Below is a video and text of this past weekend's homily.  For links to transcripts from previous weekend homilies click here:

One of my professors once described the apostle Peter as a big dog. Sure, he's friendly, but he's not aware of how much space he takes up, and he keeps bumping into things. He's impulsive too—he says and does things that make the other disciples, and Jesus, shake their heads. Like daring Jesus to command him to walk on water. In the middle of the Sea of Galilee. During a storm.

But every so often, Peter says something that gets right to the heart of Jesus' teaching. In today's Gospel, he doesn't hesitate to blurt out who Jesus truly is—the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Jesus responds by naming Peter the Church's foundation and giving him the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.

As Catholics, we read that as Scriptural proof for the primacy of Peter and his successors. I'm not about to dispute that. What interests me more is what Jesus says next: “the gates of the netherworld will not prevail against it.”

The common reading treats the Church as a fortress against the powers of darkness—an image that resonates, especially in times of crisis, standing firm while enemies rage outside. Nothing wrong with that image. But a fortress mentality eventually becomes obsessed with keeping people and possessions safe inside, and everything undesirable outside.

Sound familiar? We've all run into people and institutions more concerned with preserving the past than growing. It shows up in the Church too, among those who idealize the good old days—whether that's Tridentine certainty or the heady experimentation after Vatican II. Idealizing the past is a rut. Saint Augustine put it well: “You hear people complaining about this present day and age because things were so much better in former times... You may think past ages were good, but it is only because you are not living in them.” Respect the past, learn from it—but we can't live there.

So let's revisit that line about the gates of the netherworld. I want to propose a different reading: it's not the forces of darkness on the offensive. Gates don't attack. Gates are barriers—they keep things in and out. If the gates of the netherworld won't prevail against the Church, that means we're the ones on the move toward them.

Not under our own power, of course. We profess in the Nicene Creed that Jesus, after his death, descended into hell—freeing the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world, showing that his sacrifice liberated the dead as well as the living. As Saint John Chrysostom preached at Easter: "Let no one fear death, for the Savior's death has set us free... He descended into Hades and took it captive.” The gates of the netherworld couldn't stop him from breaking in to free the righteous.

If Jesus went to the gates and broke them open, then the Church he founded on Peter—big, clumsy, impulsive Peter—isn't meant to just hold the line. We're meant to keep going where Jesus went: toward the people and places that feel locked away, abandoned, beyond hope.

What does that look like for us? Maybe it means a parish that worries less about protecting what it has and more about who's still on the other side of a gate we've stopped knocking on. The estranged relative nobody's called in years. The friend who left over something decades old and never came back. The people we quietly stopped serving once it got hard. Those are gates too, and Jesus didn't stay outside them.

It might also mean the gate we've built around our own heart. The grudge we've decided is permanent. The part of our past we've sealed off because facing it feels riskier than avoiding it. If Jesus can walk into hell and not be overcome, he can walk into whatever we're guarding too.

That's the real comfort here—not that the Church is a fortress strong enough to survive an attack, but that we belong to someone who already went where the darkness was thickest and came back out the other side, not empty-handed, but with the dead on his arm. That's the foundation Peter was handed: not a wall, but keys. Keys don’t just lock people out, but they can let people in.



So maybe this week's question isn't “what's threatening us,” but “what gate have we stopped walking toward.” The Church Jesus built wasn't made to survive. It was made to go and get people.