divine inspiration

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Tuesday, 18 October 2022 : Feast of St. Luke, Evangelist (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Red

2 Timothy 4 : 10-17b

You must know, that Demas has deserted me, for the love of this world : he returned to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia and Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke remains with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is a useful helper in my work. I sent Tychicus to Ephesus.

Bring with you the cloak I left at Troas, in Carpos’ house, and also the scrolls, especially the parchments. Alexander, the metalworker, has caused me great harm. The Lord will repay him for what he has done. Distrust him, for he has been very much opposed to our preaching.

At my first hearing in court, no one supported me; all deserted me. May the Lord not hold it against them. But the Lord was at my side, giving me strength, to proclaim the word fully, and to let all the pagans hear it.

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Sunday, 16 October 2022 : Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Second Reading)

Liturgical Colour : Green

2 Timothy 3 : 14 – 2 Timothy 4 : 2

As for you, continue with what you have learnt, and what has been entrusted to you, knowing from whom you received it. Besides, you have known the Scriptures from childhood; they will give you the wisdom that leads to salvation, through faith in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, refuting error, for correcting and training in Christian life. Through Scripture, the man of God is made expert and thoroughly equipped for every good work.

In the presence of God and Christ Jesus, Who is to judge the living and the dead, and by the hope I have of His coming, and His kingdom, I urge you to preach the Word, in season and out of season, reproving, rebuking, or advising, always with patience, and providing instruction.

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Thursday, 21 August 2014 : 20th Week of Ordinary Time, Memorial of Pope St. Pius X, Pope (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : White

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we celebrate the feast of a great saint, the Pope of the Holy Eucharist as he is famously known, namely Pope St. Pius X, the first Pope to be elected in the twentieth century, and a great reformer of the faith who brought great rejuvenation both to the Church and to God’s people. Pope St. Pius X had done a great deal of goodness for the Lord and His people, and the effects of what He had done can still be clearly felt today.

Pope St. Pius X was the one who reformed much of the liturgy and the celebration of worship in the Church, and he made the Gregorian chant once again the predominant hymn and song used in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Through his contributions, he made the liturgy of worship to God much richer and more beneficial for the growth of the faith and devotion among the faithful. Numerous other contributions he had made to the benefit of God’s people.

And his greatest contribution was the great improvement in the accessibility and focus on the Most Holy Eucharist, the very Precious Body and Blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who had given us these freely as He offered Himself humbly to the Lord as the sacrifice for the sake of our salvation, which we celebrate regularly in the Holy Mass. This is the centre of our faith, and the very foundation of what we believe in God.

In addition, if we today know the Holy Communion as something we always do every time we attend the Holy Mass, and if we can remember the time when we first received the Holy Communion in our early youth, then all of these could be attributed to the works of this holy Pope, Pope St. Pius X, and this is why he is also known famously as the Pope of the Eucharist. Why is this so? Let me elaborate further.

Pope St. Pius X encouraged frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist by the faithful, and he also lowered the minimum age required for the reception of the first Holy Communion, bringing the Lord closer to even young children. This reminds us clearly of what the Lord Jesus had said to His disciples and followers, that all of us ought to imitate the faith of children, and we should not prevent children from coming to the Lord.

With that consideration, what Pope St. Pius X had done was truly exemplary, allowing children, provided that they are at an age when they are already able to discern about the Lord, to receive the Lord in the Most Holy Eucharist, certainly at an age significantly younger than what was previously stipulated and practiced in the Church. This helps many of the youths and children to be close to the Lord for the important years when their faiths in God are developing and taking roots.

And ultimately, today we will focus on the role of this holy man and shepherd of the Church, in how he transformed and brought the Lord and His fullness of truth into the centre of the faithful’s attention, by emphasizing strongly on the importance of worship and the properness in worship of the Lord, in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which we also celebrate today, but which in many places had notably dropped in terms of our ability to appreciate how important it is to properly worship the Lord.

This relates precisely to the reading of today, in which Jesus told His disciples a parable, which described the wedding feast organised by a king for his son, and how the guests whom the king had invited to the feast refused to come to the feast prepared for them. Those guests were given what they had deserved, and they were cast down.

And when the king invited new groups of people who were then invited to the wedding banquet, he found someone who was not wearing the garments appropriate for the wedding feast, and consequently he was thrown out of the banquet and cast into the darkness to suffer the penalty of his actions and his ignorance.

How is this relevant to us and our faith? Precisely because the Holy Mass is the wedding banquet of the Lord, when the Lord comes to be one with us and to dwell among us, none other than through His Most Holy Presence in the Eucharist, bread and wine transformed completely into the Most Precious Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And our focus should indeed be on the action of the guest who had come into the banquet not wearing the appropriate wedding garment. This in fact reflects on those among us, and many of us indeed, who did not take the celebration of the sacrifice of our Lord seriously. It reflects clearly on our part when we are not serious about our part in the celebration of the Holy Mass. And in particular, in the recent years, more and more abuses of worship and of the celebration has occurred.

