ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEDICATION

Sunday, October 18, 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

 

For convenience, we’re commemorating this church building's dedication today, on October 18th, the Feast of St. Luke. The 115th anniversary actually occurred almost a month ago, on St. Matthew’s Day, September 21st. On that date in 1911, the Rt. Rev. James de Wolf Perry, Seventh Bishop of Rhode Island, consecrated St. Matthew’s Chapel for the worship of God, the preaching of God’s Word, and the administration of the Sacraments. Although the building had served as a mission chapel of St. John’s, Barrington, for twenty years, since 1891, the rule was that a church building could not be consecrated until the mortgage was paid off and the congregation owned it outright. St. Matthew’s Chapel remained a mission of St. John’s until 1924, when it became a mission of the Diocese. In 1959, it attained parish status as Saint Matthew’s, West Barrington. In 2012, upon merging with St. Mark’s, Riverside, it officially became Sts. Matthew and Mark. 

 

The dedication festival gives us an opportunity to reflect on the broader significance of church buildings. In 1975, Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, addressed the celebration of the Millennium Anniversary of the Cathedral of Mainz in Germany. In what follows, I draw on some of his reflections. 

 

Unlike some religions, the Christian faith is not centered on any one shrine, temple, or holy place. The religion of the Old Testament centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. Today’s reading from First Kings recounts King Solomon’s dedication of the Temple when it was first built, and today’s Psalm expresses the joy pilgrims felt as they entered the sacred precincts to worship God in his Temple: “How dear to me is your dwelling, O Lord of hosts; my heart has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord ...” 

 

Christianity has many holy places and pilgrimage sites; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome are among the most prominent. Yet the New Testament largely focuses on the Church as a spiritual temple built of living stones—faithful Christian people—with Christ as the chief cornerstone. As St. Peter puts it in today’s epistle: “like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

 

Still, in practical terms, the early Christians needed places of worship. Initially, they met in each other’s homes, but they soon began building and setting apart buildings to celebrate God’s Word and Sacraments. Thus, the word “church” has two senses: on the one hand, the Body of Christ, a spiritual house built of living stones; on the other, houses built of stone, brick, and wood where the faithful gather to worship.

 

But Christian churches are far more than functional meeting places. At the heart of Christian faith lies the principle of Incarnation: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. In Christian art and architecture, the Word of God transforms material things into signs of God’s presence. A church building’s beauty points to the future transformation of God’s whole creation in heavenly glory.

 

Based on these reflections, Ratzinger offered four key observations.

 

First, whatever its artistic and architectural merits, a church building derives its true life and power from the faith of the community that gathers within its walls. This becomes evident when visiting churches, shrines, cathedrals, and abbeys while traveling. A church that is no longer home to a living community of faith has, in effect, become a museum: a sad memorial to a past that is no more. 

 

Secondly, many churches derive an aura of holiness from the faith and prayers of past generations. Moreover, traditional styles of church architecture, design, and decoration testify to the faith’s unity and continuity over the centuries. 

 

For example, when William Walker designed this church in 1891, he was making not only an aesthetic statement but also a theological one. When churches are built to look like churches—rather than conference centers, libraries, or assembly halls—they visibly express the hope that their congregations’ faith and worship will be true to the universal Church in all times and places. Because this space looks a bit old-fashioned and churchy, it calls us to unity in the faith with all those who’ve gone before us.

 

Thirdly, churches must be a home to all the faithful everywhere. That is, the church building cannot become the exclusive preserve of the local parish family, no matter how warm and intimate its life together; nor can the active congregation claim exclusive ownership of the building. The church must remain an open place where strangers, visitors, foreigners, and exiles can find welcome and refuge, a home away from home.

 

This imperative came home to me on September 11, 2001, the day of the World Trade Center disaster. At the time, I was rector of S. Stephen’s Church in Providence, in the midst of Brown University. After a student buzzed the office on the intercom to ask to enter the church, I realized many more people would likely want to come in. So I opened the church doors and spent the day sitting in the narthex, watching a steady trickle of people come in to sit quietly, pray, or light a candle. I had never seen most of them before, and I would never see many of them again, but in that moment of crisis, they instinctively sought the church as a place of refuge and sanctuary. That day I realized, as never before, that a church is a spiritual landmark not only for its congregation but also for its surrounding neighborhood. To be faithful to our mission, we need to find ways to open our doors as much as possible, both literally and figuratively.

