Sunday Mass · 16 November 2025 · XXIII Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday Mass: November 16, 2025 | Thoughts of Peace
Bloom’s Sunday Mass, and the Church opens this one by telling you what God is thinking about you: I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction. We offer this Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition—not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
Communion and close
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Bloom’s Sunday Mass, and the Church opens this one by telling you what God is thinking about you: I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction. We offer this Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition—not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, but standing in the same Roman Rite, held by a pastor for whom this tradition has always been home. Beloved, grace and peace to you this morning, wherever you are sitting and whatever kind of week is behind you.
Today is the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, and we are in green. It is a second-class Sunday, which means it takes the whole day: St. Gertrude the Great, whose feast this is in the calendar, gives way entirely and is not even commemorated. So there is no saint in this Mass. There is a Sunday, and there are two readings, and there is an entrance chant that speaks in the first person and points straight at you.
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Listen to the grammar of it before you listen to anything else. I think thoughts of peace—and then, immediately, towards you. Not thoughts of peace in general. Not a disposition God holds somewhere at a distance and might one day get around to mentioning. The sentence has a direction, and the direction ends where you are sitting.
One more thing before we begin. You do not need to believe a word of this for the next half hour to be worth your time. If you have ever worked out how to get what you needed without making anybody stop and deal with you, today’s Gospel is about you, and the theology is optional.
II
The Penitential Rite
(The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)
We begin the way the Church has always begun—not with achievement, but with an honest accounting. Each of us names what we have done and what we have left undone, in whatever words we actually have, and none of it is said aloud to anybody else.
Take the pause. The Collect in a moment will call this our weakness rather than our wickedness, and that is the Church’s own word for it.
III
The Gloria
(The Gloria is sung or said here, from the Missal.)
Then praise, straight after the honesty and never before it. The order is the argument. You are not being asked to earn the right to sing.
IV
Introit
(Jeremias 29:11-12; 29:14; Ps. 84:2)
(The antiphon is the Missal’s own arrangement, drawn from three places in the twenty-ninth chapter of Jeremias and joined into a single sentence.)
The Lord saith: I think thoughts of peace, and not of affliction: you shall call upon me, and I will hear you; and I will bring back your captivity from all places.
℣. Lord, thou hast blessed thy land: thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
Notice what the psalm verse does to the antiphon. The antiphon promises in the future tense, I will bring back your captivity, and the verse underneath it reports in the past tense that the captivity of Jacob is already turned away. The Church has put the promise and the receipt in the same breath.
V
Collect
Forgive, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the sins of Thy faithful people: that by Thy goodness we may be released from the net of sin in which we have been caught by our own weakness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
A net, and a weakness. Not a wall, and not a malice. The prayer assumes you got tangled rather than that you set out to.
VI
Epistle
(Philippians 3:17-21; 4:1-3, Douay-Rheims)
Brethren: Be ye followers of me, and observe them who walk so as you have our model. For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping), that they are enemies of the cross of Christ; whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is in their shame; who mind earthly things.
But our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
Therefore, my dearly beloved brethren, and most desired, my joy and my crown; so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved. I beg of Evodia, and I beseech Syntyche, to be of one mind in the Lord. And I entreat thee also, my sincere companion, help those women who have laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement and the rest of my fellow labourers, whose names are in the book of life.
VII
Gradual
(Ps. 43:8-9; the address “O Lord” belongs to the Missal’s arrangement rather than to either verse)
Thou hast saved us, O Lord, from them that afflict us: and hast put them to shame that hate us.
℣. In God shall we glory all the day long: and in thy name we will give praise for ever.
VIII
Alleluia
(Ps. 129:1-2)
Alleluia, alleluia. ℣. Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Alleluia.
IX
Gospel
(Matthew 9:18-26, Douay-Rheims)
At that time: As Jesus was speaking these things unto them, behold a certain ruler came up, and adored him, saying: Lord, my daughter is even now dead; but come, lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. And Jesus rising up followed him, with his disciples.