How many of us would come to the Church properly dressed and with a proper heart and mind? That means, how many of us actually prepare ourselves thoroughly to attend the Holy Mass and participate with the fullness of our hearts? Many of us often did not do so, and conveniently ignored these, and ended up physically and spiritually unprepared to be with the Lord in the Mass. In this, we are no different from the person who attended the king’s banquet without a proper clothing.

The Mass is truly great and holy, because in it we celebrate the very sacrifice that our Lord had made that day on the hill of Calvary, when He was hung on the cross between the heavens and earth, and for what? For our sake, brethren, that is for our salvation. He died so that He may break us free from the bonds of death and destruction that await us and bring us into life. And in that, He offered Himself through the Body and Blood He gave us, which through His priests, who transformed the bread and wine into that of our Lord’s Body and Blood for us to receive and eat, and drink.

If it is the Lord Himself who is present in the Holy Mass, then why did we not worship Him? Why did we not respect Him? Why did we blaspheme against Him by our words and actions? And why did we ignore Him and attend to our own needs and to our own human arrogance? I am talking about how many people increasingly lost their focus, and especially in the Mass, and they end up not worshipping God and His love, but instead praising themselves.

This is evident from the rise of unorthodox and heretical practices in the Holy Mass, which in many places, particularly in the West, but also widespread in other places, of inappropriate actions by both the laity and the priests, who did not give glory to God through their actions, but instead glorify and praise themselves. The practices of ‘liturgical dance’, speaking in tongues, use of inappropriate music in the celebration of the Mass and many other liturgical abuses of the Mass, unlike the attitude of the man without a proper garment in the banquet.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, on this great occasion of the feast of Pope St. Pius X, let us ask for his kind intercession and help, so that the Lord may strengthen the faith in us, and hopefully we may learn to know how to properly prepare and place ourselves in the worship of our great Lord and God. Let us all redirect our attention away from ourselves back towards the Lord. Let us all restore the solemnity and holiness in the celebration of the Holy Mass. Let us all work together to make our celebration of the Mass be truly heaven on earth, and get rid of any forms of abuses that still mar our spirit of celebration of this great banquet of the Lord.

May Almighty God guide us on our efforts, strengthen our faith and renew in us the love that we have for Him. Let us strive to make our worship a true worship once again, gaining inspiration from what Pope St. Pius X had once done for the good of the souls of the faithful. God be with us all. Amen.

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Monday, 2 June 2014 : 7th Week of Easter, Memorial of St. Marcellinus and St. Peter, Martyrs (First Reading)

Liturgical Colour : White or Red (Martyrs)

Acts 19 : 1-8

While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul travelled through the interior of the country and came to Ephesus. There he found some disciples whom he asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?”

They answered, “We have not even heard that anyone may receive the Holy Spirit.” Paul then asked, “What kind of baptism have you received?” And they answered, “The baptism of John.”

Paul then explained, “John’s baptism was for conversion, but he himself said they should believe in the One who was to come, and that One is Jesus.” Upon hearing this, they were baptised in the Name of the Lord Jesus. Then Paul laid his hands on them and the Holy Spirit came down upon them; and they began to speak in tongues and to prophesy. There were about twelve of them in all.

Paul went into the synagogue and for three months he preached and discussed there boldly, trying to convince them about the Kingdom of God.

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Friday, 27 December 2013 : Feast of St. John the Evangelist, Apostle (Scripture Reflections)

Liturgical Colour : White

Brothers and sisters in Christ, if yesterday we celebrate the feast of St. Stephen the protomartyr, the first of the martyrs of the faith, then today we celebrate the feast of one of the four writers of the Holy Gospels, that is St. John the Evangelist, the youngest of the disciples of the Lord and the only one who did not die of martyrdom.

St. John the Evangelist was the brother of St. James the Lesser, another of the Twelve Apostles. They were the sons of Zebedee, and they were once fishermen at the Lake of Galilee. They were called from their former lives and profession by Christ, to be His followers, and were selected to be among the Twelve He had made to be His Apostles.

St. John the Evangelist was one of the closest disciples to Jesus besides that of St. Peter and his own brother, St. James. They were the three who went up the mountain with Jesus and witnessed His glorious Transfiguration. St. John the Evangelist was also the one whom the Lord entrusted His own mother, Mary, to his care. He was the first to believe in the resurrection after Mary Magdalene had reported to the disciples that the tomb of the Lord was open and the Body was missing. That was the Gospel we had heard today just now.

St. John the Evangelist was the one whom Jesus mentioned that he would not ‘die’ before he saw all the things that the Lord had told His disciples, about the things that are about to happen. The disciples were annoyed at this because they failed to understand what the Lord had truly meant with what He said. Jesus said that to foretell what St. John would do to bring glory to God, that is through the Revelation he was to receive.

