Knights of Columbus Council 3300

Knights of Columbus Council 3300 We are a Non- Profit, Religious based organization established to provide Volunteer Services, Support

09/08/2026

Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Matthew 1:1–16, 18–23
Friends, today we celebrate the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And our Gospel declares that she will be the mother of Jesus, who would be “God with us.”

Mary is a rich and multivalent symbolic figure in all of the Gospels. In Luke’s infancy narrative, she emerges as the spokesperson for ancient Israel, speaking, in her Magnificat, in the words and cadences of Hannah.

In Matthew’s Christmas account, she is compelled to go into exile in Egypt and is then called back to her home, recapitulating thereby the journey of Israel from slavery to freedom. She is thus the symbolic embodiment of faithful and patient Israel, longing for deliverance.

In John’s Gospel, she is, above all, mother—the physical mother of Jesus and, through him, the mother of all who would come to new life in him. As mother of the Lord, she is, once again, Israel, that entire series of events and system of ideas from which Jesus emerged and in terms of which he alone becomes intelligible. Hans Urs von Balthasar commented in the same vein that Mary effectively awakened the messianic consciousness of Jesus through her recounting of the story of Israel to her son.

09/07/2026

Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 6:6–11
Friends, in today’s Gospel, the Pharisees plot against Jesus because he healed a man on the Sabbath.

Christians know something of God from sources philosophical, mythological, historical, and poetic, but their deepest grasp of the nature of God comes from Jesus of Nazareth, the Logos, the spoken Word of the Father. This Jesus was the friend of the marginalized, the healer of the disabled and the sick, the advocate of the forgotten, the forgiver of sins. His mission was to carry the fire of divine mercy to all those who were cut off from it.

In doing so, he excited the wrath and opposition of the powerful, all those whose status depended upon an ideology of violence, differentiation, and exclusion. When he was born, Herod trembled, and when he came on the public scene, Pharisees schemed and protectors of the establishment plotted to do away with him.

In the end, he was put to death by a conspiracy of the secular and religious authorities, and, in his moment of greatest danger, he was betrayed, denied, and abandoned by even his dearest friends. Jesus did not simply die; he was executed, eliminated. And he died precisely because of the way he lived.

09/06/2026

Thus says the LORD:
You, son of man, I have appointed watchman for the house of Israel;
when you hear me say anything, you shall warn them for me.
If I tell the wicked, "O wicked one, you shall surely die, "
and you do not speak out to dissuade the wicked from his way,
the wicked shall die for his guilt,
but I will hold you responsible for his death.
But if you warn the wicked,
trying to turn him from his way,
and he refuses to turn from his way,
he shall die for his guilt,
but you shall save yourself.

09/05/2026

Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 6:1–5
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares that he is Lord of the Sabbath.

Again and again, Jesus is portrayed as violating the sacred command to rest on the seventh day. His disciples pick grain on the Sabbath, and many times he cures on the Sabbath, much to the dismay of the protectors of Jewish law.

When challenged, he declares himself Lord of the Sabbath (a breathtaking claim for a Jew to make, since Yahweh alone could be assigned that title) and clarifies that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

In short, he claimed the properly divine prerogative of relativizing the significance of perhaps the defining practice of pious Jews and placing it in subordination to the kingdom of God.

09/04/2026

Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 5:33–39
Friends, in today’s Gospel, people ask Jesus why he doesn’t encourage fasting among his followers. Jesus’s answer is wonderful: “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?” (That’s a typically Jewish style, by the way, answering a question with another question.)

This great image of the wedding feast comes up frequently in the New Testament, most obviously in the wedding feast at Cana narrative. And it is echoed in the tradition. Jesus is the wedding of heaven and earth, the marriage of divinity and humanity; he is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride. In him, the most intimate union is achieved between God and the world.

