Category: BC Catholic

As Paul made his way toward Jerusalem, prophets warned him again and again, through the Spirit, of what awaited him: arrest. Yet Paul’s decision to go was itself made under the guidance of that same Spirit. At Tyre, the whole community—women and children included—knelt together on the beach to pray with him before he sailed. Describing this farewell, Saint Luke seems to echo Old Testament language about the daughters of Tyre, and St. Bede concludes that no city had sent the apostle on his way with greater kindness.

Further along, we meet Philip the evangelist, whose four daughters were gifted with prophecy, and a prophet named Agabus, newly arrived from Judea. Agabus did not simply speak his prophecy—he acted it out. Taking Paul’s belt, he bound his own hands and feet and declared: “Thus says the Holy Spirit: This is the way the Jews will bind the owner of this belt in Jerusalem, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles.”

This journey deliberately echoes the journey of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel—and since both books share an author, the echo is intentional, not accidental. A great structural feature of the Gospel is that ten chapters, from chapter 9 to chapter 19, are devoted to Jesus “on the way to Jerusalem,” with many of his most important teachings set within that journey. Luke portrays Jesus there as the Prophet marching toward his own death.

Now Paul does something strikingly similar. He too marches toward Jerusalem, toward arrest and being “handed over to the Gentiles”—language that recalls Jesus’ own three predictions of his passion. Prophecy after prophecy foretells Paul’s coming suffering in terms that recall the suffering of Christ himself.

“What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? I am prepared not only to be bound but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 21:13). When these prophecies came, the disciples begged Paul not to go. This was his answer. He would not let natural affection, however sincere, hold him back from bearing witness to Christ; loyalty to Jesus mattered more. Convinced this was God’s call, he continued on his way.

The scene recalls the Gospel in which Peter’s very human affection tried to hold Jesus back from his own passion, and Jesus rebuked him: “Get behind me; you are a stumbling block.” Paul, in imitation of his Master, would not let human affection stand in the way of his mission.

In the end, the community stopped pleading and simply said, “The Lord’s will be done” (Acts 21:14)—an echo of Jesus” own prayer in Gethsemane: “Not my will but yours be done.” To accept suffering, ultimately, is to accept it in that same spirit of surrender.

23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ez 33:7-9
Second Reading: Rom 13:8-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 18:15-20

Think of some truth about which you are absolutely sure. It might be that the brakes on your car are faulty, that tobacco and other drugs harm the body, or that nutritious food and regular exercise are beneficial.

Now suppose you see someone acting, or about to act, in ignorance of this truth. Can you keep silent? If you say nothing, and the ignorance causes harm, are you not to blame for it, at least partly?

Imagine the reproaches. “You knew that the brakes were faulty, and you let me drive the car!” “You knew that drugs were addictive and harmful, and you let me experiment with them!” “You knew the importance of nutrition and exercise, and you brought me up to laze around and eat junk food!”

With this in mind, consider this Sunday’s Readings. If “you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand,” God tells Ezekiel.

“If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone,” Jesus says. “If you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you.”

He is speaking to us. Our duty to warn our neighbours about sin is part of the love we owe them.

Can we be as sure about right and wrong as we are about the truth of the examples we started with?

Yes. From the beginning, God wrote, deep in our conscience, in our “most secret core,” a law which calls us to love him and our neighbour for his sake: that is, to obey the Commandments. Inwardly, at the right moment, the law tells us to do this or shun that.

Our conscience can be “by degrees almost blinded” through sinful habits. However, God has not only implanted his law in our hearts, but also reminds us of it: first through the Ten Commandments and second through the Church.

Jesus gave his apostles the task of “promoting and preserving the faith and the moral life,” and their successors continue this task, Pope St. John Paul II said in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendour of Truth”). The Church, then, is “the pillar and bulwark of the truth, including the truth regarding moral action.”

However, all Christians, “by the example of their lives and the witness of their word,” have an obligation “to manifest the new man which they have put on in Baptism and to reveal the power of the Holy Spirit by whom they were strengthened at Confirmation,” says Ad Gentes (“To the Nations”).