It was in that revelation, about what is going to happen at the end of everything, when the Lord will come again in His Second Coming, to judge the living and the dead, that John saw all that Jesus had foretold, and he died after he had seen all these visions, and shared them to all of us through his writings, both in the Book of the Revelation and in the Gospel that he wrote.

The Gospel of John is different from the other three Gospels in that it is unique in terms of its mystic and spiritual nature, with more difficult concepts and mystery as compared to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, which spoke in more historical terms and in a more chronological way, unlike the Gospel of John. But if we are able to read and understand what was written by John in his Gospel, our faith and our lives will be made considerably richer.

That is because John had been endowed with the gift of great faith, and when he wrote the Gospel, he did so with great zeal for the Lord and showed the faith to us, in all of its complexity, and yet at the same time bared the entire truth of the Lord to us. He started his Gospel with none other than the centre of the very Creed of our faith, that Jesus is God, and He is the Word of God incarnate into flesh, and He came in order to dwell among us, and bring us to complete perfection in Him.

Indeed, for those who lack the faith and who had not practiced the faith, these may seem very difficult to understand, to the point of impossibility. But that was what John made clear in his own Gospel, that the Lord is Lord, and He has one, singular mission in this world, that as we celebrate Christmas at the moment, we must never, ever forget.

That Christ who was Divine incarnate into Man, was born into this world that He might die for the sake of us all, that He might bear all the burdens of the sins of the world, the sins and taints of our rebelliousness against the will of God. Christ is the Lord, and He alone has the power and authority, to be able to liberate us from the enthrallment under sin and the power of Satan. This is what John made clear throughout his Gospel, by showing what Jesus had done, and His ultimate purpose on the cross.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we too have been given with the gifts of faith, and we have made the profession of the faith, that we believe in our Lord and Saviour, whose birth into this world, we are celebrating this Christmas. But to reiterate again the points I have often raised during this period of festivities, I want to remind all of us gathered, that we must never forget about Christ in our lives.

We cannot take out Christ out of the equation of our lives, for He is the One who provided us with basically, everything we have. Without Him, we are nothing. Therefore, brethren, let us use this time, this chance, and this opportunity, to profess our faith, as clearly as St. John the Evangelist had, showing it not only through words but also through our actions. Most importantly, as Christians, we cannot say that we are Christians if we do not base our actions on love, for God is Love.

St. John the Evangelist had shown us the virtues of faith, and how important faith is for all of us. We all have been granted faith, and we have faith in the Lord, but we cannot remain idle. As Christians, that is as the followers of God, we are expected to go out and show our love to others, particularly those who lack them, and even unto those who hate and persecute us.

Let us all, from today onwards, follow in the footsteps of St. John the Evangelist, and proclaim the truth about our faith to all. Profess and proclaim it through our tongues, our hands, and our legs, yes, through our words, actions, and deeds, rooted deeply in the faith in God and in the love for the Lord, as St. John had once did.

May the Lord born unto the world on Christmas, bless us, strengthen us, and make us into the instruments of His will, just in the same way as St. John the Evangelist had been. God bless us all. Amen.

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Friday, 12 July 2013 : 14th Week of Ordinary Time (Gospel Reading)

Matthew 10 : 16-23

Look, I send you out like sheep among wolves. You must be a clever as snakes and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard with people, for they will hand you over to their courts, and they will flog you in their synagogues. You will be brought to trial before rulers and kings because of Me, so you may witness to them and the pagans.

But when you are arrested, do not worry about what you are to say, or how you are to say it; when the hour comes, you will be given what you are to say. For it is not you who will speak, but the Spirit of your Father in you.

Brother will hand over brother to death, and a father his child; children will turn against parents and have them put to death. Everyone will hate you because of Me, but whoever stands firm to the end will be saved.

When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next. I assure you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

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First General Congregation of the College of Cardinals in ongoing : We pray for the Cardinals and wait for news

The First General Congregation of the College of Cardinals in now ongoing in Rome (since half an hour ago, 9.30 am Rome time today), with most Cardinals having arrived in Rome, to discuss the Conclave, and the qualities needed for the next Pope. Which is also a chance for the Cardinals to discuss among themselves who they think the best candidate is.

The date of the Conclave will also be decided shortly, if not in this meeting, then in the Second General Congregation which will begin at 5 pm Rome time today. We pray for the Cardinal-electors, that the Holy Spirit will guide all of them in this period, and later into the Conclave, that we will soon have a new Pope, a wonderful new Shepherd to lead God’s Church in this world.

We await the press briefing by Fr. Federico Lombardi, head of the Holy See Press Office, which will be at 1 pm Rome time today (CET/UTC+1).