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Today we celebrate the Institution of the Polish National Catholic Church. “This year marks the 114th Anniversary of the organizing of the PNCC in Scranton, PA by a group of Polish immigrants under the leadership of Father Francis Hodur in March 1897. […] When the PNCC was organized, Bishop Hodur did not want to establish […]

Today we have heard the final words of the Sermon on the Mount, the sermon that is Jesus’ manifesto, His picture of what real Christian living means. It ends with a plea that is also a warning against hypocrisy: He urges us to put our faith into practice. Jesus illustrates the point with a parable,

When Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “You cannot be the slave both of God and of money,” He goes to the heart of the problem. Earning and spending are necessary, and prosperity in itself is good, but our human condition is such that we can so easily allow ourselves to be enslaved by materialism. We

Aggression is one of our instinctive reactions to difficult situations. Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel tells us that if we respond to aggression with more aggression we risk creating an endless cycle of violence. Violence harms our unity, setting one person against another and making cooperation impossible. Jesus teaches that God’s love extends to everyone,

In his Gospel St. Matthew portrays Jesus as a new and greater Moses. It was on a mountain Sinai, that Moses delivered the Law of God. Now it’s on a mountainside, in His Sermon on the Mount, that Jesus delivers the new law. When He says, “You have learnt how it was said to our

When we read today’s Gospel reading we get a little snapshot of Jesus’ teaching. It’s a tiny reading, just as four verses long. If we look at the words we have heard today alone we get some meaning, but it is by other means the whole picture. Fortunately we have every opportunity to look a

We are so used to the Beatitudes that we cannot comprehend how amazing they must have seemed to their first listeners. It is not that they would have been completely unaware of the teaching behind what Jesus was saying. If we were to examine them carefully, we would find that each one of the eight

St. Matthew tells us that by setting in Capernaum, “a lakeside town on the borders of Zebulun and Nephtali”, Jesus fulfilled the words of the prophet Isaiah. Without saying or doing anything particularly spectacular, Jesus fulfilles a prophecy in the scriptures by staying in a certain place. For St. Matthew, Jesus is the new king.

All the readings in our liturgy today make the claim that Jesus’ message is for the whole world. It is universal. He fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah in the first reading, which says that God’s servant will bring a message of salvation that must reach to the ends of the earth. St. Paul insists in