nightmare.” But while the Trinity can be viewed as the most arcane and inaccessible Christian doctrine, it’s also the most ordinary...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Trinity as Call to Action”
“Our readings for this third Sunday of Easter provide lessons in fundamental Christianity and a kind of master class in preaching. And notice the tension they stress between sin and...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Basics of Christian Proclamation”
“On this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, we remember the dedication of this day by Saint John Paul II in honor of St. Faustina’s vision of Christ, in...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Divine Mercy”
“Entering Holy Week, we see numerous stirring examples of Jesus’ fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. From the direction he enters Jerusalem to his mode of transport, we find again and...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Return of the King”
“The Divine Love is the great theme of the Bible, but one of the mistakes we can make is to project onto God our way of being. God’s love is...”
Bishop Robert Barron ““Hesed” All the Way Through”
“The Temple, for Old Testament Jews, was everything. But St. Paul, who lived for many years in Jerusalem and knew the rituals of the Temple very well, told the Corinthians...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Cleansing the Temple”
“Whatever trouble we're in we should come to Jesus in the attitude of worship. He's the Lord, we're not. This is the key step in getting our lives in order whatever the issue is that we have. The key step is right praise.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Leper and Evangelization”
“We're all like this demoniac, we're not demon-possessed thank God, but we have disordered lives. What's the voice that calls them back to order? The voice of Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Prophet Like Moses”
“the real message of Christianity is a revolution. It's about the breakthrough of a new world prompted by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead”
Bishop Robert Barron “Radical Christianity”
“the real House of David now we understand was meant to be the body of his son in which God would be pleased to dwell and into which he would invite the whole world”
Bishop Robert Barron “Building a House”
“Our second reading today is taken from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians—and it always takes my breath away. He says, “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Rejoice, Pray, Give Thanks”
“How do we wait? That is the question addressed by Jesus’ parable for today. While we wait for the second coming of the Lord, we should keep our lamps stocked...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wise and Foolish Virgins”
“Our readings for this weekend are tough for everyone, but especially for those who are in positions of leadership in the Church. I’ve been a priest for 31 years (and...”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Challenge to the Sons of Levi”
“God loves with a special love those who are most in need of love, and therefore so should we”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Great Commandment”
“we're meant to see how weird it is that we consistently refuse the invitation from God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Parable of the Wedding Banquet”
“How are we tending the vineyard? We who receive so much from God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Vineyard”
“we should never assume the stance of moral superiority...We should never use the Law to aggress others and put them down”
Bishop Robert Barron “Judgment and Love”
“The whole point of receiving the divine light is to give it away in turn. If you cling to it and make it your private prerogative, you undermine it and it, in fact, turns to ashes, but when you give it away it is renewed within you.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Religion of Grace”
“Just as we can be defined by the things that we seek and love, we can also be defined by our fears”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Silent Presence of God”
“When we surrender to the path of love which he's laid out to us...our lives become infinitely lighter, easier, more joyful and they begin to move according to the divine rhythm and the divine purpose. See, what makes our lives burdensome, everybody, is that we are held captive to the old way of ordering things.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Yoke Upon Your Shoulders”
“In the midst of the world's struggles and difficulties you can find a place of safety and power when you are grounded in Christ Jesus”
Bishop Robert Barron “Prioritizing Our Fears”
“when one receives the Eucharist one's body is indeed being nourished but what matters above all is the change that has taken place through the power of the living Word. This Word that enables us now to participate in Christ, to be one with him, to share his life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Every Word from the Mouth of God”
“whenever I think about the Trinity or start talking about it I realize we are million miles away from a mere abstraction. We are getting very close to the heart of the deepest mystery of who God is and what the very dynamics of salvation are.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Communication of Love”
“think of the ascension of Jesus not as his going away but his going to a place of command. Where he is now going to direct the great work of his church.”
Bishop Robert Barron “At the Right Hand of the Father”
“The Acts of the Apostles is the story of how Jesus is gradually becoming king. How his power and influence are spreading all over the world. Now how, how? Precisely through the acts of his Apostles. And these acts, Luke insists, are a product of the Holy Spirit.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Spirit on the March”
“What is prayer?...One way to characterize it, it's attentive listening to God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Listen!”
“Holiness, the divine life, the divine otherness, is essentially a matter of love. In our love we are set apart from the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Holy, Be Perfect, Be a Temple”
“What is God working precisely where you feel most vulnerable, most alone, most lost?”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Great Light in the Darkness”
“The point is we might give up on God but God never gives up on us. We might think there's no meaning, no purpose during this but God keeps telling us 'yes, there is.'”
