Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

94th World Mission Day

In other years: Saint Luke, Evangelist

Readings of the Day

RB: Ch 14 The Celebration of Vigils on the Anniversaries of Saints

Mass: Is 45:1, 4-6; Resp Ps 96; 1 Th 1:1-5b; Mt 22:15-21

Give the Lord glory and honor.

Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.

(Mt 22:21)

With today's Angelus Address, the Holy Father took me to the life of Cardinal Basil Hume, the beauty of our faith tradition, and the gift of continuity in teaching. One person leads to another leads to another and so on, as you will see from the four quotations below.  

In his Address, Pope Francis speaks of the "mission of the Church and of Christians", namely, "to speak of God and to bear witness to Him." In today's Gospel, Jesus "acknowledges that the tribute to Caesar must be paid because the image on the coin is his", the Pontiff says, "but above all Jesus recalls that each person carries within him or her another image-we carry it in our heart, in our soul-that of God, and therefore it is to Him, and to Him alone, that each person owes his or her existence, his or her life." By virtue of our Baptism, then, we are called "to be a living presence in society, inspiring it with the Gospel and with the lifeblood of the Holy Spirit." The Holy Father then echoes a predecessor, Pope Saint Paul VI, and urges each one of us to "make one's own contribution to building the civilisation of love, where justice and fraternity reign." 

The Church today is faced with an immense task: to humanise and to Christianise this modern civilisation of ours. The continued development of this civilisation, indeed its survival, demand and insist that the Church do her part in the world.

(Pope Saint John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 256)

We are called to be physicians of that civilisation about which we dream, the civilisation of love.

(Pope Saint Paul VI, General Audience, December 31, 1975)

Peace can write the finest pages of history, inscribing them not only with the magnificence of power and glory but also with the greater magnificence of human virtue, people's goodness, collective prosperity and true civilisation, the civilisation of love.

(Pope Saint Paul VI, Peace Day Message "If You Want Peace, Defend Life", January 1, 1977)

We are made in the image and likeness of God and there is in each of us a yearning -consciously recognized or not-for the Father and the source of our being.

(Cardinal Basil Hume, Towards a Civilisation of Love: Being Church in Today's World, 96)

SAINT LUKE,

PRAY FOR US.

© Gertrude Feick 2020