 

Fourthly, Ratzinger writes that setting apart houses for God not only divinizes but also humanizes our environment. To make his point, he asks us to imagine what the landscape of our cities, towns, and villages would look like if we removed all the churches. “It would,” he writes, “become a desert of utility in which the heart would probably stop beating. Where people just want to inhabit the earth by themselves, it becomes uninhabitable.” 

 

To expand on this point, I feel a sense of warmth whenever I drive down Wampanoag Trail to get here, and I come round the bend, and the White Church’s spire comes into view over the waters of the Hundred Acre Cove. My usual route takes me past two more Barrington churches before I arrive here. They are not churches of my denomination or tradition, but they are visible signs of God’s presence in this world and in this town. They signify that people in this community have taken the trouble to build and set apart houses for God: places where people can gather to encounter the living God’s presence and activity among them. The good news is that when we make a home for God in this world, he will make a home for us—both in this world and in the world to come.

 

SOCIETY OF MARY ANNUAL MASS

Saturday, October 17, 2026

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Troy, NY

 

 

Interest in and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary are growing in the Episcopal Church and across the wider Anglican world. It’s no longer just an Anglo-Catholic thing. Parishes of all kinds of churchmanship have Rosary groups and Walsingham cells. 

 

In this context, I find it interesting to see which aspects of our Lady resonate most with writers and preachers who’ve recently discovered her. Often, their focus is on Mary’s response to the angel’s message at the Annunciation. Her humility, trust, obedience, and active cooperation with God’s plan seem to be the very model of Christian discipleship, and rightly so.

 

Nonetheless, a full and balanced Marian devotion will make room for Mary's other appearances in Scripture, Tradition, and the Church’s ongoing life. To be clear: Mary is one and the same person throughout. Yet at different times and in different places, she presents herself to us in different ways.

 

In the opening chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel, she’s the Virgin of Nazareth. In the nineteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, she’s the Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the cross. In the first chapter of Acts, she becomes the Mother of the Church, praying with the disciples in the Upper Room for the Holy Spirit’s descent. Finally, at the end of her earthly life, she falls asleep and is taken up, body and soul, to reign as Queen of heaven.

 

We Anglicans are fond of the Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi, “the law of prayer is the law of belief.” It suggests that the prayers and collects in our liturgies and devotions best express our distinctive doctrines. But I’ve recently become aware of another Latin saying: lex cantandi, lex credendi, “the law of singing (or chanting) is the law of belief.” In other words, our best hymns and anthems also powerfully express what we believe. I suspect many people in the pews learn more theology from the hymns they sing than from sermons, Bible studies, or Christian education classes.

 

One excellent hymn for teaching Marian theology is number 278 in The Hymnal 1982. The first verse begins: “Sing we of the blessed Mother, who received the angel’s word, and obedient to the summons, bore in love the infant Lord …” The second verse brings us to Calvary: “Sing we too, of Mary’s sorrows, of the sword that pierced her through, when beneath the cross of Jesus, she his weight of suffering knew …” The third verse brings us to the Resurrection and Pentecost: “Sing again the joys of Mary, when she saw the risen Lord, and in prayer with Christ’s apostles, waited on his promised word …” Finally, the fourth verse points us to heaven: “Sing the chiefest joy of Mary, when on earth her work was done, and the Lord of all creation, brought her to his heavenly home …”

 

The popular devotion known as the Holy Rosary likewise directs our attention to different aspects of Mary’s role in the drama of salvation. In its traditional form, it guides us through fifteen episodes from the lives of Mary and Jesus, grouped into three sets of five: the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. Praying the Rosary helps us experience these mysteries from the perspective of Mary’s participation in her Son’s life and mission.

 

In the early eighteenth century, the French priest and writer St. Louis de Montfort wrote in his book The Secret of the Rosary that the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries correspond to an ancient understanding of the three ways of the spiritual life. Beginning around the fourth century, writers such as Evagrius Pontus and the Pseudo-Dionysius observed that progress toward spiritual maturity often follows a recognizable three-stage pattern. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure developed this idea in the medieval period, and St. John of the Cross elaborated on it in the sixteenth century.

 

The traditional names for the three stages are the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way.

 

Those in the first stage are known as “beginners.” This is the stage of initial conversion: turning away from sin and toward Christ. Overall, it’s a joyful time, marked by spiritual experiences of joy and delight. 