Could you imagine people fasting at a wedding banquet? Could you imagine going into an elegant room with your fellow guests and being served bread and water? It would be ridiculous! The mark of the Christian dispensation is joy. Exuberance. Delight. God and the world have come together. What could be better news?

09/03/2026

Memorial of Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church
Luke 5:1–11
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus climbs into Peter’s boat without asking permission. He simply commandeers this vessel that is central to the fisherman’s life and commences to give orders. This represents something of enormous moment: the invasion of grace.

Though God respects our relative independence, he is not the least bit content to leave us in a “natural” state. Instead, he wants to live in us, to become the Lord of our lives, moving into our minds, wills, bodies, imaginations, nerves, and bones.

This commandeering of nature by grace does not involve the compromising of nature but rather its perfection and elevation. When Jesus moves into the house of the soul, the powers of the soul are heightened and properly directed; when Jesus commands the boat of the natural human life, that life is preserved, strengthened, and given a new orientation.

This is signaled symbolically by the Lord’s directive to put out into the deep water. On our own, we can know and will within a very narrow range, seeking those goods and truths that appear within the horizon of our natural consciousness, but when grace invades us, we are enticed into far deeper waters.

09/02/2026

Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 4:38–44
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares his mission: “I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent.” And he continues to pursue his mission among us in our efforts to do the work of evangelization.

Do we need evangelization? The statistics couldn’t be clearer. Did you know that the fastest-growing category in polls of religious affiliation is “none”? And did you know that there are far more nones than Catholics in this country?

So, Catholics cannot avoid the demand of evangelization, proclaiming the faith. Vatican II couldn’t be clearer on this score, seeing the Church itself as nothing but a vehicle for evangelization: It’s not so much the case that the Church has a mission, but rather that a mission has the Church.

St. Paul VI and St. John Paul II made this idea central to their teaching. In fact, John Paul famously called for a new evangelization. Bringing people to Christ is not one work among many; rather, it is the central work of the Church, that around which everything else that we do revolves.

09/01/2026

Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 4:31–37
Friends, today’s Gospel reports that Jesus came to Capernaum, entered the synagogue on a sabbath, and began to teach. So far, so ordinary. Any bar-mitzvahed adult had the privilege of speaking in synagogue and commenting on the Scripture.

But then it says that the people “were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority.” Once again, we’d probably pass over this rather quickly, but it meant the world to a first-century Jew. The ordinary teachers would have appealed to their own teachers and authorities, and finally to Moses and the Torah, which were unassailable.

The Sermon on the Mount gives a wonderful example of Jesus’s authoritative teaching. He appears as the new Moses. Like Moses, he goes up on a mountain, and like Moses, he brings down a kind of new law. But here the comparisons get strained, for Jesus does something that even Moses could never do: He claims authority over the Torah itself. “You have heard it said . . . but I say.”

What he means is that they have heard it said in the Torah! And this was the authority beyond which there was no appeal. That’s why the people “were astonished at his teaching.”

08/31/2026

Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 4:16–30
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins his Galilean ministry with a prophetic message in the synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

The moment has arrived, the privileged time, the kairos; something that human beings have been longing for and striving after and hoping to see has appeared. In Jesus of Nazareth, the divine and human have come together in a salvific way, and this reconciliation is the long-awaited kingdom of God.

One motif in Scripture is persistent: the passionate desire for deliverance, the cry of the heart toward the God from whom the people feel alienated. What Jesus announces in his first sermon, and what he demonstrates throughout his life and ministry, is that this wild desire of his ancestors, this hope against hope, this intimate union of God and humanity, is an accomplished fact, something that can be seen and heard and touched.

08/31/2026

My God my Heavenly Father, let Your word dwell within my heart. Nurture in me a better understanding of its divine truth so as to give me wisdom, and ignite in me the will to share Your message of love. Your psalms I will sing and Your bread I will break with all others who open their hearts as I have done to You Lord, my Heavenly Father and His Holy Son. Amen.

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