Bishop Robert Barron “History is Going Somewhere, And It Rhymes”
“Jesus comes to give sight to blind eyes. Well, one of the principal effects of the loss of the divine life is spiritual blindness.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Tell John What You See and Hear”
“real kingly power lies in God's self-emptying love...the force that is great enough to transfer us from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light is not one of the elemental powers. It's the love of God made visible on the cross of Jesus.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Aspects of Christ’s Kingship”
“Maybe ask the question that way next time there's someone that you concretely can help: why has God given me the wealth that I have and why has God placed that person or those persons in a perhaps unnerving way right on my doorstep?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Rich Man, Poor Man”
“if you take the plunge, you trust in God, what you'll find is life in abundance, life you never dreamed possible”
Bishop Robert Barron “Faith and the Reasoning of the Religious Mind”
“once we see everything in light of God we can learn to love the things of this world without clinging to them. Without expecting too much of them. Think how much disappointment and heartache can be avoided if we only learn this truth.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Bubbles, Everything is Bubbles”
“Without the other two, the apostolic becomes just mere social service. Without the other two, the contemplative can become something superstitious. Without the other two, the theological can become rationalistic.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peter, John, and Thomas”
“What's the darkness show in both Abraham and, and the Transfiguration story? Well it shows that we're not in charge.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Glorified Body”
“We should not trust in any of the powers of this world to give us final security and peace. Such peace will come only with the arrival of God's kingdom.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Advent and the Shaking of the Kingdoms”
“What if you try this now, for an entire day, the only relevant question was: What's the righteous thing to do? What would conform me more and more to the love that God is?”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Does It Mean to be a Saint?”
“in Catholic thought, beauty, the goodness of sensuality is transfigured, heightened, elevated when it's connected to love”
Bishop Robert Barron “Sexuality, Love, and Marriage”
“Christ once he’s awakened in you has the power to calm the storms that rage around you. We just have to find a way to wake him up.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Storm at Sea”
“look with the eyes of faith and see what God is up to as these mustard seeds grow into great trees”
Bishop Robert Barron “Walking By Faith and Not By Sight”
“We tend to read the Ascension along enlightenment lines, as if Christ has gone to a distant, irrelevant place.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Ascension Sunday: The Relationship Between Heaven and Earth”
“Authentic Christianity does not present Jesus as a ghost, an abstraction, or a disembodied soul. It presents him as risen from the dead, glorified and resurrected at every level. This...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Strangeness of the Resurrection”
“doing the will of God in the midst of a devastated world will always look weird. See, because people get used to the devastation, that's the only world you know.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ark, the Mass, and Re-Ordering the World”
“Sinners are meant to approach Jesus with the same confidence with which the leper approached”
Bishop Robert Barron “Evangelizing Out of the Encounter”
“God shows Job how little he understands of God's overall design and purpose. He reminds Job that his suffering is a tiny ingredient in a plan that includes the whole of space and the whole of time.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Spirituality of Pain”
“We never simply watch the baptism of Jesus from the outside as surveyors of a distant historical scene, the idea is we participate in it now”
Bishop Robert Barron “Priest, Prophet, and King”
“we who are in Christ we are called upon to...bring the reign of love into every aspect of life. That's the message, the kingly message we receive on this final Sunday of Advent”
Bishop Robert Barron “Adam, David, and Jesus”
“Christ proclaims himself as the King of everything. This is a bold claim for it puts everything under him. However, he is a very different King than what we typically...”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Not Very Cozy Advent”
“Church buildings should not be dismissed or rendered secondary, they have an enormous sacramental and symbolic significance”
Bishop Robert Barron “St. John Lateran and the Meaning of Church Buildings”
“As you pray for your beloved dead, take comfort in those words of the Lord: 'Everything the Father gives me will come to me, will come to me, I will not reject anyone who comes to me.' 'The souls of the just are in the hand of God.'”
Bishop Robert Barron “All Souls’ Day and the Mystery of Immortality”
“But social justice stands at the heart of biblical religion”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pier Giorgio Frassati and Social Justice”
“One can and should stand before God, individually and assume spiritual responsibility. One ought not to hide behind or lose oneself in the collective.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Taking Spiritual Responsibility”
“So stare at the cross today everybody as the Church exults it, stare at it. Let it shed the light on the dark places in you and let it be at the same time this enduring sign of the divine mercy.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Venerating the Cross”
“The trouble with running to everyone but the person that you are criticizing, talking behind his back, it is doing nothing to help the person and it is puffing up your already inflated ego”
Bishop Robert Barron “Correcting a Brother”
“Give away the grace that's given and you'll find your own life enhanced”
Bishop Robert Barron “Grace”
“You know what these two very different men had crucially in common? Was their love for Jesus Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Peter and Paul”
“part of the process of conversion is coming to a stance of complete reliance upon God and not upon ego”
Bishop Robert Barron “Bread in the Desert”
“if I say Jesus Christ is Lord of my life...it doesn't mean I pay attention to him for a few minutes once a week. It doesn't mean I pay him lip service...it means he has taken possession of me.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Drink of the Holy Spirit”
“So everybody on this 5th Sunday of Easter meditate on that temple in Jerusalem, which has morphed if you want into the temple of the Church, which in turn anticipates this great heavenly temple”
Bishop Robert Barron “Temple Talk”
“Does God need this sacrifice? Well of course not, God needs nothing but our salvation is affected through it. Our salvation is affected through this presentation by which we are brought back to the Father through the Son.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Presentation of the Lord”
“Paul says 'I preach one thing, Christ, him crucified.' He never forgets that Jesus is the suffering servant”
Bishop Robert Barron “Isaiah and Paul”
“Jesus' own risen body is now the true temple. It's now the place of right worship. The mystical body of Jesus, the Church, is now the point of reconciliation between divinity and humanity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Apocalypse and the Resurrection”
“What he's saying is resurrected life will be greater than marriage because an intimacy will be achieved that is beyond our imagining”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Resurrection of the Body”
“If you're in a good spiritual space, how will God's love break into your life? Ah, as something gentle and kind and pleasant. You're off-kilter to varying degrees, you're stuck in your sin and dysfunction, how will God's love be perceived? Trust me, as judging fire.”
