I joined the Catholic Church when I was 15 years old. As a baby, I had been baptised in the Anglican Church, and my mother was a very devout Anglican all her life, as had been her parents.
There was this story of an old but sick man who won a huge prize from lotto. The relatives were afraid that if they broke this news, he might have a heart attack and die.
When seeing his chosen people turning away from Him and worshipping the golden calf made of their hands, God was full of wrath, dressing down Moses, “Your people whom you brought out of Egypt…” sounding like God is disowning his people.
For those, like me, who have ever played the game “Pokemon Go”, you might be able to relate with me. As far as I understand the game, you capture as many Pokemon monsters as you can.
In 2018, I attended the episcopal ordination of Bishop Ewald Sedu, in Maumere. Maumere is a very Catholic town, on the very Catholic island of Flores, in very Christian eastern Indonesia.
How many of us, especially the younger generation, have thousands of Facebook friends but have never met them in person? I am sure one of them.
The first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah speaks of how Jeremiah was ill treated for doing God’s work. He is thrown in the well since he is accused of dampening the spirit of the soldiers and the people by speaking the truth.
The Gospel reading for this Sunday invites us to be ready and dressed for action. We remember the Gospel from last Sunday, where the rich man, seeing the bumper harvest he had, thinks of building bigger barns and store all the wealth to himself and doesn’t even give a second thought of sharing it with the other.
To borrow a story from a good friend of mine, Fr Bel San Luis, SVD, there was a man who wanted to have a lot of money so badly that he promised the devil to do his work in exchange for a copy of the newspaper a day ahead before it was published so that he could get the winning Lotto number in advance.
This Sunday’s Gospel is surely at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It begins with Jesus instructing his followers how to pray. He says those words that Christians cherish, the Our Father, and then he talks about asking for things and receiving what we need.
A contractor needed one more man to chop down trees for export. One day, two men appeared willing to do the job but only one could be employed so what the contractor did was to put the two men to a test, they were to chop down as many trees as they could in an eight-hour shift and the man who chopped down more trees got the job.
When I was still a seminarian, I was in Surigao City, a city northeast of Mindanao Island in the Philippines and one day as I was walking around a corner a car nearly sideswiped me.
An atheist friend once said, “The Bible message is nice to read, but it is too beautiful to be true”. Of course, it is beautiful, who would say otherwise?
This Sunday’s Gospel reading is one of those passages of Scripture that is very hard to understand. Jesus seems to be contradicting himself.
The Feast of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ
Fr Elmer Ibarra SVDToday we celebrate a feast that is central to our faith. We celebrate the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine that we consume during Mass. We believe that after the priest says the words of consecration during Mass, the bread ceases to become bread and it becomes the body of Christ.