BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut  ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) I hate labels. Not the kind we put on jars or folders, but the kind we put on people to indicate our own superiority. "Liberal" and "conservative," for example, which have legitimate meaning in their own right, have come to be often abused in this way, as a slur against those whose opinions differ from ours. It’s not so long ago that "Protestant" and "Catholic" were labels of this same kind. 2017, just two years away, will mark the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. The hostilities are no longer what they were. Some, perhaps many, of the disagreements have been resolved, but the most fundamental ones have not. One of these relates to the issue of faith and works. The Catholic Church placed and places significant value on works, that is, good deeds, and believes that they are important...

Fr. Charles Irvin Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35 At many points in our lives we all must face and deal with change, change that requires us to abandon the old familiar patterns in which we live and move into new and unfamiliar ways of living. We seem at times to want change and when it occurs we don’t like it, don’t want it.  In times of change our emotions must cope with fear of the unknown. The loss of our sense of security forces us to muster up the courage and strength to enter into what changes bring to us in the way we think, feel, and act. Fear plays upon us, causing us to resist change; and because change always brings loss with it, the loss of our former securities and patterns of living that we both want to change and don’t want to change. Deep within our hearts and souls insecurity conflicts with security in a war between each other. We experience an internal war between two states of being, passivity and change. The readings we just now hea...

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) How much food can you buy for $11,600.00? Maybe 1,365 small pepperoni pizzas. Not enough. Or about 2,900 hamburgers. Not enough. Or about 1,900 rotisserie chickens. Still not enough. Not enough, according to the Apostle Philip, to feed the large crowd that was following Jesus. "Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little," he says. Assuming today’s federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, times 8 hours a day, times 5 days a week, times 40 weeks, you get $11,600.00.  Not enough to feed this crowd. This feeding of the multitude is one of the few events that is recorded in all four Gospels. In each case the text specifies five thousand men, and Matthew even notes that this number does not include women and children. The point in each Gospel is that what is on hand, the "supply" in economic term...

Fr. Charles Irvin 2 Kings 4:42-44; Ephesians 4:1-6; John 6:1-15 Once upon a time a cruel hunter killed a beautiful mother eagle. A chicken full of compassion took the eagle’s egg from its nest and put it with her own eggs. It was a bit uncomfortable because the eagle’s egg was considerably bigger. But that detail isn’t of any significance for us here. When the egg hatched the farmer named the baby eagle “Chickie” and treated her as he treated all baby chickens. As she was growing she just assumed that she was a chicken like the others. One day “Chickie” saw some birds flying high in the sky. How “Chickie” envied those birds in the sky! She so much wished she could fly like they did. Unfortunately, no one told her that she was an eagle and could fly high up into the heavens. Then one day a stranger came into the barnyard, caught sight of “Chicky” and instantly recognized what she was, an eaglet — not a chick. He took her out into a nearby field and began to make her hop from his ...

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) The heart of Jesus, we are told, was moved with pity for the crowd, “for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” There are various ways for such a situation to occur. Nowadays, the obvious and literal case described in the Gospel is found when there are simply no shepherds to tend to the sheep. One thinks immediately of mission lands where one or two missionaries travel almost constantly in hopes of visiting each community two or three times a year. We can forget that in many parts of our own country, less than 150 years ago, that was the reality as well, with many rural areas served by “circuit priests.” Many dioceses seem to be reverting to that condition. In the Archdiocese of Boston, for example, there were so many priests 50 years ago that none of them could reasonably expect to be named a pastor before his 25th anniversary of ordination, if ever. To...

Fr. Charles Irvin Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34 Plans. All of us are familiar with plans. There are family plans, school plans, plans at work, travel plans, game plans, and all sorts of other plans. Our days are lived out in them. Even our fun times are planned… sometimes over-planned. Some people can’t stand plans. They want things to be spontaneous and enjoy the surprises that can come when things are unplanned. Others can’t stand to do anything, and I mean anything, without a plan. They need structure; they go nuts without structures. The world in which we live these days, with all of its many demands, requires us to plan ahead. Few of us have the luxury of unplanned holidays and vacations. Most of us cannot get away unless we plan time for getting away from all the tasks that face us in our everyday weeks, months, and years. In today’s Gospel we heard about the apostles who had been out preaching and had come back to Jesus to report about all they had bee...

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) One of the members of my La Salette religious community is Father Joe, who just turned 87. We get together often for an afternoon of “tea and computer.” He tells me what, in his insatiable curiosity, he needs to know, and I look it up on my laptop. But the first thing is always a visit to NASA’s website, APOD, i.e. “Astronomy Picture of the Day.” Fr. Joe loves science. Not rarely we find something like this. “The Eight-Burst Nebula (pictured above)… originated in the outer layers of a star like our Sun… Neither the unusual shape of the surrounding cooler shell nor the structure and placements of the cool filamentary dust lanes… are well understood.” At which point Fr. Joe will say: “In other words, they haven’t got a clue!” We are meant to understand. That’s why we have a mind. Even children eventually come to realize that “because I’m the Mommy” isn’t a pr...

Fr. Charles Irvin Amos 7:12-15; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13 We are in ordinary time now. In the liturgies from Christmas until Pentecost we entered into all that God our Father has done for us and all that His Son has done for us in His birth, life, death, and resurrection. God has sent His Son among us not just to tell us that He loves us, but to share His very life with us. Now, in ordinary time, it is we who are sent, sent by the Holy Spirit who, because of Christ, the Father has sent to us. In today’s Gospel account we reflect on that event in which Jesus summoned the Twelve and first sent them out into their surrounding world. The account is not about something that happened long ago, it is about something that is happening to us in our lives. God, you see, is sending us. Visit Father Irvin's Homiletics Page for more reflections and homilies. Being sent is a commission that occurs because of God’s initiative, not ours. Amos, about whom we heard in the first reading, p...