iPadre Catholic Podcasting

18th Sunday After Pentecost — 2026

There are people for whom we have prayed for years.

A son or daughter who has stopped practicing the Faith. A family member who has not been to Confession in decades. Someone struggling with addiction. A marriage that seems beyond repair. A friend who has turned away from God.

We pray. And we pray again.

Months pass. Years pass. And sometimes absolutely nothing seems to change.

It is easy to become discouraged and wonder: Is my prayer accomplishing anything?

The Gospel for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost gives us a beautiful answer. It teaches us that sometimes our vocation is simply to keep carrying someone to Jesus.

“Jesus, Seeing Their Faith”

Our Lord had crossed the Sea of Galilee and returned to Capernaum, the city that had become the center of His public ministry in Galilee. Even today, visitors entering the ruins of ancient Capernaum encounter a sign proclaiming:

“Capernaum — The Town of Jesus.”

It was there that a group of men brought a paralytic to Our Lord.

The man was apparently so severely afflicted that he could not come to Jesus on his own.

Others had to carry him.

And then St. Matthew gives us a remarkable detail:

“And Jesus, seeing their faith…”
(Matthew 9:2)

Notice what the Gospel says.

Not simply his faith.

Their faith.

These men believed enough to pick up their friend, carry him to Jesus, and place him before the Lord.

The paralytic could not get there by himself.

So his friends carried him.

Our Lord first addressed the man’s deepest need: “Have confidence, son, thy sins are forgiven thee.” Then, as a visible demonstration of His divine authority, Jesus commanded him:

“Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house.”

And the man arose.

We Are the Ones Carrying the Stretcher

There is a profound lesson here about intercessory prayer.

We are those men carrying the paralytic.

Every time we intercede for another person, spiritually speaking, we pick that person up and carry him before Jesus.

A mother carries a wayward son or daughter.

A father carries his family.

A priest carries his people “to the altar of God.”

A contemplative monk or nun, hidden from the eyes of the world, carries countless souls before God.

And the Church herself continually carries all of us poor sinners to Christ.

Sometimes the person for whom we are praying cannot—or will not—come to Jesus on his own.

Then we carry him.

We carry him in the Rosary.

We carry him in our Holy Communions.

We carry him before the Blessed Sacrament.

We carry him through our sacrifices and penances.

Above all, we carry him to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

And perhaps one day Our Lord will look upon that soul and, in His mercy, see something of our faith too.

What If Nothing Seems to Happen?

This is where perseverance becomes difficult.

We want results.

We pray for someone’s conversion and expect to see a change. We pray for a marriage and expect reconciliation. We pray for someone trapped in addiction and expect freedom.

But God’s time is not our time.

Grace can be working in a human soul long before anything becomes visible on the outside. God may be preparing a person through events, conversations, sufferings, memories, or circumstances of which we know absolutely nothing.

That is why we must never conclude that prayer is useless simply because we cannot see its effects.

Perhaps you have prayed for someone for twenty or thirty years.

Keep carrying that person to Jesus.

Perhaps someone in your family has stopped going to Mass and Confession.

Keep carrying that person to Jesus.

Perhaps someone you love is trapped in addiction.

Keep carrying that person to Jesus.

Perhaps a marriage seems beyond repair.

Keep carrying them to Jesus.

Perhaps we look at wars, violence, persecution, and division throughout the world and wonder whether our prayers for peace accomplish anything.

Keep carrying the world to Jesus.

A Power Hidden From the World

Christians possess a kind of power that the world does not understand.

It is not worldly power. It is not political power. It is not the power of wealth, influence, prestige, or position.

It is the power of intercession.

Think of the countless prayers that rise before God every day.

A mother quietly praying her Rosary for a child who has lost the Faith.

An elderly man sitting alone before the Blessed Sacrament.

A priest placing the intentions of his people upon the altar.

A cloistered nun offering her life for people she will never meet.

A suffering person offering his pain for the conversion of a loved one.

A parishioner whispering the name of someone at the moment of the Consecration.

The world sees none of this.

God sees all of it.

We may never know in this life how many graces were obtained through prayers uttered quietly in a darkened church, Holy Communions offered for someone who had fallen away, a mother’s tears for her child, or the sacrifices of someone who thought he had very little left to give.

No sincere prayer offered to God is wasted.

