Category: QUESTIONS

Today’s Sunday Gospel reading talks about the Sondheim musical and Tim Burton film, “Sweeney Todd.” Stephen Sondheim celebrated his 90th birthday recently, so this is my own tribute to a songwriter who has through the years been such an inspiration and influence–and who has so often–through the haunting, profound lyrics of his songs–taken the words right out of my heart.

There are many things you don’t expect to find in Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” After all, it’s a dark and strange musical that tells the story of an embittered barber who cuts his clients’ throats, and with the help of his partner, Mrs. Lovett bakes the victims into meat pies!

In such a play (or movie), the last thing you would expect to hear is a love song as tender as “Not While I’m Around.”

DOES PRAYER REALLY WORK? (Luke 18:1-8):  17 October 2010 (Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Today’s Reading

Note:  A version of this homily was delivered in Xavier School last October 6, 2010, but it fits our Gospel Reading today.

About five years ago, an interesting scientific research was conducted by a team of doctors.  The study is called STEP, which stands for “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer.” The research is interesting because it’s a kind of experiment on the effects of prayer on patients undergoing a delicate surgery called CABG–or Coronary Artery Bypass Graft.

The doctors behind STEP wanted to answer two research questions:

First: Does intercessory prayer–or praying for the patients–help them recover from surgery?

Second:  Are there benefits if the patients are assured of prayers?  In other words, do they recover faster? I’d like to talk about this today because in today’s Gospel reading, our Lord asks us to pray–even nag Him like the persistent widow who never gave up on the judge.

THE MEMORY OF ONE’S LEPROSY (Luke 17:11-19): 10 October 2010 (Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time)

Today’s Reading

Today leprosy is considered a thing of the past.  No longer the dreaded biblical scourge that it used to be, it is relatively easy to cure these days, thanks to a multi-drug therapy developed in the 1980s and declared its definitive cure.  Leprosy has today become the forgotten disease.

A visit to Isla Culion a couple of weeks ago, however, helped me remember.The island, the country’s largest leper’s colony for nearly a century from 1906 to 1992, bears a history that reminds us of the stigma of the disease. In 1906, armed men rounded up thousands of victims of leprosy from all over the country to ship them to Culion for segregation and treatment.