You have an abundance of workers: stonecutters, masons, carpenters, and all kinds of artisans without number…
— 1 Chronicles 22:15

I had the pleasure of spending time with my children in the family home recently after it was heavily damaged by a broken pipe which flooded floorboards on two floors and impacted ceilings and walls. As such, I found myself doing a lot of restoration work, which led me to renovate other parts of the house, inside and out. Although I found myself putting in exhausting 8 hour days during my vacation, I actually found that I was restored from the work. 

I grew up with a father who was always building, and over the years I have loved to be in my workshop, making furniture, or repairing plumbing and wiring, re-erecting fences and more. This small interlude turned into an unexpectedly therapeutic change of pace from the office work that frames my usual workday.

In an early novel of mine, I dedicated a chapter to my father’s proclivity to build and expand our rickety family home. His default quote was always, ‘measure twice, cut once.’ We were relatively poor, and my father’s old hardware store was precariously perched on the precipice of bankruptcy. To survive, we needed to expand the building so that we could diversify what we sold, but we couldn’t afford the permits or navigate the regulations that prescribed what could or couldn’t be done to an existing building. As such, my dad would wait until the weekend, when the inspectors weren’t working, and we would build as much as we humanly could, always ensuring that whatever extension we began that weekend was ‘finished’ for all intents and purposes. Such were the rules, then, that if it was considered complete, an expansion couldn’t be removed or fined.

In my novel Flying in Silence, the scene unfolds comically. When the inspector cornered my father for building one extension, he simply called it a courtyard. “Very fashionable. We’ll have plants out here.” A month later we threw a roof over the new addition. The inspector ranted. “This is not a courtyard. It has a roof!” My father smiled patiently. “It’s a covered courtyard. Very European.” The inspector fumed. “Where’s your permit?” to which my father, rather logically I thought, responded, “Why do I need a permit? The building is finished.” The inspector always left exhausted. “It’s always finished with you. But it never stops!” 

And he was right. The small square of a store that was initially also our home, grew tentacles and limbs, swelling upward and down, a basement here, an apartment there. One year, when we ran out of timber, my father ripped out the second-story balcony.

Acts 20 finds Paul on the move, setting his face toward Jerusalem, fully aware that suffering and arrest await him there. What strikes us first, though, is not his destination but his company. Paul does not travel alone. He is surrounded by companions drawn from the very churches he had planted along his missionary journeys — a reminder that Paul’s apostolate was never a solo performance but one carried out in community, alongside fellow labourers he himself had formed. Even under the shadow of what lay ahead in Jerusalem, Paul kept the young Church’s growing custom of gathering for the Eucharist wherever he went.

That custom gives us one of the most vivid scenes in all of Acts. At Troas, the disciples gathered upstairs on the first day of the week, lamps burning, and Paul — knowing he would be leaving the next day — preached long into the night. A young man named Eutychus, seated in the window, was overcome by sleep and fell three storeys to the ground below. He was picked up dead. Paul went down, bent over him, took him in his arms, and restored him to life. Then, remarkably, Paul went back upstairs, broke bread, and continued preaching before a community now transformed from grief to joy.

Luke is a careful storyteller, and he loves to let his Gospel and Acts echo one another. An upper room, the first day of the week, the breaking of bread: this scene is built to remind us of the resurrection of Jesus himself. Even a death in the middle of the gathering could not stop the word from being preached or the bread from being broken — the two resumed as soon as they possibly could. It is worth pausing on that. When we come to Mass, we too receive both the word and the Bread of Life. Both are life-giving in themselves. But how much life we actually draw from them depends, as it did for the disciples at Troas, on the openness and disposition of our own hearts.

This passage is also one of the earliest pieces of evidence that the first Christians had already begun to set aside Sunday, rather than the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, as their day of worship — because Sunday is both the day of the Resurrection and the day of Pentecost. Interestingly, the older Jewish practice of beginning a feast the evening before never disappeared; it lives on in the Church’s own liturgical life, and remains especially vivid in the Eastern Churches, where the liturgical day traditionally begins around four in the afternoon. In many Eastern parishes, the faithful can choose between the Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning or the Vigil the evening before, sometimes called an all-night vigil.

