Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the

utterly fascinating, often confounding, book of Daniel. In fact, it's from the last

chapter of the book of Daniel. Can I encourage everybody if you have a chance?

Sit down this week and read through the book of Daniel. It's a little puzzling,

it's a little dense, but read through it. Get a sense of it. Because it's fair to

say the book of Daniel had an extraordinarily powerful influence on the first

Christians and those who are trying to understand who Jesus is. It provided

for them a most important template for understanding the significance of Jesus.

So for us as well, 2000 years later, this book is still of great significance.

Now Daniel is an example of what they call apocalyptic literature, which I know

in the ordinary understanding means end of the world. But apocalypse, apocalypsis

means literally a pulling back of the veil of the Kalumna in Greek. That's why

when they translated apocalypsis into Latin, they got revvelatio pulling back

the vellum, the veil. And so apocalyptic literature is not primarily about the

end of the world. It's primarily about revealing something, showing if you want

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