Order of St. John Paul II

August 2024

Shepherds And Envy

In today’s Old Testament Reading (Ezekiel 34:1-11), Ezekiel indicts Israel’s leaders (the shepherds) for their failure to care for the nation (the flock). In Ezekiel’s time, Israel’s leaders oppressed the people by looking only to their own interests by clothing and feeding themselves at the expense of the needs of the flock. Instead of strengthening […]

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Engage The Bible

Many of the readers of these Daily Reflections come from different faith traditions than do we Catholics.  We have Orthodox followers, Protestants, Muslims, Sikhs, and even a few atheists.  Occasionally, I receive thoughtful questions from one of them that make me think through my own beliefs about God.  One such question came in that I

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Lamenting Our Loss

The death of the prophet’s wife (Ezekiel 24:15-24) becomes a symbol of how the people are to respond to the loss of their Temple. God warns Ezekiel that he is going to lose his wife, the “delight of [his] eyes”, through sudden illness and death. She would be taken away in “one blow”, some swiftly

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Assimilate Jesus

Today, the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B), we continue our readings from John 6.  Recall that these six weekly readings from John are the only excerpts included in the Lectionary for Ordinary Time.  The last reading will be next Sunday.  The overarching theme for these six readings is that Jesus is the Bread of

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The Prophet Ezekiel (Part 2)

The fall of the city of Jerusalem presented something of a problem, especially to those who believed that God’s presence in the most holy place in the Temple was a sure guarantee that the place would never be overthrown. They remembered Isaiah’s words, uttered more than a century earlier, when he declared that Jerusalem was

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