BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. La Salette Missionaries of North America Hartford, Connecticut ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Elijah definitely did not have friends in high places. It didn’t help his cause that he had killed all the prophets of Baal. Their chief patroness, Queen Jezebel, expressed her displeasure in these terms: “May the gods do thus to me and more, if by this time tomorrow I have not done with your life what was done to each of them.” In other words, she ordered a hit on him. First he fled about ninety miles, from Mount Carmel near modern-day Haifa in northern Israel, to Beersheba, some forty-five miles south of Jerusalem, in the desert. And to top it off, the best shade he could find was from a broom tree, a plant which is adapted to survive extreme drought conditions. It produces very small leaves, which last only a short time. So Elijah got tired of running away and was ready to give up. “Enough!” he cried, praying for death. God of course had other plans, a

Fr. Charles Irvin 1st Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51 Some time ago I received an e-mail telling me about cactus plants, a topic that had not in the past provoked much interest on my part. After all, I pictured them to be gawkish and unattractive, although I have seen some cacti that appeared to have surrealistic heads and arms resembling human forms that exercised my imagination. Nevertheless, I read on. Pictures came as attachments to that e-mail, and when I opened them up and viewed those pictures I was delighted to find that cacti produce stunningly beautiful blossoms, all of which brought me to reassess my judgments about cactus plants. Evidently there was a whole lot more to them than I thought. My “know-it-all” previous judgments about cacti completely blocked me from seeing the beauty that lay hidden within them. That lesson can be applied to the way we see people, especially people about whom we have a “know-it-all” attitude. All of us are familiar with w

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 heard i

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