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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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! |
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Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) 2020 Published: Friday, December 25, 2020 COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down and I want to take this opportunity to thank you for how selflessly you have complied with all the protocols forced on us by this pandemic. For the first time since 1918 we had to suspend the celebration of Mass for seven weeks starting in March and have only been able to resume public worship since May 4 under very restrictive conditions, including the use of masks, which nobody likes, and physical distancing. |
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Third Sunday of Advent 2020 Published: Sunday, December 13, 2020 What is God saying to us today? What about the desert we live in? It's not a desert of sand and stone, but it's a desert just the same: lives built on shifting sand, hearts of stone, people held captive by addiction, ignorance, selfishness and all the other vices, people who long for freedom and healing, people lost in a wasteland of their own making, looking for love in all the wrong places, searching in the darkness for a way out. |
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Second Sunday of Advent 2020 Published: Sunday, December 6, 2020 Jesus has already come once and will one day come again to inaugurate a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, we should be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him. |
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Thanksgiving 2020 Published: Saturday, November 21, 2020 The Eucharist is our sacrament of thanksgiving. We gather around this altar of hope and join our grateful hearts to the loving heart of Jesus as he continues to offer himself in total sacrifice for us, who otherwise would not have a good eternal future. |
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Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe 2020 Published: Saturday, November 21, 2020 Most kings dine lavishly on the finest foods but our King is hungry today. Seated upon his throne, he looked back to this very day and said: “I was hungry ... and you gave me no food.” We have all seen him on TV. He is starving in war-ravaged regions of Yemen and South Sudan and among the malnourished poor in COVID-19 impacted countries throughout the world. |
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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A Published: Sunday, November 15, 2020 They were grateful that the master had entrusted them with the money and they wanted to put it to good use — partly out of a desire to please the master, and partly because they felt honored that the master trusted them. ... By contrast, the third servant didn’t seem to care much. He wasn’t grateful. He didn’t have much desire to please the master. So, he just put the money in storage and forgot about it. |
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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A Published: Sunday, November 8, 2020 Jesus also comes to us in the miracles of daily life: the birth of a child, any time we pray, the sacraments we receive, the Scriptures we read, moments of insight and discovery, moments of shame and repentance, moments of fear and faith and hope. |
