Happy Good Shepherd Sunday, everybody!

This is a particularly exciting weekend for the Universal Church as we welcome and celebrate our new Holy Father — our brand new shepherd — Pope Leo XIV.

You know, you always remember where you were and what you were doing when big, historical things like this happen — I happened to be in the middle of a parish council meeting at Holy Family when the white smoke began to blow out of the top of the Sistine Chapel… and as soon as I saw it, I ran outside to the big giant bell they have. I went to pull the strap connected to the bell, and I started to pull with…but then the strap SNAPPED, and I fell back on my butt RIGHT ONTO the ground!

Not gonna lie, it was pretty pathetic. 

But… that’s what I’ll remember forever when I think of the day Pope Leo XIV was elected.

Classic.

But in all seriousness, it’s very fitting that immediately after such an important day in the Church — as we welcome the first US-born pope in history — we now get to celebrate Good Shepherd Sunday.

“My sheep hear My Voice” Jesus says in our gospel today. “I know them, and they follow me.”

Before saying anything else in this homily, I just want to make one thing absolutely clear — You were made to hear the Voice of Jesus.

In today’s secular, materialistic world, it’s so easy to assume that it’s impossible for us to actually hear God’s Voice. We might believe the lie that this sort of thing is really rare, and is only for the super holy people — the canonized saints like St Faustina, who heard Jesus speaking directly to her in prayer. We might also think that we’d sound kind of crazy or maybe even sorta prideful if we claimed that we could actually hear the Voice of the Lord in our life…

But Jesus’s words today are clear:

“My sheep hear My Voice.”

That’s either true or it’s not. 

And Jesus does not lie.

YOU are one of the Lord’s sheep…

…So it therefore follows that you CAN hear His Voice.

Let’s just declare that truth out loud today:

“I can hear God’s Voice… because I am one of His sheep.”

AMEN!

This is not something you earn. It’s not a skillset you need to somehow figure out and master. It’s just part of your DNA as a Christian believer:

Jesus is speaking to you right now.

In fact, here’s a little shameless plug — If you haven’t heard about it yet, I’m currently offering a series on this exact topic: Hearing God’s Voice. We just started this past week and we’ll be meeting every Wednesday right here in the Church for the next few weeks at 7PM. You are most welcome to jump right in and join us.

Jesus is alive. And He is still speaking His word of hope, of conversion, of challenge, of LOVE today, here and now, to all of us. He speaks to us within the silence of prayer. He speaks to us in the Sacred Liturgy. He speaks to us in the beauty of nature. He speaks to us in our daily interactions and experiences with the people in our lives… He has so much to share with us…. If we are only willing and open to listen!!!!

But you know as soon as we start talking about “Hearing God’s Voice” one of the questions people always have is:

“How do I know it’s really the Lord speaking? What if it’s just me imagining things? Or worse… what if I’m listening to something or someone who is NOT GOD???”

Well, there’s a lot we could say on the subject — but this will have to suffice for now: 

An important part of how we discern whether something is really from God or not — is that we compare what we think we’re hearing… with what the Lord has already definitively revealed to us through the Church.

We must look to Church teaching — the rock solid Magisterium — so as to compare what we think we’ve heard with the content of Divine Revelation — what Jesus has already revealed to us in both Scripture and Tradition. Jesus is the same Yesterday, Today, and Forever. And He does not contradict Himself. So we can confidently refer to the Church’s teachings as authentically received from the Lord Himself.

Otherwise, we would all get confused very very quickly. 

We would begin to believe that the Lord was saying all sorts of wacko things — and we’d start justifying all kinds of immoral decisions and we’d begin entertaining all sorts of erroneous theologies if we didn’t have those all-important guardrails that Jesus has provided us with through the Church and her perennial teachings down through the ages.

And this is where the unique voice of the Pope comes in.

St John Henry Newman famously said that at the end of the day, there has to be a living voice that can determine the truth of things when the Church is divided about essential matters. 

Of course we can and should go read the Scriptures for ourselves, and we can go and delve into the riches of the Church Fathers — St Augustine, St Irenaeus, St Athanasius and so many others…Knock yourself out! …But at the end of the day, we need a contemporary voice, a LIVING voice here and now — someone to be sort of like a referee who allows the game — the mission of the Church — to play out — who intervenes only when necessary to clarify and define, and ensure that the game is being played in an orderly way.

The Pope — the successor of Saint Peter — is just such a “living voice.”

He is an ordinary human being just like any one of us — fallible and sinful left to his own devices — but he has been divinely appointed and designated as the Bishop of Rome, the First among all Bishops in the world, and so when he teaches definitively, ex cathedra, on faith and morals — We can trust his voice absolutely, infallibly, no questions asked. He is the Rock upon which the Church is built. He has been given the “keys to the kingdom of Heaven” from Jesus Himself — “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

And “the gates of hell will NEVER prevail.”

That’s essentially what our newly elected Holy Father, Pope Leo said as he looked out onto St Peter’s Square for the very first time — “God loves you all — evil will not prevail!”

That’s the promise of Jesus to the Pope right there:

The Gates of Hell…will NEVER prevail! 

EVIL WILL NOT WIN.

I don’t know if you had the chance to hear any of Pope Leo’s first homily as pope — but it was very powerful to hear the Pope’s voice speak in natural, fluent English. There’s just something so comforting and endearing, isn’t there, to hear the voice of the Universal Shepherd of the Catholic Church, speak fluidly and easily in your own native language! That hasn’t ever happened before for English speakers. It was surprising, but I think it will be a beautiful gift for us in the years to come.

So, we need to pray for the Holy Father. We ned to pray that the voice of Pope Leo XIV always will be a clear voice — a voice grounded in intimate, personal prayer — a voice founded firmly on and in continuity with the whole Tradition that has come before him.

Most of all, we pray that he can be a docile instrument for Jesus… so that we can hear the Voice of Jesus, the Good Shepherd Himself speaking to us through the life, ministry and teachings of the Pope. 

The Lord once spoke through the prophet Jeremiah saying: “I will give you shepherds after my own heart.” 

…Let us pray that Leo XIV will always be a shepherd after the most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Because Jesus is “the Lamb who is in the center of the throne” — He is the center of everything, the meaning of everything! — not the pope! — Jesus Himself “will shepherd [us,] and lead [us] to springs of life-giving water, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.”

Amen.