Preacher’s Sketchbook:

Each week, a Dominican member of the Province of St. Joseph’s Preaching Advisory Board prepares this Preacher’s Sketchbook in anticipation of the upcoming Sunday Mass. The idea of the Preacher’s Sketchbook is to take quotations from the authority of the Church–the Pope, the Fathers of the Church, documents of the Councils, the saints–that can help spark ideas for the Sunday homily. Just as an artist’s sketchbook preserves ideas for later elaboration, so we hope the Preacher’s Sketchbook will provide some ideas for homiletical elaboration.

Pope John Paul II, Homily for the Jubilee of the Entertainment World

You too have come to ask: “What must we do?” The first answer that the word of God gives you is an invitation to rediscover joy… However, this joy that flows from divine grace is not a superficial or fleeting happiness. It is a deep joy, rooted in the heart, which can imbue the believer’s entire life. A joy that can coexist with difficulties, trials, even—however paradoxical this may seem—with pain and death. It is the joy of Christmas and Easter, the gift of the incarnate Son of God, who died and rose again; a joy that no one can take from those who are one with him in faith and works (cf. Jn 16: 22-23).

Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World

Religiosity has to regenerate itself anew in this large context—and in doing so also find new forms for its expression and comprehension. People today no longer have an immediate intuitive grasp of the fact that Christ’s blood on the Cross is expiation for their sins. Formulas like these are great and true, but they no longer have a place in our overall system of thought and world view; they stand in need of new translation and comprehension. For example, we have to recover the understanding that it really is necessary to come to terms with evil. We cannot simply shove it aside or forget it. It has to be worked through and transformed from within.

Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World

We really are in an age in which a new evangelization is needed; in which the one gospel has to be proclaimed in its great, enduring rationality and in its power that transcends rationality, so that it can reenter our thinking and understanding in a new way.

Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium

Thanks solely to this encounter—or renewed encounter—with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being. Here we find the source and inspiration of all our efforts at evangelization. For if we have received the love which restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?

Pope Francis, Evangelii gaudium

Saint Irenaeus writes: “By his coming, Christ brought with him all newness”.[8] With this newness he is always able to renew our lives and our communities, and even if the Christian message has known periods of darkness and ecclesial weakness, it will never grow old. Jesus can also break through the dull categories with which we would enclose him and he constantly amazes us by his divine creativity. Whenever we make the effort to return to the source and to recover the original freshness of the Gospel, new avenues arise, new paths of creativity open up, with different forms of expression, more eloquent signs and words with new meaning for today’s world. Every form of authentic evangelization is always “new”.