Homilies

I know what it’s like. My Dad’s nursing home is closed to the public and my Mum is in hospital, allowed no visitors. Today I’m saying Mass in an empty cathedral and miss my people very much.

On this day in 1535, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London woke old Bishop Fisher at 5AM for his 9AM execution. He decided to go back to sleep so to save his strength for the occasion!

It’s blowing a gale, the sea is wild, the waves breaking over, the boat filling with water (Mk 4:35-41). Where’s Jesus when you need Him? Sound asleep…

There’s an old Peanuts comic in which everybody’s self-appointed life-coach, Lucy, is telling her younger brother Linus about the many uses of a tree. “They provide shade from the sun,” she tells him, “and protection from the rain. They prevent erosion, and their wood is used to build beautiful buildings.”

Faust: in German legend he was a learned, successful yet dissatisfied man who made a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The legend has been retold in books, plays, movies, even an opera.

Jacques Pantaléon was a cobbler’s son who entered the priesthood and, with local mystic Juliana of Liège, introduced the Feast of Corpus Christi into that diocese.

How do we measure a life? By the length of years, wealth or honours, Facebook friends and Instagram likes? Is it more a matter of whether a person got what they wanted much of the time, a good balance of joys over sorrows, things to be proud of over causes for shame?

Many of you will know the TV series The Chosen, written and directed by Dallas Jenkins, and starring Jonathan Roumie as Jesus. It is the first ever life of Christ as a multi-season series, crowdfunded and viewed through an app.

Two hundred years ago Frs Philip Connolly and John Joseph Therry were appointed the first Catholic chaplains to the colony. They’d barely arrived when they started building the first chapel to Mary Help of Christians on this site and the first Catholic school in Parramatta.

Happy birthday! We gather today, as we would for any birthday party, so we can celebrate the Church’s birthday together. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that before Pentecost the disciples gathered in the upper room with Mary to pray for the wisdom to know what to do next (Acts 1:13-14).