Bishop Robert Barron “I Have Come to Cast a Fire Upon the Earth”
“Yes to the world. God found it good, indeed, very good. No to the world in the measure that nothing in this world is God. Live in that space and you'll find the right spiritual balance.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Great Yes and The Great No”
“Our solidarity in sin ought to awaken in us a greater compassion for each other”
Bishop Robert Barron “Every Saint Had a Past, Every Sinner Has a Future”
“The last days, which is to say the era of the Church, is when this new wine, Jesus' own divine life is on offer”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wedding Banquet that Overflows with Wine”
“Mary is now the voice of the Ark of the Covenant and the infant John the Baptist in his mother's womb is doing his version of David's dance. It's a dance now before the Ark of the Covenant.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A New Ark for a New Covenant”
“True kingship has to do with truth, it has to do with this graced encounter with God, with right worship...are we willing to give ourselves utterly to this priest, to this king”
Bishop Robert Barron “True Kingship”
“Jesus came to fight all of that. The dysfunction at the personal level...the dysfunction that abides at the deepest spiritual level.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Good News of the Apocalypse”
“The mark of ambition, again, is the focus on the ego. 'I want, not to do great things, but to get others to see me doing great things.' Not to accomplish some mighty end, that's good, but rather to become thereby an important figure in the eyes of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “True Ambition”
“Be like a child willing to be commanded, willing to surrender to the now, and the great now is God's mission, which is to forget your ego and so to allow his love to surge through you into the world”
Bishop Robert Barron “Envy and Ambition”
“We can use our own knowledge of the spiritual moral laws to attack our brothers and sisters. That's when the law becomes not a means toward freedom but becomes a kind of weapon of aggression.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Dilemma of the Law”
“The bread that Jesus gives which is identical to his very life and substance, gives life in the fullest sense. Now, why, why? Because it links us to the source of life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Bread of Life, The Body of Christ”
“Jesus was the meeting of heaven and earth. His Ascension returned him to God in order to reign as the world’s new king, and his orders to the disciples to...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Seated at the Right Hand of the Father”
“St. Peter’s impassioned sermon in the temple precincts condemned the people for killing the “author of life”, but further explains that Jesus’ resurrection means that he is forgiving the people...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Resurrection and the Forgiveness of Sins”
“God wants only what is for our good. Period. That's why obeying God is always a good thing for us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Listen to Him”
“Sin is a refusal to listen to the divine word and the divine command which is designed to make us fully alive”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus Among the Angels and Beasts”
“Jesus is God in the flesh therefore the source of all compassion. God is the power and energy that connects all things.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All Are One in God”
“listen today as you hear this gospel, listen to Jesus' own voice echoing in your own heart bringing you back to harmony”
Bishop Robert Barron “He Speaks With Authority”
“We've all heard the invitation of God, to enter into intimacy with him, to make him the center of our lives, to be married to him in Christ, and we find the most pathetic excuses not to respond”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wedding Feast”
“We don't own the world...we don't own the Church. Rather, these things are leased out to us. We are there to watch them, tend them, keep guard but we don't own them.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Parable of the Tenants”
“The idea now is to move into the space of God as best we can. To see the world from his perspective and then we have a revolutionized sense of what true justice is and then we live in an attitude of gratitude, not resentment.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Seeing the World from God’s Perspective”
“Trinity Sunday is a reflection on what reality is at its deepest level and upon what our salvation is. It is a surrender to love that wants us to be fully alive.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The God Who Is Love”
“But the question is: what is the Holy Spirit empowering me to do? Better, what has the Spirit already empowered me to do? See, in baptism and confirmation we have these gifts, now how do we use them? What are they?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Spirit of Power and of Truth”
“In Isaiah's mind, undoubtedly, it is the child of Ahaz, the line will go on. But now we see in light of the angel's remark that that was in fact a prediction of something even more wonderful.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Ahaz, Isaiah, and Joseph”
“Hope is the theological virtue, it comes from the inrushing of grace, the virtue by which our lives are ordered towards heaven and things of heaven as our ultimate good”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Virtue of Hope”
“He's taking one by one the things that we rely upon for our security in this world and he's telling us not to rely on them”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Remains?”
