King Charles III and Queen Camilla view items on display during a visit to the Royal Collection exhibition in the Green Drawing Room during the state visit by the president of the United States of America at Windsor Castle on Sept. 17, 2025, in Windsor, England. The royal couple have announced a state visit to the Vatican in late October 2025. / Credit: Aaron Chown - WPA Pool/Getty Images

Catherine Miles-Flynn, who has served as director of Christian formation for the Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia for twenty years, spoke at an EWTN news conference on Sept. 26, 2025. / Credit: Daniel Ibanez/EWTN

Archbishop Filippo Iannone speaks at a press conference presenting the reform of canon law on June 1, 2021. Pope Leo XIV on Sept. 26, 2025, appointed Iannone as prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Bishops, a department the pope himself once led. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

Friends, Pope Benedict XVI memorably told us that the Church does three essential things: It worships God, it evangelizes, and it serves the poor. This week, the first reading from the prophet Amos and the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus bring that third task vividly to mind—and they are meant to bother us. Are you indifferent to the sufferings of the poor? What are you doing, concretely, to help them?

Friends, for this Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to focus on the first and second readings. When read together, they give us a very good sense of Catholic social teaching in regard to the question of power. The Church’s position here is a subtle one. It doesn’t demonize political and economic power; after all, God is described as all-powerful, so power can’t, in itself, be a problem. But it is very much concerned with how we use that power. 

Friends, this year, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on a Sunday, so we have the great privilege of reflecting a bit more deeply on this marvelous and, frankly, disconcerting and odd feast. The Roman cross was a horrific, terrifying symbol of tyrannical power. And yet the first Christians emerge exalting the cross of Jesus. They don’t hide it or pretend he died some other way; on the contrary, Saint Paul says, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” How do we begin to explain this?