Knights of Columbus Council 3300

06/15/2026

06/15/2026

Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 5:38–42
Friends, today, in the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord exhorts us to nonresistance to evil. Martin Luther King Jr. was deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s techniques, and Gandhi learned them, largely, from the Sermon on the Mount.

Both Gandhi and King appreciated that the text dealing with the nonresistance to evil has nothing to do with passivity in the face of injustice, but rather with a new and distinctive type of resistance.

Consider the Lord’s injunction “When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.” I realize that this sounds like mere passivity, fleeing before evil, but the truth is anything but. In Jesus’s time, you would not have used your left hand for any type of social interaction, since it was considered unclean. Therefore, to strike someone on the right cheek is to strike him with the back of your hand, the way a master might treat a slave.

By turning the other cheek, one neither fights back directly nor flees, but rather stands his ground and declares, “You will not treat me that way again.” It thereby effectively mirrors back to the aggressor his aggression. It is the declaration that the aggressed person refuses to cooperate with the world of the aggressor

06/14/2026

Congratulations to Ava Dinola receiving the Father Shanley Scholarship award K of C Council 3300 Our Lady of the Rosary GrandKnight Joe Criscoulo And officer Joe Monaco Ava and family

06/14/2026

Evangelina Hegan awarded TheFather Shanley scholarship award Father Mathew presents and Tim Anderson Kof C Council 3300 Our Lady of the Rosary

06/14/2026

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew 9:36—10:8
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus summons apostles whom he shapes and sends on mission. Priests through the centuries—from Augustine and Aquinas, to Francis Xavier and John Henry Newman, to John Paul II—are the descendants of those first friends and apprentices of the Lord. They have been needed in every age, and they are needed today, for the kingdom of heaven must be proclaimed, the poor must be served, God must be worshipped, and the sacraments must be administered.

Spiritual fathers are required especially in our time, when a rising tide of secularism threatens to overwhelm the religious impulse. We are wired for God; we will never satisfy the deepest longing of our hearts apart from God.

The secularist ideology teaches that sufficient amounts of wealth, pleasure, power, or honor will make us happy. Who will counter this? Who will speak to this culture of the beauty of God? Who will remind us that our lives are not about us? Who will break open the words of the Gospel and spread out the banquet table of Christ’s body and blood? This is why we need priests.

06/13/2026

Tenth Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 5:33–37
Friends, in today’s Gospel, the Lord teaches his way about oaths and vows.

Although Jesus prohibited oath-taking, the tradition of the Church has allowed oaths “made for grave and right reasons”—for example, in court. But the Church has traditionally employed vows to sustain the commitments of priests and religious so that they may, as the Catechism puts it, “conform themselves more fully to the obedient Christ.”

For example, vows have sustained the holiness of many women religious who have become saints, including St. Katharine Drexel, a philanthropist who shows us what justice looks like when it is invaded by love; St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a Doctor of the Church whose “little way” demonstrates a prudence radicalized by Christ; St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), a philosopher and martyr who is an icon of evangelical courage; and St. Teresa of Kolkata, a missionary of charity who embodies the power of poverty and asceticism when placed in the service of Jesus.

06/12/2026

Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Matthew 11:25–30
Friends, in today’s Gospel, the Lord offers to relieve our burdens: “Take my yoke upon you . . . and you will find rest for yourselves.” Jesus almost always speaks in paradoxes, and this is another one. “I will put a yoke on you.” Now, if I am burdened, the last thing I want is a yoke that will make my life more burdensome.

But here’s the paradox: What is it that makes our lives heavy and weighed down? Precisely the burden of our own egos, the weight of one’s own self. When I am puffing myself up with my own self-importance, I’m laboring under all that weight. Jesus is saying, “Become a child. Take that weight off your shoulders and put on the weight of my yoke of my obedience to the Father.”

Here’s how it works: If you have two animals yoked together when they’re both pulling, they are doing each other’s work. Jesus is saying that if your life is heavy and burdensome, it’s probably because you are caught up under the weight of your own sense of self-sufficiency. Get rid of that and take the yoke of Christ’s obedience upon your shoulders. Allow yourself to be led.

06/11/2026

Memorial of Saint Barnabas, Apostle
Matthew 5:20–26
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus commands us to be reconciled with one another. I want to say something about the role of forgiveness in repairing our broken relationships.

When you are at worship and realize that you need to forgive someone (or be forgiven by someone), go and do it. Go get reconciled, then come back. It’s like a rule of physics. There is something hidden in the deep mystery of God, and I can’t fully explicate it. Somehow, if there is a lack of forgiveness in you, it blocks the movement of God in you. Perhaps it’s simply because God is love, and so whatever is opposed to love in us blocks the flow of God’s power and God’s life.

One reason we do not forgive is that we feel that some injustice has been done to us, and we resent it. A good cure for this feeling is to kneel before the cross of Jesus. What do you see there? The innocent Son of God nailed to the cross—the ultimate injustice. What does he do? He forgives his persecutors. Meditate on that, and your sense of being treated unjustly will fade away.