And behold a woman who was troubled with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment. For she said within herself: If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed. But Jesus turning and seeing her, said: Be of good heart, daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.
And when Jesus was come into the house of the ruler, and saw the minstrels and the multitude making a rout, he said: Give place, for the girl is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn.
And when the multitude was put forth, he went in, and took her by the hand. And the maid arose. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that country.
X
The Creed
(The Nicene Creed is said here, from the Missal.)
We say it together, out loud, in the same words and at the same speed, whatever each of us is privately able to mean by it this morning. Some of you will say every line as fact. Some of you will say it the way you would hold a door for a stranger. Both of you are saying it.
The Offering
Sunday Homily | Thoughts of Peace
Matthew tells you a great deal about this woman and withholds exactly one thing.
Matthew tells you a great deal about this woman and withholds exactly one thing.
He tells you how long: twelve years. He tells you where she stood: behind him. He tells you what she touched: the hem of his garment, not his hand and not his sleeve. He even tells you what she was saying inside her own head, which is a thing a Gospel almost never does. For she said within herself: If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed.
What he never tells you is why she came from behind.
Hold onto that, because every reason you can think of is one you brought with you. He gives her method in four exact details and gives no motive at all, and the whole weight of what happens next sits in that gap.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
She designed a cure that needed no conversation
Look at what her plan actually is, as a plan.
She has worked out that the thing she needs is available without an exchange. If contact with the cloth is sufficient, then she does not have to explain twelve years to anybody, does not have to ask a busy man to stop, does not have to become a subject in somebody else’s afternoon. She can take what she needs out of the traffic and be gone before the sentence gets finished.
And here is the part I want you to sit with: it is a good plan, and it is considerate of everybody except her. She has arranged the whole thing so that the cost to the room is zero, and people do not arrive at a plan like that in an afternoon. Twelve years is how long it takes to learn to need something quietly.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
Notice what she is not doing. She is not sneaking. She is not stealing. Nothing in the passage treats the touch as a theft, and Christ never once frames it that way. She has simply concluded—reasonably, on the evidence available to her—that the version of this where she is spoken to is not on offer.
The hour Matthew dates it to
Now take the sentence slowly, because this is the whole homily.
But Jesus turning and seeing her, said: Be of good heart, daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.
From that hour. Not from the touch. Matthew has her plan in his hands, fully formed, entirely workable—and he declines to date the cure to it. He dates the cure to the moment she is addressed.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
That is not a small piece of editing. Matthew could have written that she was healed as her fingers closed on the cloth, and the story would still work; he wrote it the other way round. The one element she had carefully designed out of her plan—being spoken to, out loud, in the middle of a public road—is the element the text makes the cure contemporaneous with.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
What settles it is that Matthew records no search. There is no question in this account, no turning around to ask who did it, no scanning of the road.
He turns, he sees her, he speaks. The turn in Matthew is not an investigation and it is not a discovery—it is an answer, given to somebody who had not asked out loud.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
Daughter
Then hear the word he uses, because he had a wide choice and took the narrowest one.
Daughter. Not woman, which he uses elsewhere, and not a diagnosis. A word of family, spoken by a man on his way to a house where somebody else’s daughter is lying dead, at the exact moment when he could reasonably have said nothing and kept walking.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
That is the Introit landing in the Gospel. I think thoughts of peace—and the direction of the sentence, the towards you, is the entire content of the turn. She wanted an outcome. She got an address.
Two clocks, and neither is ranked
Set the two halves side by side now, because the Gospel has deliberately braided them.
The ruler’s daughter is even now dead, an emergency measured in minutes, and the man says so in his first breath. The woman has been ill twelve years, which is not an emergency but a life. One clock is running out and the other stopped a long time ago.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
Christ does not rank them. He does not tell her to wait, and he does not tell the ruler that his errand is more urgent, and there is not a word in the text about triage. The same journey holds both, and the woman is not asked to justify interrupting it. Yesterday’s Lesson said the work is to be done out of season as much as in it, and here is what that looks like when it stops being a principle: a man on the most time-critical errand of his week, stopping in the road for somebody who did not even ask him to.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
The two names at the end of the Lesson
Now the Epistle, and specifically its last three verses, which almost every reading of this passage walks straight past.
