Last Sunday’s Gospel told us how Jesus, moved with pity at the crowds who were like sheep without a shepherd, commissioned the apostles, saying, “As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons.”

The Gospels don’t give us very many biographical details about the Twelve Apostles, and this biblical scholar — among others — wishes there were more. In Sunday’s Gospel they are identified by name as those who answered Jesus’ call to work in the abundant harvest of the Gospel.

Fear is a common human experience, but Sacred Scripture consistently reminds the faithful that God walks with us, especially through our darkest hour.

Sometimes we meet someone who has the gift of bringing people together. But once they are gone, everyone seems to drift apart.

As the youngest and the only adopt¬ed child in an immigrant family, my primary years were spent experienc¬ing members of our household leaving the only place I used to call home. One by one I watched them leave for the United States.

The Lenten season is known to us as a preparation season. It prepares us for the celebration of Christ’s resurrection at Easter.

Sheep need a shepherd.

Virgil’s poem The Aeneid tells the story of Aeneas who flees the fall of Troy and goes to Italy to become the ancestor of the Roman people.

There is a distinct contrast in the attitude of Thomas when we first hear him in today’s Gospel and when he speaks to Jesus a week later.

Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski were prisoners of war in a concentration camp in Austria. They translated their experiences into the play, “Stalag 17,” which in 1953 was made into a movie with the same name.