Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, it’s appropriate that we’re looking at a portrait of the Church, because we’re coming back, if you want, to the ordinary work of the Church up and down the ages to the present day. Our Gospel from the tenth chapter of Luke gives us our marching orders—from going on mission together and staying rooted in prayer, to trusting in providence and supporting the work of the Church, to curing the sick and proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Transcribed - Published: 1 July 2025

Friends, this year, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul falls on a Sunday, and I want to spend some time reflecting especially on Saint Peter. Around the year 64, Shimon Bar Yonah, a fisherman from Galilee, was put to death brutally in the Circus of Nero. But while the Roman Empire is long gone and the successor of Nero doesn’t exist, the empire of this fisherman, Peter the Apostle, is everywhere, and in May, his 266th successor walked out onto the loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica, built over the very spot where he was buried.

Transcribed - Published: 23 June 2025

Friends, every year we have Trinity Sunday followed by today’s wonderful Solemnity of Corpus Christi—two of the highest theological mysteries of our faith, the Trinity and the Eucharist, back to back. As we reflect today on the Body and Blood of Jesus, I want to explore the deep connection between temple sacrifice, the altar of the cross, and the Mass.

Transcribed - Published: 17 June 2025

Friends, today is Trinity Sunday—one of my favorite feast days of the year because I can put my old theologian’s cap on. Looking first at one of the greatest of the medieval theologians, Saint Bonaventure, and then at maybe the greatest figure in Western theology, Saint Augustine, I’d like to reflect with you on the dynamics of the Trinitarian life—the very matrix into which we’re inserted through baptism.

Transcribed - Published: 10 June 2025

Friends, this is the great feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. In the First Reading, the Spirit manifests himself as a strong driving wind, and while you can’t see the wind directly, you can see its effects. The text I want to reflect on today is not in the readings but is one of my favorites: Galatians 5:22–26, when St. Paul talks about “the fruit of the Spirit.” And it’s precisely to this same point: What are the signs that the Holy Spirit is operative in us?

Transcribed - Published: 5 June 2025

Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, and as the Church readies us for Pentecost, the readings begin to talk about the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel, Jesus, speaking to his disciples the night before he dies, says, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. But God spoke his Word into human minds that take it in, mull it over, and look at it from different angles, the idea developing across space and time. And so we need a divine interpreter of the divine Word.

Transcribed - Published: 21 May 2025

Friends on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we have an extraordinary Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian thing. Jesus, at the beginning of a lengthy and incredibly rich monologue he gives the night before he dies, says to his disciples, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is not a sentimental or psychological banality. To understand Jesus here, we have to understand what a strange thing love is—and the way the word is being used.

Transcribed - Published: 15 May 2025

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this marvelous, short but very punchy reading from the Gospel of John: Jesus referring to himself as the good shepherd. This is a remarkably apt metaphor for how God reaches out to us—knows us personally—and how we are able to discern and follow his voice. But how do we hear the voice of the shepherd? In a lot of ways—but I wonder if the clearest way isn’t through the conscience, which John Henry Newman called the aboriginal Vicar of Christ in the soul.

Transcribed - Published: 8 May 2025

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Easter, we have the magnificent Gospel from the very end of the Gospel of John, chapter twenty-one, which is so rich theologically. We see here, on full display, what it means for us—who are all ambiguous characters—to stop resisting the cross of self-denial and love and to walk the way of the Lord.

Transcribed - Published: 1 May 2025

Friends, we enter now into the Easter season, and here is the thing I want you to know: We misunderstand Easter dramatically when we think primarily of spring festival time, the weather getting nicer, and Easter bunnies and bonnets. All of that is great; but if you don't understand Easter as a revolution—as an earthquake that has changed the entire world—you have not understood it.

Transcribed - Published: 23 April 2025

Friends, happy Easter! Many of you probably know that I’ve spent much of my life reading philosophers and spiritual writers—Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel. What all those figures have in common is a kind of calm, musing detachment as they talk about high ideas. Well, there’s all of that—and then there’s the Gospel, the “Good News.” Yes, the Gospels have inspired philosophers and spiritual teachers, but at their heart, they’re not abstracted philosophical musing; they’re the urgent conveying of news. Something happened—and I need you to know about it!

Transcribed - Published: 15 April 2025

Friends, we come to Palm Sunday, which is also called Passion Sunday because we always read at Mass the Passion narrative from one of the synoptic Gospels. This year, we hear from Saint Luke, and I want to look at two elements unique to his particular version, both of which have to do with forgiveness.

Transcribed - Published: 10 April 2025

Friends, we come to the Fifth Sunday of Lent, and I want to reflect today on our second reading from the Letter of Paul to the Philippians. It is a passage of both literary genius and spiritual power, one that uses the language of conversion—of letting go of the way I understood and defined my life and turning toward an entirely new way.

Transcribed - Published: 2 April 2025

Friends, this Fourth Sunday of Lent gives us marvelous readings: the First Reading from the book of Joshua, the Second Reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, and the Gospel reading, which is the magnificent parable of the prodigal son from Luke. The correspondences between these three readings I think are quite striking, and they have to do with the Eucharist and divinization.

Transcribed - Published: 26 March 2025

Friends, we come to the Third Sunday of Lent, and we have the extraordinary privilege during Cycle C of reading this account, in the third chapter of the book of Exodus, of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. It’s one of the pivotal texts in all of Scripture; so much of our great tradition refers to and flows from it, and it sheds light in every direction, telling us profound truths about God, about the spiritual life, and about our relationship to the Lord.

Transcribed - Published: 18 March 2025

Friends our Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent this year is Luke’s account of the Transfiguration. And it opens up something that is marvelous and confounding; there is sort of an aching and a longing associated with this text. It speaks to us of these moments when reality becomes incandescent or transparent to something more—something that lies beyond our ordinary experience.

Transcribed - Published: 11 March 2025

Friends, we come to the holy season of Lent. Pascal said that most of us go through life diverting and distracting ourselves so that we don’t come to terms with the big questions: God, meaning, purpose, eternal life. The Gospel for this week, Luke’s marvelous account of the temptation of Jesus, invites us to wrestle with three questions in particular.

Transcribed - Published: 5 March 2025

Friends, for this Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church gives us the opportunity, in our second reading from 1 Corinthians 15, to reflect on the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It was the Resurrection that Paul correctly took as the hinge, the central teaching, of Christianity. But what do we mean by “Resurrection”? How do we theologize about it?

Transcribed - Published: 25 February 2025

Friends, our Gospel for today is from the Sermon on the Plain, which is Luke's version of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, and it’s not only saying something about the moral life; it’s also saying something very profound about God. It has to do with what a number of philosophers in the twentieth century called the aporia—the difficulty or even impossibility—of the gift. Can we give a gift that’s truly a gift, with no strings attached?

Transcribed - Published: 19 February 2025

Friends, on this Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we have the first reading from the prophet Jeremiah in tandem with the Gospel from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. And both readings draw out a basic feature of biblical spirituality—namely, the ordering of the heart, that deepest organizing principle of one’s entire life, to the Lord.

Transcribed - Published: 12 February 2025

Friends, for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church gives us a wonderful pairing of readings: the first reading from the sixth chapter of Isaiah and the Gospel from the fifth chapter of Luke. They both speak to what I think are three key moments in the Christian spiritual life: first, the breakthrough of grace; then, the acknowledgement of sin; and finally, being sent on mission.

Transcribed - Published: 4 February 2025

Friends, it’s easy enough to sentimentalize the Feast of the Presentation. But we oughtn’t to, because this story is getting at, if I can put it this way, a hard truth. And the clue is given to us in the first reading, which is from the prophet Malachi: “And suddenly there will come to the temple the LORD whom you seek.”

Transcribed - Published: 29 January 2025

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about walls and bridges. There is a tendency today to be simplistic and one-sided about walls and bridges: walls are bad and keep people out, while bridges are great and establish connection. But you need both walls and bridges—both identity and relevance, both the Word and the Word proclaimed—to live the Christian thing correctly.

Transcribed - Published: 22 January 2025

Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and this Sunday, we hear the marvelous story of the wedding feast at Cana from the Gospel of John. It's as though, as we commence the ordinary liturgical year, we're meant to see everything through the lens of this reading. The Church sets it up with our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, who speaks of God’s desire to marry his people. Jesus, in his own person, is the marriage of divinity and humanity, and therefore it’s appropriate symbolically that the first of his signs would take place at a wedding.

Transcribed - Published: 14 January 2025

Friends, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is exceptionally important. All four Gospels talk about it, and John the Baptist is a kind of door we have to go through to understand Jesus properly. What was John the Baptist doing in the desert? Why did the Messiah, the Lord, go to him for a baptism of repentance? And why do we still spend time with this strange, puzzling, and even embarrassing event?

Transcribed - Published: 7 January 2025

Friends, we’re all familiar with the story of the three wise men, which has been depicted in thousands of Christmas cards. And there is something romantic and charming about it. But on this great Feast of the Epiphany, I want to develop an important angle of the story very much on the minds of many people today—namely, the whole problem of religion and science.

Transcribed - Published: 30 December 2024

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, we come to the Advent figure par excellence: the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. What I want to do in this homily is to look at some of the Church’s classical titles of Mary. These are not simply pious exclamations, but rather very substantive insights into her role in bringing Christ to birth—both in history and in us today.

Transcribed - Published: 18 December 2024

Friends, I always love preaching on the Feast of the Holy Family because I think the biblical message here is very surprising. We say the Bible is associated with family values, and indeed it is, but they're probably not the ones we would automatically think of. We see this in the two stories that the Church brings to our attention today: the story of Hannah leaving Samuel at the temple in Shiloh, and the story of Mary and Joseph finding Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.

Transcribed - Published: 16 December 2024

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, I want to draw attention to our second reading, which is from St. Paul to the Philippians. These lines about joy, anxiety, prayer, and peace can run right through our minds, but they’re actually breathtaking, and they open up something at the very heart of the spiritual life.

Transcribed - Published: 10 December 2024

Friends, in our readings for the Second Sunday of Advent, there is a lot of talk about building highways. In the Bible, both Old Testament and New, we find the theme of exile. Very often, Israel finds itself sent away from its own Promised Land, and a great hope is that one day, the exiles will return home on a highway that God has built. This is a symbol of spiritual exile—and to meet the highway that God has prepared, we have to do some preparation ourselves.

Transcribed - Published: 3 December 2024

Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent, which is the commencement of the new liturgical year. “Adventus” in Latin means arrival or coming, and one way to look at Advent is to see three comings of Christ. There is the coming of Christ in history in Bethlehem, the coming of Christ now as he approaches our hearts, and the coming of Christ someday in the future. All three of these dimensions belong to our Advent preparation.

Transcribed - Published: 26 November 2024

Friends, we come to the end of the liturgical year with the Feast of Christ the King, where we meditate upon the kingly reign or rule of Christ. Now, we in the modern liberal West have a hard time with kings; we like democratic polities. The United States emerged out of a great rebellion against the king. But we should get over this modern hang-up, because kingship—from Adam all the way up to Christ—is a basic biblical idea. And the importance of today’s feast is that it forces a decision about which king we follow.

Transcribed - Published: 20 November 2024

Friends, we're coming toward the end of the liturgical year, and as is typical, the Church gives us readings of an apocalyptic nature dealing with the end times. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling,” and what’s being unveiled in our readings is the emergence of a new world—not so much in the literal, cosmic sense as in the sense of how we navigate and understand the world. Something has fallen apart; the old world has given way.

Transcribed - Published: 12 November 2024

Friends, our first reading is that wonderful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, which is a kind of hidden gem in the Old Testament. Like so many of the stories in the Bible, it is very understated, but chock full of spiritual meaning. And it has to do with how we respond—and the strange and surprising ways God might respond to us— when things are toughest.

Transcribed - Published: 5 November 2024

Friends, the readings for this Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time take us to very holy ground. In the first reading, taken from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, we hear the “shema,” a prayer fundamental to Jewish theology and spirituality. And in the Gospel, when one of the scribes asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment, the Son of God, the Torah made flesh, recites the same prayer. We can’t get any more sacred or any clearer indication of how we should govern our lives.

Transcribed - Published: 29 October 2024

Friends, all three readings for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time have a golden thread running through them, which is the idea of the call—of the primacy of God’s action in the life of salvation. Whenever we start thinking that this is our own ego project and that we are in command, we are ipso facto on the wrong path.

Transcribed - Published: 23 October 2024

Friends, our Gospel this Sunday is taken from the tenth chapter of Mark, and it is high-octane spiritual business. Something pivotal is being laid out for us in this passage, and it has to do with power, suffering, and a willingness to go where Jesus goes.