Paul has just finished a soaring sentence about how our conversation is in heaven. And then, with no transition at all, he names two people. I beg of Evodia, and I beseech Syntyche, to be of one mind in the Lord. Two women, named, in a letter that is going to be read aloud in a room where both of them are sitting.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
And then the verse that does the work: help those women who have laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement and the rest of my fellow labourers, whose names are in the book of life.
Read what Paul actually calls them. Not helpers, and not the women who supported the work. They laboured with me in the gospel—and then he sets them in a single list with Clement and everyone else he calls his fellow labourers, and does not sort the list.
There is no second category in that sentence. Whatever Clement was doing, the text says these two were doing it too.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
I am naming who this lands on, because the verse names them first. There is a teaching, very old and still working, that a woman’s part in the church is assistance to somebody else’s ministry and never ministry itself—that she may arrange, clean, teach the children, sit with the dying, hold a parish together for forty years, and that all of it is called help, while the same work done by a man is called labour. Philippians 4:3 will not support it. Paul had one list and he put them on it.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
Apply the fruit test to Christianity’s own record and ask what that teaching has grown. It has grown congregations that would not exist without women and cannot describe what those women do in the same words they use for anybody else. It has grown a great many capable people who learned to make their contribution look smaller so that it would be accepted. And it has grown the exact habit today’s Gospel is about: getting what is needed without ever becoming a subject in the transaction.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
That is the Gospel and the Lesson making one claim from two directions. The woman on the road had learned to receive without being addressed. The women in Philippi had laboured without being named. Christ turns around; Paul writes the names down.
A chair carried across a parish hall
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There is a story sometimes told of a man of eighty-three who had been in the same parish since he was nine years old.
His hearing had been going for a decade and by then it was mostly gone, and he had worked all of it out himself, the way people do. He sat at the front on the left, because that was where the loop reached. He knew the responses so well that he did not need to catch them. And four years ago he had quietly stopped staying for the parish lunch, because eight people talking at one table is not a conversation he can join, and he was not going to make a room full of people repeat themselves for him.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
He did not stop coming to the hall, though. He worked out that if he arrived right at the end, when most of it was over, he could stack the chairs and be useful and be gone. Nobody had to slow down. Nobody had to say anything twice. It was the same plan as the woman on the road: get the thing you want out of the traffic, at no cost to anyone else, and do not require a conversation to do it.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
What happened was that a woman who ran the lunch picked up a folding chair one Sunday, carried it across the hall, put it down next to him, and sat in it. She did not take him out to the corridor where it was quieter. She sat in the middle of the room with the urn still going and the tables not yet cleared, and she asked him one question, and waited, and then asked him another one. Slowly, facing him, in front of forty people, for about twenty minutes.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
He said afterward that the strange part was not being able to hear her. It was being asked. He had built four years of arrangements around not needing anyone to make an effort, and she made the effort in public, where the whole hall could see her doing it, which meant he could not treat it as a favour done in private and pay it back later.
I am not going to tell you that he started staying for the lunch. I do not know that he did. Nothing in this story gets fixed—his hearing did not come back and the hall was still too loud the following month and he still went home early. What changed is that one person declined to let him be served invisibly, and did it where it counted, and that is the whole of it.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
The room that already knew the answer
And then consider who is already waiting at the ruler’s house.
The minstrels and the multitude making a rout. Professional mourners, already hired, already working. The machinery of certainty was on site before Christ got to the door, which tells you the household had accepted the verdict and moved on to the arrangements. And when he says the girl is not dead, but sleepeth, they laugh him to scorn.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
That is the only laughter in the passage, and it is worth knowing what it is aimed at. They are not laughing at a miracle claim, because he has not made one yet. He has made a claim about time—about how far along this is, about whether the thing is over. And a room that has already decided the thing is over will find that funny every single time.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
A week ago today we sat with a man who could not for the crowd see past a street full of perfectly well-behaved people. Here is the other half of that. Last Sunday the crowd was an obstruction nobody had authored; this morning it is an opinion, loudly held.