“Friends, you never know where the truth is going to come from. You never know who's going to be the bearer of God's word to you and if you're too uppity or too sophisticated to listen, you might miss the message.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Naaman the Syrian”
“the feast of the Assumption, especially in light of our readings for today, is a celebration of Mary's translation to heaven and is also precisely for that reason a spur to battle”
Bishop Robert Barron “Mary the Warrior”
“Who you are is always more important than what you have. Why? For who you are will last forever, what you have will fade away.”
Bishop Robert Barron “To Have and To Be”
“God doesn't need our petty sacrifices but, but it pleases him to receive them for they are an expression of justice. They make us just. They establish the right relationship between us and God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Sacrifice that Makes Saints”
“that's the purpose of the Church, it's to change the world. We read these three readings from this weekend...find great confidence in the fact that it is the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, who still guides us and still leads us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Guidance of the Holy Spirit”
“The true kingdom is this kingdom of love, which is embodied in the cross”
Bishop Robert Barron “Which King? Whose Kingdom?”
“Do you see in yourselves those gifts of the Holy Spirit? Are you consistently a radiant sign of God's grace in the world? Good, then you've allowed God to invade you. But if not, it's time to change.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Tale of Two Trees”
“The only source of real spiritual vitality is the Lord God. When you're planted in him you grow and you thrive even during the toughest times.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Whom Will You Trust?”
“See, when the true God breaks into your consciousness, he breaks into your life with his grace, nothing remains the same”
Bishop Robert Barron “Shaking the Foundations”
“Today’s scriptures clarify that the mission of the Messiah will not just be for the benefit of Israel, but for all the nations. Through the Jesus the Messiah, the Lord...”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Messiah for All the Nations”
“What do we do as we stand ready before the true Ark of the Covenant? We do what David did, we do what the infant John the Baptist did. We dance.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Joy Before the Ark of God”
“It's time, John is saying, for a new mind, a new set of eyes, a new kind of expectation. God is about to act, wake up. God is about to act, be ready.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Ready!”
“It's the Church's job now to do this mop-up work, it's the Church's job to engage this struggle knowing that we will win, knowing that in Christ we have already won”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Last Battle”
“the saints are God's masterpieces and he never tires of painting them in different colors according to different styles and different compositions”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Communion of Saints”
“Jesus endures and bears unjust suffering and thereby unleashes into the world redemptive power”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Suffering Servant”
“marriage is a reality deeply blessed by God and reflective of the way God is”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Theology of Marriage”
“At the heart of Jesus’ kingship, listen, is the vision of a new life”
Bishop Robert Barron “A New Shepherd; A New Kingdom”
“So we’re all called to be prophets, we’re all called to be disciples. What does it mean? It means it’s not your life primarily, it’s God’s call. It means not the door that you open, it’s the door that’s opened for you by God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Way of the Prophet”
“The Trinity is not simply a theological connundrum for scholars to fuss about.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Center of Our Faith”
“The Ascension of the Lord empowers the Church to fulfill its messianic mission: to gather the nations of the world into a relationship with the God of Israel.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Feast of the Ascension”
“The readings for today effect a correlation between the resurrection of Jesus and conversion. The biblical word for conversion is “metanoia” which has the sense of “going beyond the mind...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Resurrection and Metanoia”
“From the time of Marx, Feuerbach and Freud, we’ve heard the critique that religion is a wish-fulfilling fantasy, a game of “pie in the sky when you die.” The readings...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Resurrection and the Love of This World”
“There are some debunkers of religion around today who want us to believe that the story of the resurrection is just another iteration of the myth of the dying and...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Resurrection of Jesus is Not a Myth”
“Life is grim. It is marked by conflict, division, inextricably difficult situations. And brooding over all of it is the fact of death. How do we deal with this mess?...”
Bishop Robert Barron “Dealing With the Mess”
“The whole purpose of the Church, his mystical body, is to be an agent for the transfiguration of the world”
Bishop Robert Barron “Get on the Ark”
“the leper stands here not so much for just the socially ostracized but for those of us who have wandered away from right worship. Those of us who are no longer able or willing to worship the true God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Becoming Fit for Worship”
“David's kingdom would be fulfilled in Christ his distant descendant and then the promise made to David and to Solomon about the Temple, fulfilled not in the ordinary, cultural, historical sense...but fulfilled mystically in Mary who becomes herself the Ark of the Covenant, the Tabernacle, the Temple of the Word of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “Reading the New Testament in Light of the Old”
“We won't be able to appreciate Jesus unless and until we know how much we need him”
Bishop Robert Barron “Prepare the Way of the Lord”
“the renewed temple is the body of Jesus Christ, where divinity and humanity meet. Church, every church building in the world now from St. John Lateran to the humblest parish church is a representation of that temple. It's a sign, a symbol, a figure of the mystical body of Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Dedication of St. John Lateran”
“Those who have died have passed beyond this world, that's true, but they've not disappeared”
Bishop Robert Barron “All Souls Day”
“What in your gut is your life about? That's what worship refers to.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Three Tasks of the Church”
“What does God want? God wants to share his life with us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Sacred Banquet”
“Do we have this within us, to carry forth to the nations this great message of the God of Israel that comes to its fulfillment, its full fruition in the crucified and risen savior?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Lessons from the Vineyard”
“God's power is precisely in his capacity to give himself away”
Bishop Robert Barron “Old Adam or New Adam”
“What looks like deep injustice or simply dumb suffering can in fact, the Bible says, be ingredient in God's overall design”
Bishop Robert Barron “As High as the Heavens”
“The solution to human self-elevation is divine self-abnegation. To get this little rhythm is to get much of Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Triumph of the Cross”
“You are morally obliged in love to do fraternal correction but then, how do you do it? Do it in this loving manner recommended by Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Fraternal Correction”
“'Truly' they say 'you are the Son of God.' Now listen Christians, that's the confession of the Church up and down the ages to the present time. When we stop saying that we stop being the Church.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ, the Son of God”
“in the Bible, election is always for service and never for glory”
Bishop Robert Barron “Election”
“What's the Church's business? What's the Church's deepest identity? Simply this, to make people holy.”