 

Those in the second stage are known as “proficients.” The transition to this stage often takes the form of a crisis, a period of darkness and discouragement as the consolations and delights of the first stage fade and seem lost. The soul learns to persevere in the spiritual disciplines by following Christ on the Way of the Cross. In this stage, we deepen our knowledge of the mysteries of sin and redemption, death, resurrection, and the hope of eternal life. (In 1959, Martin Thornton titled one of his classic books Christian Proficiency because he believed most Anglican parishioners seeking spiritual direction are in this second stage.)

 

Those in the third stage are traditionally known as “the perfect”—not because they’re literally perfect or sinless, but because God’s love is perfecting them. The transition into this stage is often marked by an even more intense spiritual crisis, in which the soul may lose sight of its former theological certainties but nonetheless gradually becomes aware of God’s presence within, at the innermost core of its being. In this stage, we’re often drawn to silent contemplative prayer to experience a direct union with God beyond words and images. (An anonymous fourteenth-century English author described this in the title of the book, The Cloud of Unknowing.)

 

Most Christian spiritual writers emphasize that these three stages don’t always follow a linear sequence. Sometimes we experience all three simultaneously. Sometimes we find ourselves zigzagging back and forth, circling around and around, spiraling up and down among them. 

 

St. Louis de Montfort related the mysteries of the Holy Rosary to these stages of the spiritual life. The Joyful Mysteries help us in the early stages, reminding us of the joy we feel when Christ first enters our lives. The Sorrowful Mysteries teach us to persevere in the Christian disciplines and follow the Way of the Cross. The Glorious Mysteries point us toward union with God and with one another, to which we’re all called as baptized Christians.

 

To avoid misunderstanding, I’m not saying we should pray only the mysteries of the Holy Rosary that seem to match the stage of spiritual life we think we’re in. For one thing, we’re likely to get that wrong, and we really need to discuss that sort of question with a competent spiritual director. I am saying that a healthy Marian spirituality will be balanced, focusing our attention on all aspects of Mary’s life, mission, and role in God’s plan of salvation: joyful, sorrowful, and glorious. And the mysteries will speak to us differently, depending on where we are in our spiritual journey. 

 

In recent years, certain segments of the Church  emphasizing what they call “radical hospitality” have popularized the cliché: “Whoever you are, and wherever you are in your journey, there’s a place at the table for you.” My point in this sermon is best expressed by modifying that saying as follows: Whoever you are, and wherever you are in your spiritual journey, there’s a mystery of the Holy Rosary that can speak directly to you. For there, the Blessed Virgin Mary will meet you where you are and lead you to her Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

PROPER 19, YEAR A

September 13, 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R.I.

 

 

Genesis 50:15-21

Psalm 103:1-13

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18:21-35

 

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” So our Lord teaches us to pray. God’s forgiveness of our sins through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is at the heart of the Christian Gospel. 

 

But forgiving those who’ve hurt, wronged, injured, or offended us is one of the most challenging demands of our faith – and one of the most controversial. Do we really expect victims of child abuse, rape, or violent crime to forgive their tormentors? Do we really expect survivors of the concentration camps to forgive their captors?

 

Those are enormously difficult questions to which I don’t pretend to have easy answers. But two points: 

First, we can answer the question of forgiveness only for ourselves, not for others.

Second, such questions typically arise only in a Christian context. Only after we’ve heard the Christian Gospel do we begin to feel the tension between its message of forgiveness and our human instinct for retribution.

 

Typically, Scripture offers answers to such questions not through detailed, step-by-step instructions for achieving forgiveness, but through stories. As we hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the biblical stories, they gradually shape our minds, imaginations, and wills. They don’t offer easy answers to hard questions so much as help us see the questions themselves in new ways.

 

The story of Joseph in today’s reading from Genesis is a case in point. Joseph and his eleven brothers are Jacob's sons and ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. Many years earlier, Joseph’s brothers attacked him in a fit of jealous rage, stripped him of his beautiful robe, and sold him to a caravan of traders who took him to Egypt to sell him as a slave. 

 

But instead of remaining a slave, through a series of adventures featuring his unique ability to interpret dreams, Joseph has risen to become the chief minister of Pharaoh’s household: the most powerful official in the land. In this capacity, he’s stockpiled grain reserves in preparation for the famine he knows is coming, again thanks to his ability to interpret dreams. When the famine does strike, his brothers come down to Egypt to buy grain. After a series of encounters in which he recognizes them but they don’t recognize him, he finally reveals himself, telling them that God sent him ahead of them into Egypt to preserve all their lives.  