The answer may not come in the form we expect. It may not come when we expect. And sometimes God’s answer is very different from the one for which we prayed.

But our task is faithfulness.

Pick Up the Stretcher Again

Maybe there is someone in your life right now who seems spiritually paralyzed.

Perhaps that person cannot come to Jesus.

Perhaps that person will not come to Jesus.

Then remember those men in Capernaum.

Pick up the stretcher.

Carry that person to Jesus.

And if tomorrow nothing seems to have changed, pick it up again.

And the next day, again.

And next month, again.

And next year, again.

Never stop carrying them to Jesus.

As Padre Pio so often counseled:

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry.”

For one day, perhaps when we least expect it, Christ may look upon the person we have carried before Him for so long—

and see our faith.

15th Sunday After Pentecost — 2026

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Saint Luke recounts three encounters with Our Lord. A grieving mother encounters His compassion, a dead man encounters His divine power, and a crowd encounters the presence of God. No one is left unchanged.

Jesus and His disciples were approaching the city of Naim. As they reached the gate, they met a funeral procession coming out of the city. A young man had died, and his widowed mother was following his body to the grave.

This poor woman must have suffered greatly. Her husband had already died, and now her only son was dead. She faced not only the terrible grief of losing her child, but also deep anxiety about her future. In the world in which she lived, her husband and son would have been her providers and protectors. Now both had been taken from her. She was truly alone, and her future was uncertain.

But through the gate of Naim came the Lord of Life—the One who would declare, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

The widow did not ask Jesus for anything. Perhaps she was too brokenhearted even to notice that He was approaching. But Jesus noticed her. He saw her grief, entered into her pain and loneliness, and said:

“Do not weep.”

These words might have sounded impossible. How could she not weep? Her only son was being carried to the grave. Yet Jesus could tell her not to weep because He knew what He was about to do.

He then stepped forward and touched the bier. At once, everything stopped: “The bearers stood still.”

This was the second encounter—the encounter between Jesus and the dead young man.

Jesus did not pray or look up toward heaven. He simply issued a command:

“Young man, I say to thee, arise.”

God alone can command the dead to return to life. At creation, God spoke His word and life came into being. At the gate of Naim, Jesus spoke His word and life was restored. The young man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.

There were two processions at Naim that day. One procession was leaving the city, following death toward the grave. The other was entering the city, following Jesus Christ, the Lord of Life. When those two processions met, death was forced to stop.

The third encounter was between Jesus and the crowd. The widow had been accompanied by “a large crowd from the city.” They had come to mourn with her and to accompany her son to his burial. But when the young man was restored to life, “fear seized them all, and they glorified God.”

They had encountered the power of God standing in their midst. There is only One who possesses authority over life and death—and that is God.

A true encounter with Jesus Christ changes people. A grieving mother was given hope. A dead man was restored to life. A large crowd was filled with holy fear and began to glorify God.

The same Jesus has the power to change us. He can restore hope to the brokenhearted. He can convert the most hardened sinner. He can bring a soul dead through mortal sin back to the life of sanctifying grace.

There may be people in our families, our parishes, and our world whom we consider beyond hope. Perhaps we have prayed for them for years and have seen no change. We may be tempted to give up. But no one is beyond the reach of God’s grace.

Spend time before the Blessed Sacrament seeking a personal encounter with the living Lord Jesus Christ. Bring with you, in prayer, those who have wandered far from Him. Place before Jesus those who are spiritually dead through sin. Pray for them, offer sacrifices for them, and do penance for their conversion.

The same Lord who approached the funeral procession at Naim is present in the Blessed Sacrament. He still sees the brokenhearted. He still approaches those who have no hope. He still possesses the power to raise the dead.

Place those hardened hearts before Him and beg Him to touch their souls and command:

“Young man, I say to thee, arise.”

Years ago, an older woman I knew used to say, “It’s so easy to be a Catholic.”

I have to disagree.

Perhaps it is easy to call yourself a Catholic. It may even be easy to practice a kind of “Catholic lite”—going through the motions, keeping the parts of the Faith that are comfortable, and quietly setting aside the things that demand too much of us.

But to be a good and faithful Catholic? To strive seriously for holiness?

That isn’t easy at all.

The Honeymoon Doesn’t Last

Anyone who has experienced a conversion knows what I mean.