And when the multitude was put forth, he went in. Christ does not argue with the mourners and does not persuade them. He puts them outside and closes the door.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
Out of the depths, twice in one Mass
One more thing, and it is the Church’s own editing rather than the evangelist’s.
The Alleluia verse this morning and the Offertory a few minutes from now are the same two verses of the same psalm. Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord. The Church says it before the Gospel and then says it again over the bread and the wine, in a Mass whose entrance chant has already announced thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
On Thursday we prayed those same two verses under a different antiphon, in a Mass whose Lesson said that the one who had begun a good work would also be the one to finish it. They keep coming back because they are the shape of most people’s praying: not a summary and not a well-formed request, but a voice from a low place asking to be heard.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
And that is exactly what the woman on the road did not do. She did not cry out at all. She said it within herself and reached for the cloth, and the Mass this morning surrounds her with a psalm about crying aloud from the depths, as if the Church wanted to make sure nobody left thinking that silence was the requirement.
Where this leaves us
So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room.
Somebody near you has a version of that plan. They have worked out how to get the thing they need without making you stop—the seat by the door, the early appointment, the message sent at two in the morning so that nobody has to answer it, the thing they stopped asking for because asking twice was harder than going without. It is competent and it is exhausting, and you were never meant to notice it.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
You will not be able to identify these people reliably, and I would not try. Do the other thing instead. Ask a question and wait for the answer. Use somebody’s name. Do it in the room rather than in the corridor, because a kindness done off to one side can be quietly declined and one done in company has to be received.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
On Tuesday we prayed a Collect that said we have no power of our own to keep ourselves safe, and this morning’s Collect says the same thing in a different image—a net, and a weakness, and a request to be let out of it. Neither prayer asks you to be strong first. And on the first of this month we stood in front of a multitude which no man could number, which is what heaven looks like from the outside. Today you get the other view: one name, said out loud, on a road, to somebody who had come from behind.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction.
That is the Introit and the Gospel saying one sentence. The thoughts God is described as thinking are directed, and the direction is a person. And whatever else is true this morning, the Church put that line at the door of this Mass on purpose, so that you would hear it before you heard anything about your own sins.
Thoughts of peace, and not of affliction. Towards you.
↑ The order resumes below.
XII
Offertory
(Ps. 129:1-2)
Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord.
XIII
Secret
We offer unto Thee, O Lord, this sacrifice of praise, that we may the more truly serve Thee: that Thou mayest graciously bring to completion what Thou hast bestowed upon us, who are unworthy of it. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
XIV
The Canon and Consecration
(The Preface of the Most Holy Trinity, the Sanctus, and the Canon through the Consecration are prayed here, from the Missal, and the Consecration made within Bloom’s own Independent Catholic tradition.)
We come to the part of the Mass that stops explaining itself. The Church simply does what it was given to do, in words it has used for centuries, offered as a real celebration within our own tradition and not a claim on anybody else’s.
Whatever you carried in—the arrangement you have built so that nobody has to accommodate you, the request you have stopped making, the thing you have gone twelve years without mentioning—put it on the altar. This is a table where ordinary material is taken seriously, and you qualify as ordinary material.
XV
Act of Spiritual Communion
No livestream can hand anyone a host. That is true of every Mass offered over video, anywhere, by anyone. So the Church’s own long-standing practice stands in, the same one bishops recommended to their parishes joining from home.
My Jesus, I believe that Thou art truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love Thee above all things and I desire to receive Thee into my soul. Since I cannot now receive Thee sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace Thee as if Thou wert already there, and unite myself wholly to Thee. Never permit me to be separated from Thee. Amen.
If you cannot say that this morning, sit quietly through it. You are not receiving less by being here differently.
