Jesus at the Center, or Nothing Holds
We Talk About Everything Except Jesus
The past year has been full.
Not in the abstract, but in the real ways life fills up.
In 2025, I have buried the dead, prayed with families at hospital bedsides, watched people carry fear quietly into the pews, and listened to parishioners who are simply tired of being afraid all the time. I have also seen joy return where prayer became serious again, where the sacraments were received with intention, and where people stopped trying to control everything and began trusting God.
What stands out to me most is this:
When Jesus is spoken about clearly, people respond.
When He is not, they drift.
We live in a moment when Christians speak constantly. We post, comment, react, explain. Priests included. And yet, for all the words, Jesus Himself is often strangely absent. We talk around Him. We reference values. We debate consequences. We weigh strategies. But we hesitate to speak simply and directly about Christ.
That hesitation is costly.
As I have written before, the Church does not exist because the world is strong. It exists because the world is wounded. And wounded people are not helped by commentary alone. They are healed by encounter.
This year made that unmistakably clear. When illness disrupted plans, when death arrived without warning, when anxiety could no longer be managed away, what sustained people was not opinion or alignment. It was prayer. It was the Eucharist. It was the quiet conviction that Jesus Christ is present and faithful even when life is unstable.
Jesus does not need to be made relevant. He already is. He meets people where they actually live. He listens. He challenges. He forgives. He calls people to more than survival. He calls them to life.
And yet, even within the Church, we sometimes speak more readily about public figures than about the Son of God. We analyze leaders while neglecting the Lord. We risk sounding more like commentators than shepherds. Not out of malice, but out of habit.
But people are not starving for our takes.
They are starving for Christ.
I have seen again and again that when priests speak about Jesus with clarity and confidence, something shifts. Confession lines grow. Prayer deepens. People stop asking only what the Church thinks and begin asking how to follow the Lord.
We do not need a newer message. We need a deeper gaze.
The Gospel has not failed this age. It has simply not always been proclaimed with conviction. When Jesus is reduced to implication rather than proclamation, faith thins out. When He is named, preached, and trusted, faith takes root.
Our task is not to win arguments or manage outrage. Our task is to look closely at Jesus ourselves and then speak about Him without embarrassment or fear.
If we do that, the Church will not need to shout to be heard.
The voice of Christ will do the work.