Transcribed - Published: 15 October 2024

Friends, for this Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our first reading from the marvelous book of Wisdom presents an old biblical trope: If you were to ask God for something, or if God were to come to you and say he will give you whatever you want—what would you ask for? This is a really clarifying question. And while many things might come to mind, the answer of the paradigmatic wisdom figure is instructive.

Transcribed - Published: 7 October 2024

Friends, the first reading from Genesis and the Gospel from Mark this week are of great importance. They have to do with what we call Christian anthropology—the biblical understanding of who we are—and most specifically, in relation to marriage and family. This question of how we define ourselves is of course on the minds of many people today, and the readings, in a beautifully compact way, bring out the Christian answer.

Transcribed - Published: 1 October 2024

Friends, the first reading and Gospel this Sunday have to do with the Church at war with itself. The devil is the scatterer, the divider, and one of his favorite tricks is to take the Church—which is meant to be an instrument of the Gospel in the world—and to turn us against one another.

Transcribed - Published: 25 September 2024

Friends, why was the story of Jesus with the little children, versions of which appear in the three synoptic Gospels, so vividly remembered by the first Christians? I think they intuited that it got very close to the heart of Jesus’ teaching. The way Mark sets up his account of this story in our Gospel for this weekend is frankly funny, and it’s an example of the disciples completely missing the point of everything.

Transcribed - Published: 17 September 2024

Friends, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread”—and this week, I am going to go once more into the issue of faith and works, which has been dividing Western Christianity since the Reformation. Our second reading from the Letter of James is a key text on this issue, and its metaphor of healing—together with Paul’s forensic metaphor—orient us to the Catholic view of justification.

Transcribed - Published: 10 September 2024

Friends, our Gospel for today is the evocative scene of Jesus healing a man who cannot hear and cannot speak. This man is beautifully symbolic of many in our culture today: we don’t listen to God, and therefore we can’t speak clearly about God. To us, as to him, Jesus says, “Ephphatha!”—be opened to the Word of God!

Transcribed - Published: 3 September 2024

Friends, as Americans, we have a very ambiguous relationship to law. On the one hand, we are a nation of independently minded people; we don’t like the law imposing itself on us. At the same time—let’s face it—we are a hyper-litigious society. We see the same ambiguity about law—both its beauty and its shadow side—in our three readings today.

Transcribed - Published: 27 August 2024

Friends, we come now to the close of this great discourse of Jesus in the sixth chapter of John, where we see the aftereffects of his teaching on the Real Presence. The Eucharist is a standing or falling point of Christianity, and the question Jesus poses to the Twelve is posed to every one of us today: Do you also want to leave over this teaching? Do you reject it, or do you accept it?

Transcribed - Published: 20 August 2024

Friends, we’re continuing our reading of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, which is all about the Eucharist. And here’s my take on our reading for today: A long trip by car or plane can be uncomfortable, even overwhelming. But we’re heading somewhere else; we’re on a journey. And on a long journey, you have to find sustenance to keep going.

Transcribed - Published: 6 August 2024

Friends, in the midst of our country’s great Eucharistic Revival, we continue our reading of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. And this week, I want to reflect on a line that names something so spiritually basic: “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life.”

Transcribed - Published: 30 July 2024

Friends, this Sunday we begin five weeks of Gospel readings from the sixth chapter of John, which is all about the Eucharist. Jesus will get into a lengthy discourse about the Eucharist, but it commences narratively with the familiar story of the multiplication of the loaves, which is an iconic presentation of the Mass.

Transcribed - Published: 24 July 2024

Friends the readings for this Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time are interwoven with each other in a very interesting way. I want to start with the first reading from Jeremiah, then look at the Gospel from Mark, and then circle back to the second reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which I think sheds the most light on the thematics here—namely, God’s desire to shepherd his people, and the arrival of the shepherd in Christ.

Transcribed - Published: 16 July 2024

Friends, on this Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, our Gospel from the sixth chapter of Mark is Jesus sending the Twelve out on mission. These are the very earliest moments of the Church—in a way, the “pre-Church”—so it’s important for us to pay attention to what the Lord tells them.

Transcribed - Published: 9 July 2024