Official Website of the
Catholic Diocese of Little Rock
Bishop Taylor Homily Library
Bishop Anthony B. Taylor celebrates Mass across Arkansas and beyond. This library features the homilies delivered from March 2014 to the present. To listen to earlier homilies, please visit the bishop's Homily Archive.
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Good Friday of the Lord's Passion 2021 Published: Friday, April 2, 2021 Even illness and death become a blessing when embraced with an attitude that hallows — sanctifies — God’s name. He is the master; we are servants whose only role and source of greatest blessing is to do God’s will as best we know it. |
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Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper 2021 Published: Thursday, April 1, 2021 Jesus offers up his body and blood today in every Eucharist, which is the sacrament of his death to self and enduring presence among us ... and he invites us to join our own sacrifice of self to his, offering up our body and blood to the Father, from the same altar, united to that of Jesus. |
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Msgr. Scott Friend at Chrism Mass 2021 Published: Monday, March 29, 2021 As of June 15, Msgr. Friend will become the new pastor of Blessed Sacrament parish in Jonesboro and Father Jeff Hebert, currently our assistant vocations director and prefect of our House of Formation, will take over as our new vocations director. Father Jeff is well qualified, but he sure does have some big shoes to fill! |
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Chrism Mass 2021 Published: Monday, March 29, 2021 Jesus was both priest and victim, the one who offered and the one who was offered — and so are we, in union with Jesus. He did so in the concrete circumstances and all the adversities present in 33 AD. We do so in the concrete circumstances and all the adversities present in 2021. We walk by faith. |
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Palm Sunday 2021 Published: Sunday, March 28, 2021 So today, we lift up to the Lord ourselves and all of those people who are living in fear throughout the world, especially those who are suffering and dying unaccompanied. Jesus at least was accompanied by John, his mother and a few women … and even so, he felt forsaken. You and I are not forsaken; our Savior is with us and so we place our trust in him. |
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Funeral for Michael Taylor Published: Tuesday, March 23, 2021 But as the 23rd Psalm insists, we can use our time in this dark valley as an opportunity to draw closer to the Lord ourselves, for he can also be our companion, our source of strength. The Shepherd has not forgotten his sheep. |
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Wake for Michael Taylor Published: Monday, March 22, 2021 With all the waiting for appointments and the results of labs and sickening medications and painful bone marrow aspirations, and everything else, (Michael) grew in patience, kindness, courage and love. He was unfailingly optimistic, always highlighting the positive in his lab results and finding ways to contextualize the negative. He was now ending every phone conversation with “I love you.” |
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Rite of Election 2021 Published: Sunday, February 21, 2021 |
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Catholic Arkansas Sharing Appeal 2021 Published: Saturday, February 6, 2021 Your generous spirit is also obvious in your response to last year’s CASA campaign, to which you gave as much as in other years, despite the pandemic and its effects, thanks to which we have been able to continue operations amid all the restrictions imposed on us by COVID-19. |
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Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B Published: Saturday, January 30, 2021 A government cannot rule forever by force nor by countering the truth with “alternate truths” that everyone knows are really lies. Satan is the prince of lies and those who seek to impose their will through deceit and have knowingly aligned themselves with his destructive force may seem powerful for a time, but it is a temporary illusion and they will not in the end prevail. |
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Mass for Life 2021 Published: Sunday, January 17, 2021 Abortion is clearly the most depraved expression of what Pope Francis calls our “throw-away culture” and nowhere does he imply a false equivalence of all the myriad threats to life, but neither does abortion as an issue stand alone, as some would have us believe. In his homily to us bishops at St. Matthew Cathedral in Washington, he specifically linked “the innocent victims of abortion” to many other pro-life issues. |
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Baptism of the Lord 2021 Published: Sunday, January 10, 2021 That's the third way, the way of Jesus Christ. Not fight or flight, but rather standing there with the even greater courage required to resist evil with the costly, personally vulnerable, non-violent force of good. |
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The Epiphany of the Lord 2021 Published: Sunday, January 3, 2021 I now realize that the exclusiveness of the "in crowd" was not an expression of self-confidence; rather, it was a reflection of their own fear and insecurity, and I was beginning to discover that freedom-from-fear that comes from seeking to do God's will rather than my own. |
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Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God 2020 Published: Friday, January 1, 2021 I hope that every one of us can discover and take ownership for those areas of our lives where we know we're not clean, because we all have them. Things of which we're not proud and for which we know we need a savior, areas of weakness that have the potential for great spiritual fertility because it's precisely where we're weakest that God's grace can do the most good. |
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Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph 2020 Published: Sunday, December 27, 2020 Today is the last Sunday of the year and so is a time for taking stock. Looking back over this most difficult year in memory, I hope the Lord has used this time to help all of us grow in spiritual strength and wisdom too. After all, in a lot of ways we are all children: everyone of us still has room to grow! |
