Homily | September 17, 2026 | Grace From Head To Heart (Episode 274)

Today, the Church celebrates an optional memorial Saint Robert Bellerman, whom the Church remembers as one of the greatest Catholic minds of his age.

He was born in Italy in 1542, became a Jesuit, a professor, a theologian, bishop, and cardinal, and eventually was declared a doctor of the Church.

He lived during one of the most turbulent periods in Christian history, the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation.

Catholics were being challenged with serious questions.

What is the Church?

Where does authority come from?

What are the sacraments?

What is grace?

What do Catholics actually believe?

Bellerman became one of the Church's greatest defenders and teachers.

He wrote extensively, he debated, he taught, he helped generations of Catholics understand their faith.

But today's readings raise an uncomfortable possibility.

You can know a great deal about Christianity and still miss the mark.

Look at Simon the Pharisee.

Jesus is sitting in his house.

Jesus, think about that.

Simon has invited the Son of God to dinner.

He knows religion, he knows the law, he knows what respectable religious behavior should look like.

And then this woman enters.

Everyone apparently knows her reputation.

Luke simply calls her a sinful woman.

She begins to weep, she washes the feet of Jesus with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them, and pours expensive ointment upon them.

And Simon looks at the whole scene and thinks, If Jesus really knew what kind of woman this was, he would never let her touch him.

But Simon has completely misunderstood what it is happening.

He thinks Jesus does not know who she is.

Oh, Jesus knows exactly who she is.

What Simon does not understand is that Jesus also knows what grace can make her become.

And that's the difference.

Simon knows her past.

Jesus sees her future.

And that takes us directly into St.

Paul's words today.

Paul gives us one of the earliest summaries of the Christian gospel.

Christ died for our sins.

He was buried, he was raised on the third day, he appeared.

That's the heart of the faith.

That's the charisma.

Christianity is not fundamentally a philosophy or a moral improvement program.

Something happened.

Jesus Christ died.

Jesus Christ was buried.

Jesus rose from the dead.

And Paul says, I received this and now I hand it on to you.

That's tradition with the capital T in the most basic sense.

We received something we did not invent and faithfully handed on.

Robert Bellaman spent his life doing precisely that.

But then Paul suddenly becomes personal.

He says, I'm the least of the apostles.

Why?

Well he says because I persecuted the church of God.

Paul never forgot where grace found him, but neither did he allow his past to become his identity.

And then comes one of the most beautiful sentences By the grace of God I am what I am.

That could be almost the sentence connecting all three people today Paul, the woman in the gospel, and Robert Bellaman.

Different lives, different centuries, different sins, gifts, and vocations, but the same grace.

By the grace of God I am what I am.

And Paul adds something we should not miss.

His grace to be, his grace to me has not been ineffective.

In other words, grace did something to him.

That's the question today's readings place before us.

What has grace done to me?

Not simply do I know the creed, do I know Catholic teaching, do I say my prayers, do I come to mass?

Can I defend the church?

Those things matter.

Bellerman devoted his whole life to them.

But Catholicism cannot simply be information stored in the head.

Eventually the gospel has to travel those difficult eighteen inches from the head to the heart.

Simon knew religion, the woman knew mercy, and Jesus seems far more interested in what mercy has produced in her than in what Simon knows about everyone else's sins.

That's a dangerous territory for religious people.

Because after years of practicing the faith, we can become very good at identifying what is wrong with everyone else.

We know who is living correctly, who's not, who belongs, who doesn't, who has disappointed us, who has made mistakes, who has a past.

Without realizing it, we can become Simon sitting at the table with Jesus while completely missing what Jesus is doing three feet away.

Robert Bellerman reminds us that truth matters.

We should know our faith.

We should study it, we should be able to explain it.

We should never be embarrassed by the intellectual richness of Catholicism.

Today's gospel reminds us why the truth was given to us in the first place, so that we might encounter Jesus Christ.

The woman walks into that house carrying an alabaster jar, but she walks out carrying something infinitely greater.

Your sins are forgiven.

Your faith has saved you.

Go in peace.

Perhaps that is the examination of conscience for all of us today.

After all, the masses I have attended, all the prayers I have said, all the Catholic teachings I have heard, all the years I have known Christ, am I becoming more merciful, more humble, more capable of seeing what grace can do in another person?

Because we can know every answer in the catechism and still miss the person kneeling at the feet of Jesus.

Saint Robert Bellamin, teach us to know the faith.

Saint Paul, teach us to hand on the faith.

And that unnamed woman in the gospel, teach us something just as important what it looks like when the faith finally reaches the heart.

Amen.