Bishop Robert Barron “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic”
“The Father sent the Son, yes, even into the depth of our sin. Why? That we might be gathered by the Son into the Holy Spirit. That's the whole purpose of the spiritual life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Dangerous Spirit”
“the deepest principle and most powerful sign of the Holy Spirit is love. Why do we know that? Because that's what the Holy Spirit is.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Five Signs of the Spirit”
“A priest is a mediator between God and human beings. Someone who offers a sacrifice and praise to God and thereby links divinity and humanity. A priest is a kind of pontifex. That means bridge builder.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Priesthood of the Church”
“You see what this story is saying? If God and his criterion, grounded in his own mind, remain at the center of your life then it becomes a garden, a place of delight”
Bishop Robert Barron “Back to Basics”
“What are the struggles that other people are having and how can I help them? Apply this principle within families.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Holy Family Values”
“all the signs that we ask for, all the dreams that we dream, they're all finally related to Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Ahaz and Joseph”
“Advents can be scary things. How come? For something breaks in to end, upset and rearrange the current state of affairs.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Incoming!”
“how was Jesus the new David? He did the two great things that David was expected to do. He gathered the tribes...Jesus battled. No, not with the earthly weapons of David but with the weapons of the Spirit.”
Bishop Robert Barron “David and Jesus”
“we look for the resurrection of the dead, we await the resurrection of the body. Higher, more beautiful, elevated, transformed and transfigured life through God's love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Resurrection of the Body”
“The Ten Commandments have two tables, the first of which commands the love of God, the second of which commands the works of justice and compassion”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Natural Law”
“Allow these questions, Christians, to sink deep into your soul this week: Who finally comes first? Who finally matters?”
Bishop Robert Barron “Gospel Freedom”
“Easter is the dawn of a new creation. St. John tells us that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early on the morning of the first day of the week....”
Bishop Robert Barron “A New Creation”
“the ultimate test of love is the love of those who are not going to love you back”
Bishop Robert Barron “Enemy Love”
“if we obey him, we listen to him, follow his will, he will find a way to transfigure and transform those ordinary things into something beautiful and uplifting and intoxicating”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Task of the Church”
“What's the purpose of a family? To be a forum in which all the members of the family discern and find their vocation.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Biblical Family Values”
“All of us are in our sin exiles, heart-broken, far from home. But what's the good news? In Jesus Christ we find the way back.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Return Home”
“God's justice is arriving, God's new world is breaking in. And now order your life around that perception and let everything else fall into place around it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Second Coming”
“whatever we have we should always be deeply mindful of the fact that it's come to us from God as a gift and it's meant ultimately to serve God's purposes”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Chief of the Nations”
“Prudence is a feel for the particular. Wisdom is a vision of the whole. That's why they're such a potent combination, why it's so important to ask for both those things.”
