Two Takes on the Same Readings

My family usually attends our parish's biggest Sunday morning mass, which among other things includes Litergy of Word for Children, and offers babysitting (yup, I'm one of the lazy bad moms who dumps her kid on others rather than taking her to mass). My older daughter's social life has meant that she missed that mass today, so I took her to the Lifeteen mass tonite (which she, being a sophisticated pre-teen, loves). In short, I attended two massed today and while the readings were the same (of course) the homilies were quite different. This morning our PV had mass. He seems like a nice enough guy but he speaks slowly with long pauses between words, and some of the lessons he draws from the readings have me scratching my head--not necessarily with disagreement but more with "how did he get THAT from those readings". In today's gospel Jesus healed the leper and told him to show himself to the priests, offer the customary sacrifice, but not tell anyone. Fr. C mentioned the guy's faith--that he didn't say "if you can heal me, please do so" but rather said "if you want to, you can heal me". Then he went off about not judging by appearances, and about how the leperosy kept the guy from practing his religion and now he had religious freedom, and how we are so lucky to have religious freedom today. The priest who said mass tonite was the former pastor of a parish that is being closed due to Katrina. He spoke about healing and how all of us have something in our lives that needs to be healed and we need to name it and ask Jesus to heal it.

WHO'D A THUNK IT?

http://www.financialexpress.com/latest_full_story.php?content_id=116523 is an article about a study that will be published in Science which shows that HIV/AIDS rates are declining in Zimbabwe. Why? People are delaying sexual activity and having fewer casual sexual partners. Condoms may also play a role (and if you go to Google News and search on Zimbabwe AIDS you'll find a lot of reporting on this study that tries hard to credit the condoms and downplay the changed sexual behavior) but in the end, it seems that it is better not to have sex with someone infected with AIDS than it is to wear a condom when you have sex with someone infected with AIDS. Maybe the Catholic church wasn't so dumb when they said that years ago.