AUGUST 29, 2026 FATHER PETER TURRONE
For John had been telling Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.
Today we celebrate the memorial of the beheading of John the Baptist, a very tragic moment in the life of the church.
But we hear so many important things in today’s gospel, because all of this comes down to what is true.
What is truth?
Truth is when what is inside of me conforms to objective reality.
Today we have a completely wrong. When you speak. When I speak to many people, when I read the news and listen to other people, what other people have to say, which is important.
Oftentimes I hear people say the following. Well, this is my truth, and that’s your truth. That’s your opinion.
Something can be my opinion. But an opinion is not the same as being the truth. My opinion, your opinion can be close to the truth, or it can be a patent lie and can be completely false.
And I know this is something difficult for some people today, for many people today in society to kind of grasp.
So if something is true, then we owe our lives to it. But for an opinion and everybody has a right to an opinion, we are called to speak what is true.
So if somebody is believe something to be wrong, we have a responsibility to defend the truth. Why is it? Because the truth is not so much it only a proposition, but a truth is a person.
Jesus is God in the flesh. Jesus is the way and the truth and the life.
And because he is the truth, then everything that is proclaimed or is said to be true must conform with Christ and what he has taught us in the gospel and throughout all the Sacred Scripture.
It’s very simple, but there is so much confusion.
And when you look back and you look at the root, the foundation of this, my truth versus your truth, what does it really come down to?
Well, basically it’s saying you can’t tell me what to do. I’ll do what I want to do for myself. And you have your own truth, your own opinion. Basically, stay out of my life.
It doesn’t work that way. Especially because what matters is what is going to save us and what is good for everyone.
So what is ultimately going to lead for it to our salvation?
The church exists for the salvation of souls and for no other purpose.
And therefore, once we veer from our mission, then we’re just presenting another opinion or another truth in the public square. But it doesn’t work that way.
And that’s why we look to John the Baptist, because John the Baptist was a man who was completely in love with God, and he was completely in love with the truth.
But the way John does this, the way he proclaims the truth, is by being very humble when he does it.
If you go on social media, and if you scroll down and you look at some of the comments, when people are stating things or making evident the sins of other people, oftentimes there’s so much malice, there’s so much hatred and so much condemnation.
This is not what John the Baptist is doing.
John the Baptist is saying it is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife. He’s calling out Herod because he’s committing a grave sin. He’s violating the commands of God.
And again, he’s doing this not with a beam coming out of his own eye, because he’s a humble man and he knows himself. And even though he’s the greatest born of women, he doesn’t let it get to his head.
But he’s concerned about what is true. And he wants there to be order, and he wants Herod to be saved. He’s concerned about his salvation. And this is why he says this.
And Herod himself, as he’s listening to all of this, when John is preaching, he says very clearly that he enjoyed listening to him, that he enjoyed listening. He was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him.
So why is that?
Because every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. So all of us, unless we’ve been so, our intellects have been so darkened by mortal, by mortal sin, by grave sin, repeated sin, that all of us have this capacity for what is true.
It’s built into us. And when we hear what is true, then there’s something inside of us that kind of goes in that direction.
So you can see there’s this struggle inside of him because he knows that it’s right. But at the same time, his passions, his disordered passions, are preventing him from doing what is the right thing. So even though he knows it.
But John insists, and he says it over and over again.
And then we hear Herodias, who is the complete opposite. This woman has no conscience. It’s been completely destroyed, and she hates the good , and she hates John the Baptist.
And as a consequence, she does everything to have him killed. And again, you can see the weakness of Herod over a dance that he’s willing to give up half of his kingdom.
So that’s when our passions become so disordered that we lose common sense, the capacity to reason. And it’s unfortunate, but we can see this in our society.
And as Catholics, we have the responsibility before God and for the common good in society to remind the government that they have a responsibility to care for everyone and for a society to be truly just as we heard in the beginning, and for there to be true peace, we have to seek what is good and true and beautiful.
And therefore we need to remind people of the natural law, what God has revealed to us. This is how societies become just, and this is how we care for the weakest members.
And then truth will always prevail and so too will justice.
But if we allow our passions to overcome us, if we don’t fight them, if we hate what is good, then they’re going to try. We will try. Others will try to remove us from the public square to drown our voices.
But we have to insist again with humility, not with hatred. But we have to do this because it’s important.
And the best way to do this is like John the Baptist, he wore a hair shirt and he would eat locusts. He lived off of that.
So what that means is that it’s important for us to look inwardly and say, am I living the truth? Am I trying to live the truth that I know is Christ?
Am I fighting against my lower passions? Am I doing what is necessary with fasting and some penance to gain control of myself, and to seek what is true and good and beautiful?
Following the example of John the Baptist, and then leading people to the Lord and to repentance.
This is so important. So this is why we remember this.
We remember this special day, you know, it was it was a tragic moment when we look at it. But we also know that this was the way that he was going to ultimately glorify God.
We don’t know what awaits us in the future. We don’t know what the Lord is going to ask of us in the future, but he wants us to be faithful now.
And being faithful now means living our lives in conformity with the gospel and in humility, speaking the truth to our brothers and sisters. Even when we know that there’s a risk that they may not accept it.
But if we pray, we beg God and we pray for them. Maybe someone will listen. And maybe instead of taking the wrong road, they may turn back to Christ and be saved.
