Please. Don’t.
(With apologies to Father Malachy’s Miracle, one of the Lost Loyola Classics. As in, at the last minute the heirs pulled out of the contract. Grrr. But in the novel,  written decades before Vatican II, there’s some hilarious stuff about a liturgically innovative priest in the book’s setting – Scotland – who insists on wearing vestments of his clan’s tartan and so on. Along with much more that is still very relevant today – indeed echoes so many of the same conversations about religion we have today. A shame that the deal fell through.)

Oh, and if any readers heard about the “Miracle of Sharing” at Mass on Sunday,  feel free to… share. (The signal is…”But the real miracle was….”  As far as I can tell, the interpretation, as I mention in that old column, goes back to William Barclay, which explains its popularity in sermons and homilies: If this is what happened, it was not the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes; it was the miracle of the changing of selfish people into generous people at the touch of Christ.  Generosity and plenty of course is at the core of the narrative, but it’s God’s generosity. The Barclayian interpretation is illogical,  and frankly – not surprising given the era and the emphasis of Biblical studies of the late 19th and early 20th century, which, for example, saw the most “authentic” elements of the Jesus story as those that were the least Jewish  – tinged with more than a bit of anti-Semitism. Think about it.)
We didn’t! Homily was on the second reading this time.