When Beethoven finished writing his 23rd. piano sonata,  he wrote the word appassionata on the cover.  Ever since then it has that name.  When we listen to it, we can understand why,  it is an explosive piece of music,  and it makes us think that the person who wrote it, must have been on fire […]

The story is told of several farm laborers on the Yorkshire dales, tending sheep flocks as Sunset approached. The barking of a faraway dog suddenly broke the quiet of the warm and pleasant evening. All heads turned towards the excited animal. The dog began to run across the hills – a race that was soon […]

Four-year-old Marion West shouted and jumped for joy when her mother came home from work on her lunch break. But Marion would become hysterical when her mother left again after lunch. One day her mother stopped coming home for lunch. Marion was saddened. She wondered why her mother stopped eating and playing with her. She […]

About the middle of the nineteenth century St. John Bosco (founder of the Salesians) began to work for poor and endangered youth in the Italian city of Turin. The young people soon realized that in him they had found a true friend. They so loved him that once when he got seriously ill, they stormed […]

Once upon a time there was a thief, we don’t know much about him, we don’t know what he stole, we do know that he was sentenced to die on the cross.  What was he thinking of on his way to his death?  Maybe he was thinking of his wife and his family; maybe he […]

Today we have the privilege of hearing the greatest story ever told, the greatest of Jesus’s parables, the Parable of the prodigal Son. Gandhi tells how when he was fifteen, he stole a little piece of gold from his brother. However, he felt so bad about it that he made up his mind to confess […]

Beginning of Mass: 2022 ‘Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.’ These words were addressed by Jesus to his contemporaries and are addressed to us in today’s liturgy. We always begin our Mass with a call to repentance. Homily: “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish as they did”. Jesus says these words […]

I remember seeing a movie called Mask which is based on a true story. A 16-year-old boy named Rocky Dennis had a rare disease that caused his skull and the bones of his face to grow larger than they should and as a result his face was terribly misshapen and disfigured. His grotesque appearance caused […]

The Trojan Horse refers to a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks, during the Trojan War, to enter the city of Troy and win the war. After a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse and hid a select force of men inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and […]

In 1953 Sir Edmund Percival Hiliary was a New Zealand Mountaineer, explorer and philanthropist. He was part of the ninth British expedition to Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. This expedition went to Nepal in India to conquer Mount Everst and to climb it for the first time. There were many men in […]