April 28, 2026 // Bishop

Bishop Rhoades Celebrates Mass at ND for Those Being Confirmed, Coming into Full Communion

Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades

Bishop Rhoades delivered the following homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter on April 26 during a Mass for those coming into full communion in the Catholic Church and receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.

The words of Jesus at the end of today’s Gospel express the very heart of His redemptive mission: “I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” The abundant life Jesus is speaking about is the new and eternal life He came to bring to humanity through His incarnation, life, death and resurrection. The life in abundance is life in communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The fullness of life that Jesus came to give us “far exceeds the dimensions of our earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God” (Evangelium Vitae, No. 2). We all yearn for this life. This yearning drives all human searching for truth, love, peace and happiness. It is our deepest human aspiration, a built-in yearning for infinity that nothing finite can satisfy. St. Augustine famously articulated this longing when he prayed, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” While we may pursue many fleeting desires, like material wealth, pleasure or power, we discover, as Augustine did, that ultimately, they do not satisfy. The prodigal son realized this, too, since his search for life in the wrong places led to misery. He came to his senses, returned to his father, who received him back with open arms, saying, “My son was dead and has come back to life.”

The sacramental life of the Catholic Church is a beautiful expression and means by which we receive and share in the life in abundance that Jesus promises us. Through the action of the Holy Spirit in Christ’s Body, the Church, the power of Christ’s Paschal Mystery touches us. Through baptism, we enter into communion with Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life. And through Jesus who is the gate, we enter the sheepfold, the Church. In baptism, the Holy Spirit communicates to us, intimately and personally, the divine life, the life that originates in the Father and is offered to us in the Son.

At this liturgy, 32 of our Christian brothers and sisters, already baptized, will enter into the full communion of the Church. They already share in the new life of Christ, but they seek to share more abundantly in His life. They have heard the Good Shepherd calling them to deeper communion with Him through access to the fullness of grace and truth which our Lord entrusted to the Church, which He established on the foundation of St. Peter and the apostles and their successors to teach, sanctify and govern in His name. With joy, I will receive them into the Catholic Church at this liturgy. Then, in confirmation, they and 66 other candidates will be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, and will be bound even more perfectly to Christ and to His Church.

Dear candidates for confirmation, you will be enriched with a special strength of the Holy Spirit today, the special strength that the apostles received on the day of Pentecost. In the first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles, we heard part of a powerful speech given by St. Peter on the day of Pentecost itself. Notice how bold his words were, so powerful that St. Luke tells us that the people “were cut to the heart.” They repented of their sins, and about 3,000 were baptized that day. Candidates, in the Sacrament of Confirmation, you will receive a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit as once granted to the apostles on the day of Pentecost, to strengthen you to be missionary disciples of Jesus; as the Catechism says, “to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross” (No. 1303). We heard in Psalm 23, the responsorial psalm today, these prophetic words of the psalmist addressed to God, the shepherd of His people: “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, will anoint you today with the oil, the chrism of salvation. I pray that your cup will also overflow. This overflowing cup refers to the abundant life that God desires for us, the blessings of peace, hope and joy, which are fruits of the Holy Spirit’s action in our lives.

Psalm 23 also contains these words addressed to the Lord: “You spread the table before me in the sight of my foes.” We can see this as a prefiguration of the table of the Eucharist, where the Good Shepherd feeds us with His very body and blood, a foretaste of the banquet feast of heaven. The One who said, “I am the Good Shepherd” also said, “I am the Bread of life.” At this Mass, those who will have been received into full communion in the Church will join us for the first time at the table of the Lord and receive their first holy Communion. Jesus nourishes us on our life’s journey with the Holy Eucharist, with Himself, the Bread of life. It is, as St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “the one bread that provides the medicine of immortality, the antidote for death and the food that makes us live forever in Jesus Christ.”

The new life we receive in the sacraments flourishes when we follow the Good Shepherd, live in His love and love one another as He has loved us. Indeed, the sacraments give us the grace to do so. Pope Benedict XVI taught that “when we love, we are fulfilling our deepest need and becoming most fully ourselves, most fully human. Loving is what we are programmed to do, what we were designed for by our Creator.” This is what it means to be truly alive. It is at the very heart of Jesus’ moral teaching: loving God and our neighbor, imitating the Good Shepherd who laid down His life in loving sacrifice for us and serving Him in our brothers and sisters. This is what the holy Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ’s love unto the end, nourishes us to do, as it nourished all the saints of the Church. When we live in this way, we find life in abundance, and, in doing so, we are building a culture of life and civilization of love.

One of our most recently canonized saints, the young adult, Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1925 at the age of 24, famously said these words: “I want to live and not simply exist!” Those words express something we all experience deep in our hearts. St. Pier Giorgio found this life he was yearning for in Jesus and in His Body, the Church. On a photograph of him while mountain-climbing, Pier Giorgio wrote a friend, “Verso l’alto” which means “to the heights.” This young saint was an avid mountain climber, but he wasn’t referring merely to his physical climbing to reach the top of the mountain when he wrote “Verso l’alto.” He was referring to spiritual climbing to reach the summit of eternal life with Christ. His words are a call to rise above worldly apathy, setting one’s sights on Christ and pursuing holiness.

St. Pier Giorgio and all the saints you have chosen as your confirmation names set their sights on eternal life with Christ. They lived their lives in Christ, strengthened by the sacraments. They were not satisfied to live lives of mediocrity. They lived lives of faith, hope and charity with their eyes fixed on eternal life. This is what God created us for: to be with Him forever.

May the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints help us with their prayers to grow in holiness, that we might have life and have it more abundantly by following Jesus, the shepherd and guardian of our souls!