17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle C https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072725.cfm Two weeks ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Poland with a group of Catholic high school teachers. As part of that experience, we spent two days at Auschwitz-Birkenau , the Nazi extermination camp at the center of the Holocaust that operated between May 1940 and January 1945. Auschwitz has become a byword for evil, and rightly so, it is the site of the worst atrocities of the 20th century (if not human history): 1.1 million people—Polish people, Soviet prisoners, Roma, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, criminals, and most especially Jews—lost their lives in the camps. It is hard to grasp the intensity of “man’s inhumanity to man” at this place, and it is difficult to understand how God permits such awfulness to exist. In today’s 1st reading, we hear Abraham argue with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah . In that story, God hears people crying out in anguish from those cities, sayin...
These posts are the collected homilies of Deacon Ned Berghausen, permanent deacon of the Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville, assigned to St. Agnes Catholic Church. The title "Foot Washer" refers to the Last Supper (John 13:1-20) in which Jesus washed the feet of the apostles and challenged them, "“Do you realize what I have done for you? If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow."