The Ambo: Homilies for the Faithful

John 8:2–11 (NRSVCE) 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where ar...

We all celebrate that we have a new Pope, Francis. It’s a work of the Holy Spirit that he combines the keen intellectual tradition and evangelical zeal of his order, the Jesuits, embodied in one of its tireless preachers, St. Francis Xavier, with the gentle simplicity of the example of St. Francis of Assisi, particularly his disdain for pretense and hypocrisy. During the economic crisis in Argentina in 2002, i t was then Cardinal Bergoglio who declared in a homily “to those who are now promising to fix all your problems, I say, ‘Go and fix yourselves….have a change of heart….Get to confession, before you need it even more!” It was no surprise that he was not loved by those governmental elites. I’ve been praying for the man who would be our Vicar of Christ on this earth. But now I’m starting to fall in love with this guy. We are already hearing the lament from the mainstream media that this cardinal is not young and, even worse, appears to be "yet another conservative....