 

As today’s reading from Genesis begins, Joseph’s brothers are terrified that, now that their father Jacob has died, Joseph will finally take his revenge on them. So they offer to be his slaves if only he’ll spare their lives. But instead, he reassures them: “Fear not, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you intended evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive …” 

 

Notice that Joseph doesn’t try to exonerate his brothers or excuse their crime. He tells it like it is: “you intended evil against me.” His brothers stand condemned. But Joseph discerns a deeper wisdom at work. If he were to exact retribution by killing or enslaving his brothers, he’d be putting himself in the place of God, to whom alone vengeance belongs. He’d also be contradicting the will of God, who allowed him to be sold into slavery in the first place to save all their lives. So, just as God has been merciful to Joseph, so now Joseph is merciful to his brothers.

 

The story Jesus tells in today’s Gospel, the parable of the unforgiving servant, stands in a kind of inverse parallel to the story of Joseph and his brothers. A king releases a servant from a huge debt the servant could never pay by himself. But the same servant then refuses to forgive an infinitesimally smaller debt owed to him by another servant. When the king hears of it, he’s outraged: “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you besought me. Should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant as I had mercy on you?” 

 

The analogy is that God has forgiven us at the infinite cost of his Son’s suffering and death on the cross for our sins, so he expects us to forgive one another, even though it costs us far less. To become forgiving people, we begin by acknowledging how much God has forgiven us. 

 

As today’s Psalm puts it: “[The Lord] has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.” And again, Saint Paul, in today’s reading from his Letter to the Romans, says: “Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? … For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”

 

However, it's crucial to understand what forgiveness is and what it isn’t. When someone has hurt us, forgiveness doesn’t mean saying, “Oh, that’s all right, it doesn’t matter.” It’s not all right, and it does matter. If it were truly all right, there’d be nothing to forgive. 

 

Forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing the wrong or pretending it didn’t happen. Instead, it means overcoming our instinct to strike back and letting go of our desire for vengeance and retribution.

 

Forgiveness doesn’t mean a violent criminal should escape serious prison time. It doesn’t mean a chief financial officer who’s embezzled company funds should keep either his job or the money. It doesn’t mean a battered wife should continue living with an abusive husband. It doesn’t mean the Church should move priests who’ve molested children from parish to parish and cover up their crimes. In each of these situations, decisive steps are necessary to protect the innocent and safeguard the community.

 

In tough situations like these, forgiveness means something much harder: refusing to be ruled by hatred, malice, vindictiveness, and the desire for revenge, which can all too easily consume us and poison our attitudes and behavior. It also means refusing to let our identities be defined by our suffering and victimization. 

 

When others hurt, injure, or offend us—which in this life they inevitably will—our choice is where to take our cues in responding. In the Genesis reading, Joseph would be perfectly justified in responding in kind to his brothers’ crime. But instead of taking his cue from his brothers, he takes his cue from God and shows mercy. In the Gospel parable, however, the servant fails to take his cue from the king who’s just forgiven him, and so fails to forgive his fellow servant.

 

To become a forgiving people, we need to learn to see the other person from God’s point of view. Easier said than done! It requires enormous perseverance, patience, and prayer. But most of all, it requires telling, retelling, and immersing ourselves in the biblical stories of forgiveness and reconciliation. Then, by God’s grace, we can begin to know the wonderful freedom and joy found in forgiving others as God has forgiven us.

NATIVITY OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY

Friday, September 11, 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

(Tr. from September 8)

 

 

The feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is one of three birthdays celebrated in the Church calendar. The other two are the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on June 29th and the Nativity of our Lord on December 25th. 

 

Most saints are commemorated instead on the anniversaries of their deaths, their birthdays into heaven. But in some cases, the Bible presents the births of great figures – such as Samuel and Samson – as instances of God sending individuals into the world who will decisively advance his plan of salvation. The telltale sign is typically that the birth occurs to parents considered barren; the more miraculous the birth, the more important and illustrious the individual is destined to become. 

 

Although not recorded in Scripture, the tradition concerning the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary fits this pattern exactly. Our earliest source on Mary’s conception and birth is the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, which dates to the second century. 

 

According to this account, Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anne, remained childless into old age. Joachim was a wealthy and pious descendant of David, but when he went to sacrifice in the Temple, the high priest rejected his offering because of his wife’s barrenness, which he interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure and punishment. Joachim then withdrew into the desert for forty days of fasting and prayer, during which Anne lamented that she’d become not only childless but also a widow.

