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 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, on 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, 2,000 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 calumna in Greek.

That's why when they translated Apocalypseis 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 to put it this way, a new world.

...