September 27, 2026

This has been an amazing week for the Catholic Church. We started by celebrating the feast day of Saint Matthew on Monday, the tax collector that become one of Jesus’ twelve apostles and one of the four Gospel writers. We celebrated Padre Pio’s feast day on Wednesday, who for almost sixty years suffered from poor health, but had many mystical gifts, spent countless hours listening to confessions, and gave us the saying, “Pray, hope, and don’t worry”. And on Thursday, we celebrated the beautification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, a man who brought the Gospel into millions of homes.

This week, the Catholic Church in the United States is observing National Migration Week, which culminates Sunday with the 112th World Day of Migrants and Refugees. 

In this year's message, Pope Leo XIV focuses in a special way on the impact of migration on displaced minors, where he tells us, "Minors are the most vulnerable group within the global movements of migration. They are concrete faces, who have unique stories, and call on our conscience. Every year, millions of children and adolescents are forced to leave their homeland because of war, poverty, violence, environmental disasters and other tragedies. Sadly, their number continues to grow," the pope said. "The economic, political and military consequences of this disaster are immense."

Bishop Jacques, reminds us, "The Church is a family where all members are responsible to care for one another, spiritually and materially, especially in their loneliness. The Church is a home where all find safety and a loving hand, and we are called to love radically and without hesitation. Human dignity has to be preserved in every situation. Under no circumstances will the Church accept the unnecessary separation of families."

Like the two sons in today’s Gospel parable, we all have choices to make. Sometimes we make good choices, follow through with our choice, and feel good about ourselves. Sometimes we fall short and don’t follow through on the choice that was made. This could lead to guilt and us harming the relationship with the people we let down. There are other times when we choose not to do something, but that good old ‘Catholic guilt’ kicks in and we complete what we were asked to do. In either case we may have been wrong about our initial decision, but what is important is actually doing the right thing. Or seek forgiveness for not completing the request and mending hurt feelings or broken relationships.

It is common to find Catholics who openly disagree with core Catholic teaching. We all know people who say that they are Catholic, but rarely attend Mass, if at all, or practice their faith. Many regular Mass attendees shy away from the Sacrament of Reconciliation – which is intended to help heal wounds and divisions in our lives, and help us deepen our relationship with God.  Everyone needs to eventually answer for their actions and their own personal relationship with God.

We all have heard about politicians who say that they are devout, practicing Catholics; but they publicly support laws that go directly against some of the most basic tenets of morality as taught by the Catholic Church. Just like us, these people will be judged by God, by how they lived their lives.

And if we are honest with ourselves, we even recognize in our own lives this same tendency. We call ourselves practicing Catholics, but we might spend more time working on our favorite hobbies than on our prayer life. Perhaps we spend more time becoming an expert in our profession than in our faith. Perhaps we tolerate in our own lives – hidden habits of selfishness and sin while we criticize other people for their more visible faults.

If we think about it a little bit, we see very clearly that this possible contradiction between what we believe and how we live is not a good thing, and can attempt to harm our relationship with God. It is like the second son in today's Gospel parable. He impressed his dad with fancy words and a good show of healthy obedience, but underneath the surface he was still living for his own self-centered gratification, not for the greater good of his mission in the Father's kingdom.

When we fall into that contradiction, it is no wonder that we don't grow in our experience of Christ's love and grace. And it is no wonder that we don't grow in wisdom, interior peace, and the deep Christian joy that we thirst for. Faith, if it's real, makes a real impact on our lives. When it doesn't, our spiritual growth suffers. St James expressed this clearly in his New Testament Letter, when he stated “For just as a body without a spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead” (James 2:26). The harmony between words and deeds, appearance and reality, is so important for Christ that he built it right into the very fiber of Christianity. 

All the sacraments, the source of God’s grace for the Church, have two elements: form and matter.  The form is the words that explain the meaning; the matter is the material that is transformed into a channel of grace by those words. If you have just the matter or just the form, you have no sacrament; you need both.

For example, if a someone goes to confession and receives absolution, but then purposely refuses to repent and fulfill his penance, they are not freed from their sin. That would be hypocritical - saying they are repentant, but not really being repentant. To receive the full effect of the Sacrament, one has to complete his penance and go and sin no more.

If we come to Mass on Sunday and say all the right prayers, but when we leave, make no effort to live as Christ would have us, nothing happens in our souls – our lives don't bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit, because we are not living as Christ taught us. Real faith requires real action.

This honest look at our tendency to be hypocritical, like the second son in today's parable, can make us feel discouraged. But discouragement never comes from God. He is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, and all-merciful. And since he is on our side, as the crucifix proves to us, everything is possible for us, nothing is out of our reach. Discouragement is a temptation. It is a feeling that comes when we recognize how weak we are, and how little we can really do when we rely on our own strength. And the devil wants us to give into that feeling – as if we really did have to rely on our own strength. But we don't.

The whole point of today's beautiful readings is that what we cannot do with our own strength, we can do by turning to Christ. That's what the prostitutes and the tax collectors, in today’s parable, discovered; and so, they were able to repent and change the direction of their lives. That's what the first son in the parable discovered – he repented from his selfishness and found strength to fulfill his duties. That's what the First Reading teaches us so clearly: if we turn away from our sins and turn towards Christ, we shall surely live! That's what today's Psalm tells us: God is our Savior, he overflows with mercy and "shows sinners the way."

When Jesus states that “tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you,” he could be speaking to any of us that have turned away from a relationship with God, our faith, have cast away a personal friendship, or have not helped someone in need. Jesus is telling us that we need to repent, seek forgiveness, and turn away from sin – to take action to correct a wrong that we may have caused. The prophet Ezekiel had a similar message for the Israelites (and for us), where he tells us to turn away from wickedness and we shall preserve our life.

In today’s scripture readings the Lord has reminded us of how much we all need his grace. As this Mass continues, let's promise that this week we will come and drink deeply from the fountains of this grace: through prayer, Sacred Scripture, the Eucharist, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. These are the doorways to our hope, because they unite us to Christ. And if we use them well, we will also be able to spread our hope to others.

As Saint Paul tells us, in his letter to the Philippians – “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”