 

Angels then appeared to both at the same time and promised them a child. Joachim returned to Jerusalem, and Anne ran up and embraced him at the city gate—a favorite subject of Eastern iconographers. In art, that embrace suggests their further union behind closed doors! Mary was born nine months later. The Church of St. Anne in Jerusalem stands on the spot where, according to tradition, Anne and Joachim lived and where Mary was born.

 

When Mary was three years old, her parents brought her to the Temple to present her to the Lord, an event commemorated in the Church’s calendar on November 21st. According to another legend, Mary grew up in a community of consecrated virgins in the Temple precincts until her betrothal to Joseph the Carpenter.

 

This commemoration of the Nativity of Mary dates back to at least the Sixth Century in the Christian East. The Eastern Church begins its Church Year on September 1st, so it seemed appropriate to follow that with the birth of the Mother of God. The chosen date, September 8th, further determined the date of the Immaculate Conception, nine months earlier, on December 8th. The Church of Rome adopted the feast in the seventh century, and it became widespread in the West in the ninth century.

 

Today’s feast celebrates Mary herself and her righteous parents, Joachim and Ann. Above all, it celebrates God’s gracious action in preparing the way for the Savior by first sending the Virgin of Nazareth, conceived without any stain of Original Sin, to be his mother. It all happened according to God’s plan, for which we rightly give thanks today.

 

PROPER 18, YEAR A

Sunday 6 September 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R.I.

 

Matthew 18:15-20

 

The international relations scholar Kenneth W. Thompson once remarked that to understand the dynamics of conflict among nations and peoples, one need only spend a month in a typical parish choir. In addition to being an accomplished political scientist, Thompson was a Christian thinker of considerable depth, and I suspect he spoke from experience. (I hasten to add that I’m not talking about our own wonderful choir here at Sts. Matthew & Mark, who all seem to get along extraordinarily well!)

 

In any case, life in the Church – not just the choir but every part of the parish – does not always reflect the harmony, peace, and love to which we know we’re called as Christians. Today’s Gospel explicitly acknowledges this hard reality. Jesus is under no illusions. Short of Heaven itself, conflicts will occur even among members of the same congregation. Moreover, for much of the Church’s history, the people with whom one worshiped on Sunday were also one’s family, friends, and neighbors: the people among whom one lived and worked, bought and sold, and socialized and played throughout the rest of the week. So conflict within the parish could be divisive and disruptive to the entire community.

 

To avoid such division, our Lord gives clear, practical directions for what to do when another Church member hurts, offends, or wrongs us. These instructions consist of three steps.

 

First, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”

 

In other words, the person with the grievance needs to take the initiative to resolve the problem. Yet how often is this not what happens! We suffer an insult or injury and, instead of taking the matter up with the perpetrator, we start sulking, feeling sorry for ourselves, and nursing a grudge. Or, worse still, we complain to everyone but the person who’s offended us. On some occasions in the past, I’ve inadvertently upset someone, only to discover weeks, months, or even years later that the person told everyone about it except me! Nothing stirs up division and dissension in a community more than people grumbling and complaining behind one another’s backs. But our Lord’s words are clear: If someone offends you, first take it up with that person: directly and privately. You might reach a mutual understanding and achieve reconciliation without stirring up trouble or making the situation worse.

 

Sometimes this direct approach works; sometimes it doesn’t. So the second step: “If you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.”

 

The biblical background is that the Old Testament repeatedly requires that no one be condemned for wrongdoing except on the evidence of two or three witnesses. One witness alone is insufficient without corroboration. The New Testament carries this principle into the life of the Church, as when Saint Paul writes in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, “Any charge must be sustained by the evidence of two or three witnesses” (13:1). 

 

As an aside, every so often a parishioner will come to me with an accusation against another parishioner: so-and-so said this and did that! Almost always, my instinctive response is that I really can’t do anything about it unless and until I’ve heard from at least both sides. Otherwise, it’s an uncorroborated allegation, and I can’t begin to get to the bottom of what’s really going on.

 

So, our Lord is saying that if we can’t resolve our differences one-on-one, then bring one or two others into the conversation. There’s always the possibility that these third parties might help us see something we can’t see on our own and mediate between the two points of view. 

 

But if this process of mediation fails and our witnesses agree that we’ve been wronged, step three is to “tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” 

 

The early Christians took the command to “tell it to the church” literally. When members of the congregation had personal complaints against one another, they would stand up in church on Sunday morning to air their grievances. The whole congregation would listen and try to mediate, arbitrate, or render a judgment. The Eucharist could not proceed until one of two things happened: either both parties were reconciled and exchanged the kiss of peace—or else the guilty party, if unrepentant, was expelled from the assembly.