22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Jer 20:7-9
Second Reading: Rom 12:1-2
Gospel Reading: Mt 16:21-27

Baptized humans live two different kinds of life in two different worlds. The first is our natural life, which God gives us through our parents. It begins with our conception and is nourished by food. The world in which we live it consists of what we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.

The other is our supernatural life, God’s life, which he gives us through his Church. It begins with our Baptism, which the Church calls our re-birth, and is nourished by the Holy Eucharist. The world in which we live it cannot be perceived by our senses: we live it largely by faith and trust.

“Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see,” says the Letter to the Hebrews.

From this Sunday’s Readings, it seems that there has always been conflict between the two kinds of life.

Jesus reproaches Peter for “thinking not as God does, but as humans do,” even though Peter has just recognized Jesus as “the Son of the living God.”

Jeremiah says that for him, “the word of the Lord” has become “a reproach and a derision,” making him “a laughingstock all day long.”

It is a conflict that we have to recognize. We must “reacquire the consciousness of belonging to a minority” that is opposed to the spirit of the world, said Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in The Ratzinger Report. We must “find again the courage of nonconformism, the capacity to oppose many of the trends of the surrounding culture.”

That courage is something we have to teach our children, for Catholicism is not simply an “add-on” to our natural human life.

“Do not be conformed to this world,” St. Paul urges, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

In explaining the title of his book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis says the following.

“The English poet William Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure of what he meant.

“But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable “either-or”; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain.

Waiting for Hugh Freiberg outside Gilmore Park United Church in Richmond, I didn’t know what to expect. It was late, but the sun was still peeking out, and I knew we were going out to deliver food to Richmond’s homeless population with the Food Delivery Coalition, which Hugh co-founded. I knew that St. Paul’s and St. Joseph the Worker Parishes in Richmond were involved with the ministry. I knew Hugh is a parishioner at St. Joseph the Worker, and I knew that he was a grandfather. Otherwise, nothing else.  

Hugh was taking me out on his last delivery run. He was retiring from the helm of the Food Coalition after 14 years of bringing food to the homeless population of Richmond. Honestly, I imagined a pretty strait-laced ministry man; I thought maybe he’d drive a van and wear conservative clothes. When he pulled up in a Dodge Ram pick-up truck loaded with food, tattoos peeking out from under his T-shirt sleeves, with a long goatee on his chin, my idea of what “church ministry people” looked like had to stretch a bit.

None of this mattered. Hugh was friendly, driven, and direct. Almost before I could ask any questions, we were pulling up to a nearby house to deliver some hot dogs, watermelon and water.  

The man at the house wasn’t technically homeless, but his situation was precarious, and Hugh believed he needed help. “His family’s from Yugoslavia,” Hugh told me as we watched him walk across the yard. “He’s got a messed up right arm as you can see – he can’t feed himself; he can’t cook, he can’t do anything.”  

Hugh and the man talked while I stay in the truck – he didn’t want photos taken, and I didn’t know how he’d respond to the idea that I was going to write about the evening.  

The man was grateful, and as we watched him walk back inside, Hugh tells me he is worried that after his retirement, guys like this will fall through the cracks. “[Outreach workers] try to focus only on the homeless,” he says. “But he’s previously homeless, a victim of slumlords [Hugh estimates there are 15 people living in the house, better described as a dump, all paying around $1000 a month in rent], and disabled – he has huge gratitude.”  

This set the tone for the evening.  

Until recently, Hugh lived in Richmond, but he was born in Saskatchewan. His family moved around, first to Edmonton, then the Lower Mainland, and back to Edmonton. He eventually settled in Vancouver in 1992.

Virtues are something that all Catholics should strive to cultivate in our lives. In this series, Patrick Macken explores how these virtues are lived out in the world of professional sports.

Humility

In a 1979 Angelus talk, St. Pope John Paul II referred to humility as the true foundation of human greatness which required profound inner strength. We need to be aware that all of our gifts and abilities are on loan. Humility is the absence of pride and arrogance — it is giving credit to God over self. 