Bishop Robert Barron “I Asked for Wisdom and Prudence”
“in marriage the couple themselves are the sacrament, they themselves are this living sign of Christ's love for his Church”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Two Become One Flesh”
“what are we willing to sacrifice, yes, even to cut dramatically out of our lives in order to gain eternal life? That's the hard question raised by this very challenging language of the Lord Jesus.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Cut It Off or Cut It Out”
“You want to destroy yourself? Cling to your warring emotions, they will devour you. You want to save yourself? Hook those passions on to the infinite purposes of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Warfare Within; The Warfare Without”
“Does Jesus fight the definitive battle? Yes, he does...By absorbing their hatred in love, forgiveness, compassion and thereby transforming it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The True Davidic Messiah”
“Friends, the Eucharist is a hard teaching. Always has been, always will be.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Many Went Away”
“In the cross the Shepherd has done his work, now we who are grafted onto that Shepherd, we have work to do. We participate in Christ breaking down the walls of enmity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Cross is Our Peace”
“prophesy means speaking God’s truth. You all got that responsibility in your own way, according to your own talents.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Call of the Prophet”
“For this feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord, I reflect on the Mass as a sacrifice. Sacrificial language runs right through all of our readings for today,...”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Mass and Sacrifice”
“On the feast of the Trinity, we reflect on the uniquely Christian definition of God: God is love.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God Is Love”
“It's summed up in his cross. He took all the negativity of sin upon himself and then swallowed it up in his own divine mercy.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Speaking to Moses and Elijah”
“What do people see in the saint? Not so much the saint, they see God shinning through. What do you see in sinners? You see the sinner because the sinner's ego is blocking the light.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Giving God the Glory”
“Paul has been seized by the Lord Jesus Christ in such a way that he must proclaim him. It's a compulsion, 'I'm ruined if I do not preach it.' It's an obligation that has rooted itself in his very blood and bones.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Compulsion to Evangelize”
“this is what Jesus Christ does in us when we allow his authoritative voice to ring in us, he gathers the whole self so that we are like saints”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Distinct Authority of Jesus”
“the spiritual payoff of detachment is the conquest of fear. I'm not afraid. I'm not clinging to things of this world so that if I lose them I'll be terrified.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Detachment Again”
“The Prince of Peace has come and he reverses the logic of the world, which is the logic of sin, and reveals to us the logic of God: love and power coincide”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Baby Born in Straw Poverty”
“It's a great paradox, the paradoxical drama of the Bible, we become more powerful when we render the ego powerless”
Bishop Robert Barron “David and Mary”
“Our first reading for this Sunday is an especially sacred one in the Christian tradition, for it was precisely this passage from Isaiah that Jesus chose to comment upon when...”
Bishop Robert Barron “To Heal the Brokenhearted”
“At its best, religion orients our lives to God and moves us away from the terrible preoccupation with our own egos.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Trouble With Religion”
“Are you being invited to this wedding banquet? All the time. Every minute, every moment, God who pervades all things, God who speaks through all things, he's spending his time inviting you to the wedding banquet.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Wedding Banquet”
“What goes wrong? I forget this principle. I forget that every breath I take is from God and for God. I forget that every degree that I ever earned is from God and for God. I forget that my family is from God, therefore for God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Vineyard”
“Who are we to be passing judgment on God's justice?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Generous Landowner”
“Keep in mind frequently your own sins. I know we want to forget them. What are we very good at? We're very good, exceptionally good at keeping the sins of others before our mind's eye”
Bishop Robert Barron “Seventy Times Seven Times”
“The Lord is sowing the seed of his word every moment of every day in everything and everybody you encounter. The most important question in your life: how do you respond to it?”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Irresistable Word”
“That's what it means to be a saint. That you fear God above all things. What you are most afraid of is not losing wealth, health, power, yes even your life. What you're most afraid of is losing friendship with God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “What Are You Afraid Of?”
“The Church, rather, is that place where I participate in the great mission of Jesus Christ. The Church is that instrument formed by Christ to draw the world into friendship with him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The New Israel”
“Which is why, Christians, that when we love, we participate in what God is, we find joy...this is about the very structure of your life. The more you love the more you're like God and that gives you joy.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The New Pope and the Trinity”
“on this feast of Pentecost pray, pray. Invoke the Holy Spirit: 'Come, Holy Spirit, stir up in me that gift you want' and when you find that gift make it the absolute center of your life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Falling of the Fire”
“Redemptive suffering is this: clearly, consciously, publicly, I stand in the presence of injustice and I suffer because of it, allowing the person provoking this suffering to see it...he is shamed into an awareness of what he is doing and it awakens in him a desire for repentance”
Bishop Robert Barron “Redemptive Suffering”
“What is our God interested in? Life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Lazarus, Come Out”
“Salvation occurs when our desire for God meets the even more powerful desire of God for us”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Infinite Thirst”
“God breathes into us his life. We have a living God who wants us to be alive with his life. The trouble is when we start resisting it...That's when sadness sets in. The living God who wants us fully alive, that's the message here.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Getting Back to Basics In the Spiritual Life”
“we're dealing with a God that wants friendship with us, he wants intimacy with us. How do we get it? By walking behind him, coming after him, conforming our lives unto his. This is the whole demand of discipleship.”
Bishop Robert Barron “They Abandoned Everything”
“Here's the challenge, Christians, not to set our own agenda, not to set our own path but to let ourselves be named, chosen, called, set apart, rendered distinctive precisely by Jesus Christ because in his will, not our own, is our peace”
Bishop Robert Barron “Called, Set Apart, Sent”
“the first move of the sinless Son of God is to make himself look like a sinner, is to stand shoulder to shoulder with us sinners. This is the whole revolution of Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Baptism of the Lord”
“The Word that becomes flesh in Jesus Christ is the pure power of God”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Word Became Flesh”
“Never underestimate the power of God. Stop overestimating your own power.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Virgin Shall Be With Child”
“Sometimes it is only through the rigors of the desert that we come to flower as the servants of God. We got to go through the desert time. Religiously intentional people do it in a very conscious way, most of us have to be dragged through it. It's the only path to the full flowering of the self.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Blooming Desert”
“You want to live in the power that makes the whole universe, perform the simplest act of love. In that you become a loyal subject of Christ the King and then you discover the secret to power.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ the Crucified King”
“Never in the bible does God impose himself on our freedom, rather from Adam and Eve on, human freedom is always consistently respected. Christ is among us, yes, even in Jericho but he's passing through. Meaning we have an opportunity to give our lives to him and we better take it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Zacchaeus, Hurry Down”
“Maybe the best way we can hand down the faith is by putting the moves of the faith in the bodies of the next generation. Don't privatize the faith, make it something interior. Rather, let it get into the body as something concretely practiced.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Will the Son of Man Find Faith on the Earth?”