 

Needless to say, this procedure caused more problems than it solved, and was soon abandoned. But it survives in symbolic form in one place in our liturgy: the Passing of the Peace! Having just been reconciled with God in the Confession and Absolution, we express our reconciliation with one another, and with all our brothers and sisters in Christ, before we dare approach the Lord’s Table.

 

But what can it mean in today’s world to “Tell it to the church”? The understanding that eventually gained acceptance was that telling it to the church could be accomplished just as well by telling the church’s authorized representatives, namely the clergy.

 

In other words, if another member of the parish hurts or wrongs you so badly that it threatens to destroy the relationship, then first, take the matter up with that person directly. If that doesn’t work, try getting one or two friends to mediate. If that doesn’t work, bring the matter to your priest. I say this not because we priests relish the thought of meddling in our parishioners’ disputes—we don’t, believe me! Yet discord among the members wounds the whole Body. So, we clergy have a legitimate interest in promoting forgiveness and reconciliation among the members of our flock. One of the gifts priests receive at ordination is the ministry of reconciliation. Frankly, when people in the parish are at odds with one another, it is the clergy’s business.

 

Even within the Body of Christ, conflicts and disputes are inevitable. We’re all still sinners, after all, and we’ve all got a long way to go before God is finished with us. What makes life in the Church distinctive, however, is not the absence of conflict, but rather the ability to achieve forgiveness and reconciliation when conflicts arise, as they inevitably will. 

 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives practical directions for working through conflicts toward forgiveness and reconciliation. The point is to do everything we possibly can to be at peace. The goal is not to cast anyone out, but rather to keep everyone within the fold. On the cross, Christ shows us his love by forgiving us and reconciling us to God. And it’s precisely in mutual forgiveness and reconciliation that we show that same love to one another and the world.

SAINT BARTHOLOMEW

Friday, August 29, 2026 (tr. from Aug. 24)

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Saint Bartholomew appears in the lists of the Twelve Apostles in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and again in the Acts of the Apostles. Tradition also identifies him with Nathanael, who appears in the first chapter of John’s Gospel.

 

There, Philip finds Nathanael and tells him: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Philip replies, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” As Nathanael approaches, Jesus says, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.” The well-known dialogue follows, in which Nathanael confesses Jesus to be the Son of God and King of Israel, and Jesus promises that Nathanael will see “heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”

 

The identification of Bartholomew with Nathanael rests on Bartholomew’s name appearing immediately after Philip’s in the Gospel lists of the Twelve, whereas John never mentions Bartholomew. If the identification is accurate, Nathanael would have been his first name, and Bartholomew—meaning “Son of Tolmai”—would have been his last name. 

 

Beyond that, the New Testament is silent about Bartholomew. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, and Saint Jerome, in the early fifth century, record the tradition that Bartholomew traveled to India, where he left a copy of Saint Matthew’s Gospel. This possibility is not as far-fetched as it might seem, since there was substantial trade in those days between the eastern Roman Empire and the west coast of India via sea routes down the Red Sea, through the Gulf of Aden, and across the Arabian Sea.

 

Another tradition holds that after visiting India, Bartholomew went to Armenia with his fellow Apostle, Saint Jude. There, he converted the king of Armenia to Christianity. He then suffered martyrdom, being flayed alive and beheaded on the orders of the king’s brother. In the thirteenth century, Saint Bartholomew’s Monastery was built on the traditional site of his martyrdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, near the border with Iran. The monastery was abandoned in 1915 during the Armenian genocide and now stands in ruins. The Armenian Apostolic Church considers Jude and Bartholomew its founders and patron saints.

 

What are claimed to be the principal relics of Bartholomew—bones and a large piece of his skin—are kept in the San Bartolomeo Basilica in Benevento, in south-central Italy.

 

The Basilica of San Bartolomeo in Rome stands on the site of the former temple of Asclepius, the Roman god of medicine. For this reason, during the Middle Ages, hospitals in European cities were often named after Saint Bartholomew. One notable example is Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, founded in 1123, which is attached to the parish Church of Saint Bartholomew the Great, the only medieval church in the City of London to survive both the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz. An architectural gem, it’s not to be missed on any visit to London.

 

In art, Bartholomew’s symbol is a tanner’s knife, the instrument of his death. Some gruesome artistic depictions show him holding his flayed skin aloft. He’s considered the patron saint of tanners and dermatologists, and is invoked by those suffering from skin diseases.