Perhaps you came to the Catholic Faith for the first time. Perhaps you returned after years away. Or perhaps you were Catholic all your life but experienced a reversion—a moment when the Faith suddenly became real and you decided that you wanted to follow Jesus Christ seriously.

There can be a kind of honeymoon period.

Prayer is exciting. You want to learn everything you can about the Faith. You begin changing things in your life. You discover the saints, the Sacraments, Eucharistic Adoration, spiritual reading, perhaps devotions you never knew before.

Everything seems new.

Then, sooner or later, the honeymoon ends.

Prayer becomes difficult. Temptations return. Enthusiasm fades. Old habits begin tugging at us again. The demands of the Faith don’t always fit comfortably with what we want.

And that is when the real work begins.

Our Lord never promised us an easy road. In fact, He told us precisely the opposite:

“Make your way in by the narrow gate. It is a broad gate and a wide road that leads on to perdition, and those who go in that way are many indeed; but how small is the gate, how narrow the road that leads on to life, and how few there are that find it!”
— Matthew 7:13–14

The road to heaven is narrow because following Christ requires conversion—and conversion is not something that happens only once.

It is the work of a lifetime.

We Are in a Battle

There is another reality that we sometimes don’t like to talk about.

The moment we begin taking our relationship with Christ seriously, we discover that we are in a battle.

The devil does not simply stand aside while someone begins moving toward God.

Temptation comes. Discouragement comes. Distraction comes. Sometimes it is something obviously sinful. More often, perhaps, it is something much more subtle: comfort, laziness, pleasure, compromise, or the quiet suggestion that we don’t need to take all of this quite so seriously.

If we fail to recognize that we are in a spiritual battle, we become an easy target.

St. Augustine knew this battle extraordinarily well.

Before his conversion, he desperately wanted God, but another part of him remained attached to his former way of life. In his Confessions, he describes the struggle:

“Thus did my two wills, one old and the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, contend within me.”
— Confessions, VIII, 5

Augustine did not literally possess two wills. He was describing the conflict taking place within himself.

And I think every serious Catholic recognizes it.

I want God—but I also want comfort.

I want to pray—but sometimes I would rather do something else.

I want to become holy—but I don’t necessarily want the sacrifices holiness requires.

I know what I should do—but sometimes I simply don’t feel like doing it.

That is the battle.

And none of us is exempt from it.

God Has Given Us Weapons

Thankfully, Our Lord has not sent us into battle defenseless.

He has given us the weapons we need.

Prayer. Penance. Sacrifice. Study. The Sacraments.

These are not merely pious extras for particularly devout Catholics. They are essential elements of the spiritual life.

We need to form our minds so that we know what is true.

We need to form our hearts so that we learn to love what God loves.

And we need to strengthen our wills so that we can choose what is good even when we don’t feel like choosing it.

Jesus tells us:

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

The modern world has a strange understanding of freedom. It often tells us that freedom means doing whatever we want whenever we want to do it.

Christian freedom is something very different.

Real freedom is having the ability to choose what is good.

A person enslaved by his passions is not free simply because he is allowed to satisfy them.

The saint is free.

The saint has become so conformed to Christ that he can choose the good even when doing so requires sacrifice.

And that kind of freedom takes formation, discipline and grace.

We Cannot Win This Battle Alone

This brings us back to St. Augustine.

After his conversion, Augustine understood something that is absolutely essential to the Catholic spiritual life: we cannot make ourselves holy.

He writes:

“The determination of the human will is insufficient, unless the Lord grant it victory.”
— On Grace and Free Will, 9

We need grace.

We cannot save ourselves by determination. We cannot overcome sin merely by gritting our teeth and trying harder. We cannot conquer the world, the flesh and the devil through sheer willpower.

We need God.

But grace does not eliminate our freedom. Grace strengthens and perfects it. God acts, and we cooperate with His action.

That is why we pray.

That is why we do penance.

That is why we make sacrifices.

That is why we study our Faith.

That is why we receive the Sacraments.

That is why we go to Confession when we fall and begin again.

And that is why a serious Catholic never gives up.

So, is it easy to be a Catholic?

No.

The gate is small. The road is narrow. There is a battle to be fought.

But we do not fight alone.

Christ gives us the weapons. Christ gives us the Sacraments. Christ gives us His Church.

And, above all, Christ gives us the grace to win the battle.

The road may be narrow, but we know where it leads.

To eternal life.