Homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Readings: Sirach 3:17-18,20,28-29; Psalm 68; Hebrews 12:18-19,22-24; Luke 14:1,7-14
Social Justice Sunday
31 August 2025
Some years ago, I was in the western region of Cambodia with a wonderful Spanish Jesuit Kike Figeredo. I first met him in the refugee camps along the Thai Cambodian border in 1987. When Kike came to the camps, he discerned what he should do in a camp of well over 100,000 people where everything was scarce and people were desperate. He asked a simple question: “What would Jesus do?” He decided that Jesus would go to the poorest of the poor. In that part of the world there were lots of land mines. So there were lots of people who had lost limbs. Kike set up a training facility for them and they manufactured their own wheelchairs out of wood and bamboo.
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After the refugees were able to return to Cambodia, Kike and I were looking for a place where the Jesuits might live and do their work. One night in the local village, Kike invited several people to dinner at a roadside restaurant. Halfway through the meal, Kike looked around the table, observing that most people at the table had lost a limb or two, or were suffering some other disability. He smiled with joy and said to me: “Isn’t this just the meal Jesus would like to share?” He referred to today’s gospel: “When you give a lunch or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or sisters or your relations or rich neighbours, in case they invite you back to repay you. No; when you have a party, invite the poor, the paralysed, the lame, the blind; then you will be blessed, for they have no means to repay you, and so you will be repaid at the resurrection of the virtuous.”
Today is Social Justice Sunday. Our bishops have produced a statement entitled Signs of Hope on the Edge. It focuses on serving homeless people with mental ill-health. Introducing the statement, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB, says: “Many Australians find it embarrassing, uncomfortable or even confronting to see homeless people on the streets; but we encourage all who are baptised to, instead, offer loving friendship to people on the edge of society. Instead of walking by and not noticing the plight of our neighbours, pay attention to them and their plight, listen to their stories, and serve them with the love we learn from Jesus.”
The bishops urge all of us to give support to community service programs which reach out to the homeless and to have a care for mental health awareness in our own community.
On Tuesday, we mark the 80th anniversary of the formal end of World War II, the day on which the Japanese signed the Instrument of Surrender. This came less than a month after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 80 years ago, most Australians rejoiced that the war had ended. It truly was a cause for rejoicing. But there was the outstanding moral question about the dropping of the atomic bombs. Just 20 years after the dropping of the bombs, the Catholic bishops of the world issued an all but unanimous declaration at the Second Vatican Council: “This most holy synod makes its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent popes, and issues the following declaration. Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”[1] Never has there been a more authoritative unqualified statement by the bishops of our Church on a moral question.
Now, 80 years later, when we live in an age in which the principles of just war have been all but abandoned – witness only the indiscriminate wholesale killing of innocent non-combatants in Gaza today – there is a profound moral ambiguity about the dropping of the bombs at the end of World War II.
One of the great scholars of the morality of war is Lord Nigel Biggar, an Anglican priest and professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Oxford. Until recently, he agreed with the Catholic bishops that the use of atomic bombs was wrong. He has now revised his opinion. He has concluded: “Tragically and dreadfully, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally necessary.”[2] If this action was morally necessary, it can hardly be categorised as “a crime against God and man himself”, meriting “unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation”.
American cardinal Blaise Cupich went to Nagasaki to attend the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on that city. He told the people that he believed that “the decision to use atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was deeply flawed”. He claimed: “In the eighty years since the fateful atomic bombings the public mood in my nation about them has undergone change. A substantial minority of Americans still approve of Truman’s decision, but a two-thirds majority does not.” However he conceded: “there remains a willingness among a majority of American citizens to use nuclear weapons against a contemporary threat to the U.S. military.”[3]
Definitive moral teachings from our bishops do not seem to find much resonance nowadays. What does cut it is leadership by example. Circling back to the topic for this Sunday’s Social justice statement, let’s recall all that Pope Francis did to provide showers, meals and shelter for the homeless around the Vatican. Ten years ago, he also put out a call to the Church in Europe: “I make an appeal to parishes, religious communities, monasteries and shrines throughout Europe, that they express the Gospel in a concrete way and host a refugee family. … May every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every shrine of Europe welcome one family, beginning with my Diocese of Rome.”[4]
I have no idea how many parishes responded to the Pope’s call. Everyone that did would have spoken eloquently to the faithful about the call being made by our own bishops in this year’s social justice statement. What then is being asked of us?
God, in your goodness, you have made a home for the poor.
The just rejoice and exult before God;
they are glad and rejoice.
Sing to God, chant praise to his name;
whose name is the Lord.
God, in your goodness, you have made a home for the poor.
The father of orphans and the defender of widows
is God in his holy dwelling.
God gives a home to the forsaken;
he leads forth prisoners to prosperity.
God, in your goodness, you have made a home for the poor.
This year, I am 40 years a priest and 50 years a Jesuit. On Tuesday, I head off for 3 months’ sabbatical. I will return to this website at Advent. Meanwhile, let’s pray for each other. Thank you.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is serving as part of a Jesuit team of priests working within a new configuration of the Toowong, St Lucia and Indooroopilly parishes in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. Frank Brennan SJ is Adjunct Professor of the Thomas More Law School at ACU and is a former CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA). Fr Frank’s latest book is An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: Considering a Constitutional Bridge, Garratt Publishing, 2023 and his new book is ‘Lessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum’ (Connor Court, 2024).
[1] https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html, #80.
[2] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/should-the-us-have-dropped-the-atomic-bombs-on-japan/news-story/c1f781220ca0aaf53723ac22bbbfa044
[3] https://www.archchicago.org/statement/-/article/2025/08/07/remarks-by-cardinal-blase-cupich-archbishop-of-chicago-in-nagasaki
[4] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2015/documents/papa-francesco_angelus_20150906.html