In sports, humility manifests itself by giving credit to teammates, accepting the role you are asked to play, respecting the developmental process as well as remaining coachable and open to learning. Sadly, we see very little of this in professional sports now: the in-your-face celebrations after scoring a touchdown in football, the embarrassing bat flick after hitting a home run in baseball, or players standing over their opponent after performing a slam dunk in the NBA. Even seeing players publicly scold their coach for how they were utilized or how much they were played is unfortunate. 

Players are being told by their agents that the crowd wants to see bravado and conflict. This means more money for all. I personally believe that many fans would prefer to see more humble, selflessness, courage and respectful athletes. 

I should clarify that arrogance, which is bad, is not the same as confidence which is good. This is a belief in what God can do through us. 

Here are a few examples of humble athletic personalities from the present and past with some of their thoughts on humility.

Football 

Fernando Mendoza, Heisman trophy winner: This devout Catholic overcame long odds to lead his team to the National Championship in 2025. He is known for emphazing that his success is due to his faith, family and teammates. He sees his role as a responsibility rather than an ego-driven endeavour. In his Heisman Trophy speech, Mendoza quoted: “Toughness doesn’t need to be loud, it can be quiet and strong” (John O’Leary).

Barry Sanders, NFL Hall of Fame: Sandres was an incredible running back for the Detroit Lions. He far preferred to talk about the team and their accomplishments rather than his own. After scoring his many touchdowns, he was well known for simply giving the ball back to the referee without any celebrations.

Hockey 

Daniel and Henrik Sedin, Vancouver Canucks and NHL Hall of Fame: These two were considered great leaders, yet they always acted with class in the best interest of the team. They accepted a lower salary to allow for the team to get better and were known for deflecting attention away from themselves towards other teammates.

In my last column, I reflected on some general insights from Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). I now wish to explore the five main takeaways from the “Conclusion” to this document: truth, education, relationships, justice and peace, and rebuilding. 

The topic of Artificial Intelligence is admittedly overwhelming. While I appreciate many conveniences of technology, immediate and often incorrect AI responses to simple Internet searches and inaccurate transcripts for online videos, fill me with fear for the future. Therefore, I appreciate our Pope’s hope-filled offerings in this rapidly changing world. Four paragraphs in his encyclical’s “Conclusion” begin with the imperative “Let us…”, as he shares ways to follow our Christian call and “assume an active role” in building the Kingdom of God (MH, 236). 

Paragraph 237 exclaims, “Let us remain faithful to the truth!” Even though algorithms and digital content can offer information, Pope Leo reminds us that we must “prefer what is right despite the most appealing content” and “immediate results” (MH, 237). The Holy Spirit’s Gift of Wisdom allows us to seek and love the truth. While computers can hold data and can be programmed to generate answers, AI does not have the ability to discern due to the absence of conscience.

In the First Book of Kings, we hear that the voice of God was not heard in the noise of wind, earthquakes or fire, but was recognized in a “tiny whispering sound” (1 Kings 19:12). Bishop Barron reflected on this small voice, namely our conscience. He reminded us that our “objective moral values” allow us to recognize right from wrong, making us proud of our good choices and resulting in shame when we choose poorly. Pope Leo acknowledges that technology is a current reality, but likewise states, “fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom” (MH, 237). To remain faithful to the truth, we must follow God’s voice and our consciences – our objective moral values – to consider multiple points of view, to choose fact over opinion, and to discover the nuances in documents, conversations and situations, as only human beings created in the image and likeness of God can do. 

Paragraph 238 begins with the imperative, “Let us invest in education, beginning with ourselves!” As a schoolteacher, this command resonates with me. Not only must I challenge my students to evaluate information, using their consciences, I must constantly do so myself. I must challenge myself to stay current with new platforms and research methods. Pope Leo states, “We all need to learn how to engage with the digital world in a human way … we must consider the digital world as a new continent to be evangelized” (MH, 238). 

