From Season to Season

Jesus said: “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.” —John 10:27-28                                                           In his message for the 50 th World Day of Prayer for Vocations (which is celebrated each year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter) Pope Benedict XVI observed, “ Hope is the expectation of something positive in the future, yet at the same time it must sustain our present existence, which is often marked by dissatisfaction and failures… To have hope, therefore, is the equivalent of trusting in God who is faithful, who keeps the promises of the covenant.” This sense of hope is at the heart of this Sund...

The Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which is among the source texts used for the Readings of the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Cycle C) is something of a problematic biblical text. Although it has traditionally been attributed to Saint Paul, writing with Saint Barnabas and Saint Silvanus/Silas (cf. 2 Thess 1:1 ), most modern scholars believe that this text (among others) was written several years after Paul’s martyrdom. Whether this letter was written by Paul or by those who had been formed by the Apostle is, however, in many ways irrelevant to the meaning of the text for the Church today. The text itself, which was certainly known to Marcion and Saint Polycarp (in the mid-second century), describes a local community that was experiencing persecution or dangers from heretical (i.e. gnostic) movements and which was at danger of losing its focus on the Faith that Paul and his collaborators had handed over to the community by their preaching and witness (cf. Raymond Brown,...