Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

May 3, 2026
Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church
Fort Worth, Texas

Acts 6:1-7
Psalm 33:1-2, 4-5, 18-19
1 Peter 2:4-9
John 14:1-12

Today we celebrate together the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in Fort Worth. This parish was established to provide particular ministry for the Vietnamese Catholic Community in East Fort Worth and has done so through the generous collaboration of the priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mother of the Redeemer.

We remember all of the deceased priests and brothers who served at this parish in preaching the Gospel and providing the sacraments to the men and women of this parish. We remember to pray for all of our family members and parishioners who have gone before us. We remember also Bishop Joseph Delaney who established your parish.

Prior to the establishment of this parish, Vietnamese Catholics worshipped at Saint Rita Catholic Church just down the street from here. The experience of the Vietnamese community, having traveled under duress from Vietnam as refugees after the war, faced numerous challenges of transition into life in the United States and in North Texas. These particular needs required the pastoral attention of my predecessor, Bishop Joseph Delaney, to maintain the cultural, linguistic, and religious integrity of the Vietnamese community and to provide for a strong community to combat the trauma of the experience of refugees.

The Church introduces us to the authentic Deposit of Faith. This is true for the Church today as it was true for the Church that we see described and assembled in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. The Church gathered together with the Apostles in communion with each other and guided by the Holy Spirit recognizes that the all of the widows and orphans — those who are socially vulnerable and poor, those divided by language and culture — Greek speaking and Aramaic-speaking each and all belong to the Church as Her children. The Apostles, guided by the Holy Spirit, appoint deacons — including the first martyr, Saint Stephen — for the ministry of care and belonging as brothers and sisters born as children of the Church through baptism and its gift of the Faith. The establishment of this parish and the growth and development of your community in the last twenty-five years testifies to the glory of God made present in the Church. There are now several generations of Catholics who have received the Faith through your parish’s ministry and who now flourish as Americans who remain imbued with the beauty of the Vietnamese culture with an appreciation of the Vietnamese language.

Out of the experience of war, poverty, and trauma, the people of this parish have never felt abandoned by Christ, a “living stone rejected by the builders,” because of His fidelity to you His children expressed through His Church have been built, “like living stones, into a spiritual house to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

In the Gospel reading proclaimed today, Jesus speaks of His preparation of a place for all of us to belong, a home, and a mansion with plenty of room for all who have faith. It is where He is going and where we are to follow. Thomas, tempted against faith, asks sincerely but without trust, “How do we know the way?” Thomas is looking for a private path that does not involve trust. Jesus, as clearly as possible, directly states that He, Jesus, is the Way. Faith in Jesus is the way. It is the faith that unites us with Him and with each other as brothers and sisters, and you as a vibrant parish.

As the late Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, “Faith in Jesus entails following Him daily, in the simple actions that make up our day. ‘It is part of the mystery of God that He acts so gently, that He only gradually builds up His history within the great history of mankind; that He becomes man and so can be overlooked by His contemporaries and by the decisive forces within history; that He suffers and dies and that, having risen again, He chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom He reveals himself; that He continues to knock gently at the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to Him’.”

Parishioners of Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church, you share a particular part of the mission of Christ’s Church to evangelize people within your own culture and other cultures to assist through your lives and service other people in finding their place of belonging as sons and daughters of the Church, as missionaries of Christ, as living stones in a living Temple of which Christ is the cornerstone. As we approach the altar of the Lord, let us do so with humble gratitude for the joys and blessings of the last twenty-five years and also beg the Lord to protect our children from the temptation of the evil one.