21st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 22:15, 19-23
Second Reading: Rom 33-36
Gospel Reading: Mt 16:13-20

“Who do people say that the son of man is?” Jesus asked his apostles. “Some say John the Baptist,” they answered, “but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Now no one could think that Jesus was John, Elijah, or Jeremiah, for Jews did not believe in reincarnation. The apostles, who had studied Scripture as boys, must have understood Jesus to mean the enigmatic figure the prophet Daniel had seen in a vision: “one like a son of man coming on the clouds of Heaven.”

Accordingly, Jesus rephrased his question: “But who do you say that I am?”

Here, “you” is plural, as the Greek shows. We can imagine Jesus looking around at his apostles to see who would answer.

It was Simon. “You are the Christ,” he said, “the Son of the living God.”

Recognizing Simon as the one to whom his Father had revealed his identity, Jesus addressed him alone.

“You are Peter,” he said, “and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in Heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in Heaven.”

The apostles must have recognized these words as those God had used in appointing Eliakim “master of the household” to King Hezekiah—a phrase translated elsewhere in Scripture as the king’s “delegate,” “deputy,” “vicar,” “vizier,” or “regent”—what we would call his “prime minister.”

“I will place on his shoulder the key of the House of David,” God said. (A key that could unbar a door could be 60 centimetres long, so it had to be carried resting on the shoulder.) “He shall open, and no one shall shut; he shall shut, and no one shall open.”

Speaking as King, Jesus was giving Peter the same office in his kingdom that Shebna had had in the Kingdom of Judah. When he returned to Heaven, Peter would be his deputy, or vicar, on earth.

Moreover, Peter would have successors in that office. Just as Shebna’s authority, symbolized by his robe, sash, and keys, had been handed on to Eliakim, so Peter’s authority, symbolized by the keys, would be handed on to his.

“The gates of Hades,” Jesus said, would not “prevail” against his Church.

“The gates of Hades” is also translated as “the jaws of death” or “the gates of the netherworld.” Like the Hebrew Sheol, Hades meant the realm of the dead, not the realm of the damned.

Two dozen families came together at Christ the Redeemer Parish in West Vancouver for this year’s Catholic Family Summit, making time to put faith at the heart of family life. 

The event kicked off with a talk by Father Richard Conlin, who introduced his family-friendly R.A.P. Lectio Divina method — Receive, Apply, Pray. Children enjoyed faith-filled and fun activities while parents had time for prayer and Confession. The day concluded with a Eucharistic procession and Mass celebrated by Father Lucio Choi.

Families attending the summit were asked a simple question: How do you keep Christ alive in your home? 

Here are some of their answers:

The Abaquin Family, Precious Blood Parish, Surrey

What a journey it has been for us in finding ways we can have Christ at the centre of our family life with the busyness of four kids under eight!

I remember learning so much from our relationship with Father Nicholas and Father Hien during our time at Our Lady of Mercy Parish. All kids can be unpredictable in their needs, but they both encouraged us to sit close to the front so our children can watch every part of the Mass intently.

Then this year, moving to our new home parish, Precious Blood, I was inspired by our relationship with Father Rich to begin praying the 20-Mystery Rosary daily. Tiffany had a passion to make individual Rosaries for all six of us and pray the Family Rosary a few times each week. The power of our Mother Mary is truly a gift!

I believe it is through our enthusiasm for our spiritual growth as a Christ-centred marriage that both of us see the effects of being models for the children to follow. We notice our son acting out parts of Mass during bath time, and heard our 7-year-old daughter teaching my nephew how to pray the Rosary!

We have a wonderful mealtime routine starting with prayer and reading one page from Father Rich’s books. During this meal, one cornerstone of our family is to discuss any challenges and obstacles in our family while using Jesus as an example of what we need to do to keep strong as an example of a Catholic family in our words and actions.

Ultimately, the journey of discovery and learning from mistakes continues. Just this week, I have decided to attend Daily Mass around my busy work schedule, and Tiffany has decided the same with her busy homeschool routine.

My wife and I learned none of our efforts have to be perfect, but Jesus will guide us in his perfect way.