“what's the test of your religious conviction? It is precisely the way you treat those who are most immediately and concretely in need.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Amos’s Challenge”
“This is what incarnation means. Our God breaks these social differences, divisions, stratifications because he has come with his relentless mercy to seek out precisely us sinners.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A God of Relentless Mercy”
“in itself admiration, honor, glory it adds nothing substantial to you”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Trouble With Honor”
“When you pray, do so in faith. When you pray, forgive someone that you're warring with. When you pray, do it persistently. When you pray, do it in Jesus' name.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ways of Prayer”
“whatever you're doing, the many things, your duties, responsibilities, cares, preoccupations, as you're doing them can you honestly say, 'this is in accord with what God wants?'”
Bishop Robert Barron “The One Thing Necessary”
“When you know what God wants you to do you do it...without hesitation, without second-guessing, without questioning you do it because it's not your will that matters so much, it's God's will”
Bishop Robert Barron “Elijah, You’re Fired!”
“What does the Trinity do? It plays. What do the three persons do? They delight in each other's presence...Christians, we imitate the Trinity when we too can delight in what is good and right and beautiful around us. We play our way into the deepest truth about the Trinity.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Three-Personed God”
“The Ascension does not mean basically that Jesus goes through a journey within space and time but, rather, that Jesus undergoes a journey out of space and time into a different and higher dimension, into the dimension of God's own life”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ascension of the Lord”
“Don't hang on and cling but trust, have faith, be willing to be lured by the God of adventure”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Adventure of Faith”
“We have a God who wants nothing but to marry us. He wants nothing but to elevate us, to transform us into his own life. If only we have the grace to cooperate with him and do whatever he tells us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Great Wedding”
“How common this theme is in the Bible from beginning to end: the reversal of expectations, the little giving rise to the great, look not to worldly splendor but look to the tiny and the out of the way and the insignificant for that's where God is going to be found.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Three Advent Lessons”
“God is joy and the world is the outflowing, the outpouring of the divine joy”
Bishop Robert Barron “Gaudete!”
“we remember the dead and we realize how they are even now influencing us”
Bishop Robert Barron “Commemorating the Faithful Departed”
“What is Jesus concerned about? Not so much following the prescription, making sure everything fits just so. What he's concerned about is the flow of grace.”
Bishop Robert Barron “God’s Grace and the Structures of the Church”
“The Cross can be a triumph only because God raised him from the dead, and I don't mean that in some vague symbolic way”
Bishop Robert Barron “He So loved the World”
“Why does Jesus go to the cross? To show the length and depth and breadth of the divine love? And why does Jesus perform miracles? Because he is the bearer of God's saving power.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Meaning of the Miracles”
“the danger is sometimes we become so obsessed with the external of the Law, the secondary expressions of it, that we forget the Law itself, the undergirding, the core of it. Don't make this mistake.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Heart of the Law”
“When we consume the Eucharist, we don’t make bread come alive, rather, that bread, that heavenly bread makes us come alive because, listen, it assimilates us to it...we are made into the body of Christ”
Bishop Robert Barron “Living Bread”
“Jesus is now this Good Shepherd made flesh, this Good Shepherd come among us to lead us even when we have suffered from bad leadership and bad shepherding”
Bishop Robert Barron “Sheep Without a Shepherd”
“Christians, grace cost because grace always means mission and discipleship. When Christ breaks into your life and he reforms you that means he's going to send you on a mission and he's going to draw you beyond yourself in a way that you never imagined.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Who Do You Say that I Am?”
