Today’s First Reading is about as grisly as you’ll find: Antiochus, the king, orders them to eat pork in violation of God’s law. They refuse. He has them tortured and killed. But as grisly as the reading is, it’s only part of the story—there are seven brothers; all of them are tortured and killed, as is their steadfast mother, but each looks forward to the afterlife in God’s presence. Apparently, to tell the story of all seven brothers and their mother would take too much time, or be too unpleasant for a Sunday morning.

Yet every night we see such visions of horror on the nightly news—a three-year-old boy sitting stunned and bloodied in an ambulance; the body of an innocent child washed up on the shore; young girls kidnapped en masse and forced to be “wives” to their captors. We see the funerals of children killed in urban gang wars; we see the anguish of their mothers who could not keep them safe.

And we run out of tears.

So we should try to find a truly passionate setting of Psalm 17, the psalm of the day, which has a sense of urgency that cries out for justice in the midst of injustice, and specifically looks forward to the resurrection and life everlasting with God. Don’t just substitute a more familiar, more pleasant seasonal psalm.

  “Faith of Our Fathers” is dauntingly full of gender-exclusive language. I found a much better text in “A Living Faith,” in the Canadian hymnal Catholic Book of Worship III, 1994, which uses Frederick Faber’s original first verse, with additional verses by Joseph R. Alfred, © 1981:

2. Faith of our mothers, daring faith,
Your work for Christ is love revealed,
Spreading God's word from pole to pole,
Making love known and freedom real,
Faith of our mothers, holy faith
We will be true to you till death.

3. Faith of our brothers, sisters too
Who still must bear oppression's might,
Raising on high in prison's dark
The cross of Christ still burning bright:
Faith for today, O living faith,
We will be true to you till death.