XVI
Communion Antiphon
(Mark 11:24; the Missal’s antiphon opens “Amen I say to you” and closes “it shall be done to you,” where the Douay of the verse reads “Therefore I say unto you” and “they shall come unto you”)
Amen I say to you, all things whatsoever you ask when you pray, believe that you shall receive, and it shall be done to you.
Hear what the Church puts in your ear on the way out of this particular Gospel. Ask. Not touch the hem and slip away—ask.
XVII
Postcommunion
Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we whom Thou dost make partakers of things divine with rejoicing, may not be overcome by any human peril. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.
XVIII
The Closing Blessing
(Given as Bloom’s own pastor, within Bloom’s own tradition)
Go now, and go asking.
If you believe this morning: the God described in today’s Introit is not neutral about you and is not still making up his mind. The thinking is already done and its content is stated—thoughts of peace, and not of affliction—and the whole of the Gospel is that sentence delivered in person, on foot, to somebody who had given up on being spoken to.
And if you believe none of it, take the same thing with the theology removed. People build careful, competent systems for needing as little as possible from anyone, and those systems are usually a report on how they have been received in the past. You can be the reason somebody revises the report. Ask the question out loud, and wait for the answer.
May God, whose thoughts towards you are of peace and not of affliction, hear you out of whatever depth you are calling from, turn towards you on the road, and call you by a name that belongs to a family. And may somebody carry a chair across the room for you when it is your turn.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Go, and use their name.
XIX
Frequently Asked Questions
Because a second-class Sunday takes the whole day. St. Gertrude the Great falls on November 16 in the calendar, but she is a third-class feast, so this Sunday displaces her entirely—she receives no oration and is not even commemorated, and the propers prayed this morning are the Twenty-Third Sunday’s own from start to finish. That is a stronger outcome than a commemoration, and it is worth knowing when it happens.
Because it is the Missal’s own arrangement rather than a continuous quotation. The chant draws on Jeremias 29:11, 29:12 and 29:14 and joins them, compressing the middle of verse 12 and the second half of verse 14. Read straight through in the Douay, those verses run considerably longer. The Church has shortened them into something that can be sung at a door, and the phrase at the centre of it—thoughts of peace, and not of affliction—is word for word what Jeremias has.
The text raises no such objection. Matthew records no rebuke, no question, no demand for an explanation, and no suggestion that anything was taken improperly. He gives her method in detail and gives her motive not at all, and that gap is worth leaving alone rather than filling in. What Christ does is turn and speak, and he attributes what has happened to her own faith.
Two women in the church at Philippi, named by Paul in the last verse of today’s Lesson and described there as having laboured with him in the gospel. He asks a third person to help them, and he lists them alongside Clement and the rest of the people he calls his fellow labourers, without distinguishing between them. Beyond the letter itself very little is known about either woman, and this Mass is one of the few times in the year their names are read aloud in church.
No, and we say so every week. Bloom offers Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition, following the 1962 Roman Rite, and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Old Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities have used the word honestly in exactly this position for well over a century, and so do we.
No. The argument holds with the theology taken out: a person who had been ill twelve years arranged to get help without requiring a conversation, and the thing that actually changed her situation was being addressed. Anyone who has organised their life around asking for as little as possible already recognises the shape. Bloom’s whole thesis fits in three words—truth, love, acceptance—and belief was never the entry fee.
Faith in Bloom is the daily liturgical work of Bloom Ministries, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and it is free to read and always will be. If it has been worth something to you and you are able, you can give once or give monthly below. Sending a post to one person who needs it does real work too.
Epistle and Gospel text: Douay-Rheims Bible, Bishop Challoner revision—the standard English scripture translation used across traditional hand missals. Introit, Collect, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, Secret, Communion antiphon, and Postcommunion: the Missale Romanum (1962), the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, following The New Marian Missal for Daily Mass by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M., S.T.D. (Regina Press, Imprimatur 1961).
Faith in Bloom, under the Church of Bloom, is a ministry of Bloom Ministries, a nonprofit organization tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It is offered in the Independent Catholic tradition and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