“Another homily from Fr. Robert Barron and Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Ultimate Sacrifice”
“The risen Christ makes two basic moves: he shows his wounds and speaks a word of peace.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Risen Jesus”
“The logic of the world says if you love something, you want something, you cling to it, you hang on to it, you grab it, you defend it. The Biblical law of the gift says no. You want your being to increase, you want your life to be enriched? Give it away as a gift.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Law of the Gift”
“What does sin do to us? It drives us apart, sets us at war with ourselves.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Angels and the Wild Beasts”
“Whatever in you is distorted bring it with humility and with love back to Christ and then expect this healing to take place”
Bishop Robert Barron “Seeking the Lost”
“We owe God everything and yet we pay him nothing in thanks and praise...The liturgy is the act by which we thank and praise God and thereby render to God what is due to him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Presenting Our Gifts”
“What's the Christian drama? Not so much a quest to find something but a quest to get rid of something. Jesus came to take away the sin of the world.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Friend of Sinners”
“Think of this, Christians, sin is a loss of direction”
Bishop Robert Barron “Here Comes With Power the Lord God”
“We hear today the parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins. The former are ready for the bridegroom when he comes;”
Bishop Robert Barron “Be Vigilant”
“The problem with the Pharisees is not what they teach. It is that they use religion–the very thing that is meant to take us out of ourselves–”
Bishop Robert Barron “Woe to You Pharisees”
“Well, Christians, what belongs to God? Everything. Everything belongs to God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Caesar and Christ”
“Your breath, your body, your creativity, your skills, the world that you live and move in, the beauties around it, that's what Jesus is telling us here: we don't own it”
Bishop Robert Barron “Tenants of the Vineyard”
“how God distributes his graces, that's God's business. It's not our business to ask 'why?' in a defiant way but rather it seems to me it's our business to ask 'why?' with a sense of awe and wonder, putting ourselves in the context of God's infinite justice.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Off-Putting Generosity of God”
“He sows his love every place, exuberantly, creatively, even a little bit irresponsibly, over the top is how he sows his seed. What's the good news of this gospel is, look, if you are the least bit receptive to it you will come to life 30, 60 and 100 fold.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Sower Went Out to Sow”
“There is something, Christians, wonderfully untamable about the Spirit. Just when we think we have God corralled, we have the ways of God figured, the Spirit has a way of blowing over all of our structures, all of our assumptions.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Feast of the Spirit”
“Every baptized person has at least one gift. God never draws people into his life without equipping them with the gift of the Holy Spirit. That's what it means to live the Divine Life.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Holy Spirit: Sharing the Divine Life”
“Christian preaching, Christian proclamation is always about the work of God. What has God done? He has raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Proclaiming the Easter Gospel”
“To what degree is my life under the control of my sensual desires?...If I am dominated by these desires I can't fulfill my mission because my mission from God might entail anything but physical pleasure.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Jesus in the Desert”
“Jesus Christ wants to be the center of your life. That power around which all of your talents, all your abilities, all of your powers revolve. Jesus says 'I want to live in you. I want to be your life, your mind, your will.' To pray it seems to me is to access that center.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Pray, Fast, and Give Alms”
“Christianity in a certain sense is a religion of fulfillment, the Lord has come, the Incarnation, Redemption have taken place, it's happened. But in another sense, Christianity is permanently a religion of waiting because we wait in joyful hope for the second coming of the Lord.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Patience, People”
“They saw in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, listen now, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Apocalypse Now?”
“Heaven is a place, listen now, where our bodiliness will be so rich and so intense that we will be able to relate to all those around us in the most intimate, powerful and rich way possible”
Bishop Robert Barron “What About the Body?”
“As we look around our homes and we look at our lives we can all find luxuries that we really don't need. Every year rid yourself of one of them. Friends, like it or not Lazarus is at the gate and we are called by God to care for him.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Lazarus and the Rich Man”
“What's the greatest spiritual tragedy? Looking our infinite desire for God unto anything less than God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “All is Vanity, and That’s Good News”
“Faith is a passion for the impossible even when it's the end of my strength beyond what I can know. I, nevertheless, trust.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Rules of Prayer”
“Faith means desiring one thing. Faith means that my life is focused unambiguously, without competition, without compromise on God and the things of God.”
Bishop Robert Barron “A Passion for the Impossible”
“you're going out as lambs among wolves, that means what? You can't rely on your own power. Rather, you must learn to rely on the providence and the direction of God as you go about your work”
Bishop Robert Barron “God’s Tender Providence”
“What Christ is saying is “if you are my follower you must be utterly free from all those constraints, interior and exterior, and you must be willing to say, 'Lord, I live only for you'””
Bishop Robert Barron “It is for Freedom that Christ Set Us Free”
“The Church is not an organization like that. The Church is an organism, it's a living thing. Christ is its head and its life. Christ is the life force that holds together a body. There's the great image: the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Liturgy as a Display of God’s Justice”
“God makes the world not because he needs it but because God's love is so rich and is so hot and is so intense that it spills over into the world that we know”
Bishop Robert Barron “Our God is a Community of Love”
“Listen, Christians, God wants us participating in his work. What's his work? Liberating the world. Who are his accomplices? All of us.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Between Fear and Complacency”
“When we don't fall in love with the world then we truly love it and truly enjoy it. When we look to heaven then we love the world appropriately.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Resident Aliens”
“Baptism is literally a Christ-ening, a turning of someone into Christ.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Christ-ening”
“You are members of the body. When you fulfill your characteristic function you are doing now what Christ intends.”
Bishop Robert Barron “The Living Body of the Church”
“The purpose of life is not to satisfy our desires. The purpose of life is to discern what God wants us to be and do and then to have the courage to do it.”
Bishop Robert Barron “Gospel Family Values”
