25 January 2027 · Latin Rite
Open in the Daily Word appAlso: Syro-Malankara Rite · Syro-Malabar Rite · മലയാളം
“I asked, ‘What am I to do, Lord?’ The Lord said to me, ‘Get up and go to Damascus; there you will be told everything that has been assigned to you to do.’” Acts 22:10
The Church celebrates no other conversion with a feast of its own; Paul's is unique because it shows what grace can do with the fiercest enemy. Paul tells the story himself, standing before a hostile crowd in Jerusalem: “I persecuted this Way up to the point of death.” On the road to Damascus, at noon, “a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’” He asks: “Who are you, Lord?” And the answer reveals everything: “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.”
Jesus does not say “my followers” but “me”. Whoever touches the Church touches Christ, for the Church is his Body. Blinded, Paul is led by the hand into Damascus. There Ananias, a devout disciple, comes to him: “Brother Saul, regain your sight!” and tells him: “you will be his witness to all the world of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.” Conversion is not complete without the Church: Paul needs Ananias, Baptism and the community he once persecuted.
The Gospel gives the risen Lord's command: “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” Paul became the great missionary of that command. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ends today, because Paul, who once divided by violence, became the apostle who wrote: “There is one body and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” No one is beyond conversion, and no division is beyond healing.
Theme: “What am I to do, Lord?”
The persecutor becomes the apostle: grace, the Church, and mission.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”” Jeremiah 1:5
“for I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” 1 Corinthians 15:9
Apply: Thank God for his patience with your past.
“Then the LORD called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!”” 1 Samuel 3:4
“I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Then he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.’” Acts 22:8
Apply: Treat every member of the Church as Christ.
“I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.” Ezekiel 36:25
“And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.’” Acts 22:16
Apply: Be an Ananias to someone this week.
“Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!” Psalm 117:1
“And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” Mark 16:15
Apply: Pray for one Christian community other than your own.
No one is beyond conversion.
Paul's question becomes ours: What am I to do, Lord?
Take-home resolution: Ask Paul's question every morning this week.
Dear friends, today the Church celebrates a conversion. Saul of Tarsus says of himself: I persecuted this Way up to the point of death, binding both men and women and putting them in prison (Acts 22:4).
On the road to Damascus a great light shone and he heard: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? He asked: who are you, Lord? And the answer: I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting (Acts 22:7–8). Jesus does not say my followers; he says me. Christ and his Church are one Body.
Blind, Saul is led into Damascus. There Ananias, a disciple who was afraid of him, calls him brother and says: get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name (Acts 22:16). Conversion happens within the Church, through a brother, through a sacrament.
The persecutor becomes the apostle. The risen Lord says: go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation (Mark 16:15). Paul carried that command across the Roman world.
Today the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ends. Paul, who once divided by violence, wrote about one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Let us pray that every division among Christians may be healed.
No one is beyond conversion. Let us ask Paul's question every day: what am I to do, Lord? Amen.
Every conversion story has two heroes: the one who is converted, and the one who dares to welcome him. Today we look at Ananias.
📖 Jonah 1:1–3
📖 Acts 9:10–14
Apply: Tell God honestly what you fear about someone.
📖 1 Samuel 16:7
📖 Acts 9:15–16
Apply: Pray for someone you have written off.
📖 Genesis 33:4
📖 Acts 9:17–18
Apply: Welcome a newcomer or a returning Catholic as brother or sister.
Without Ananias there might have been no Paul.
God still needs disciples brave enough to say brother.
Take-home resolution: This week I will reach out to one person I have been afraid of or have given up on.
Dear friends, today we celebrate the conversion of Paul. But there is another hero in the story, a quiet disciple in Damascus named Ananias.
The Lord said to him: get up and go to the street called Straight, and look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. Ananias answered honestly: Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints (Acts 9:11, 13). He was afraid, and he had good reason to be.
But the Lord said: go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings (Acts 9:15). God sees what we cannot see. The man everyone feared was the man God had chosen.
So Ananias went, laid his hands on Saul and said: Brother Saul (Acts 9:17). His first word was brother. Something like scales fell from Saul's eyes, and he was baptised.
Who is the Saul in my life? The person I fear, avoid, or have given up on? Perhaps God is sending me, as he sent Ananias, to say: brother, sister. And let us bring that person to the Mass in our prayer today. Amen.
Saul did not change his zeal, his intelligence or his energy. He changed his centre. Conversion is not becoming someone else but becoming who God meant.
📖 Jeremiah 9:23–24
📖 Philippians 3:7–8
Apply: Name one thing you are proud of and offer it to Christ.
📖 Isaiah 43:18–19
📖 2 Corinthians 5:17
Apply: Make a good confession this week.
📖 Ezekiel 36:26–27
📖 Galatians 2:20
Apply: Pray each morning: Lord, live in me today.
Conversion keeps our gifts but changes our centre.
Paul's zeal became love for Christ and for all peoples.
Take-home resolution: Each morning this week I will pray Galatians 2:20: it is Christ who lives in me.
Dear brothers and sisters, what changed when Saul became Paul? Not his intelligence: he remained a brilliant scholar. Not his energy: he remained tireless. Not his zeal: he remained on fire. What changed was the centre of his life.
He writes: whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ (Philippians 3:7). His birth, his learning, his religious record, all the things he had been proud of, he now laid at the feet of Christ.
He discovered that if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new (2 Corinthians 5:17). This is what happens in every good confession: the old passes, the new begins.
And he could finally say: it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20).
God does not want to destroy our gifts but to set them on the right centre. Let us offer him our pride, make a good confession, and pray each day: Lord, live in me. And receive him in the Mass as Paul's whole life. Amen.
Children, Saul hurt Christians, but Jesus spoke to him in a bright light and changed his heart. He became St Paul!
Jesus can change anyone. Let us pray for someone who does not know Jesus.
O God, who taught the whole world through the preaching of the blessed Apostle Paul, draw us, we pray, nearer to you through the example of him whose conversion we celebrate today, and so make us witnesses to your truth in the world. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Church keeps today the moment that turned a persecutor into an apostle. In the first reading Paul tells the story himself, in his own defence, on the steps of the Temple area in Jerusalem. The psalm, the shortest in the Psalter, calls all nations to praise, and Paul himself will quote it. The Gospel gives the command which that meeting on the road placed on his shoulders: “Go into all the world.” The feast also closes the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The key words are way, witness and all.
Setting.
Acts tells this story three times: in Luke's own narrative (9:1–22), and twice in Paul's speeches (22:3–16; 26:9–18). This repetition shows how much the event matters to Luke. Today's text is the first of the two speeches. Paul has just been seized after a disturbance in the Temple area and taken into Roman custody (21:27–36). The tribune allows him to speak, and he addresses the crowd “in the Hebrew language” (21:40), most probably Aramaic. So he tells the story as a Jew speaking to fellow Jews.
Where Acts 9:1–22 is chosen instead, the same events are told from outside. It adds the Lord's word to Ananias: “he is an instrument whom I have chosen” (9:15). It also tells of Paul's three days of blindness and of his first preaching in the synagogues of Damascus.
Structure.
Key words.
Verse by verse.
“I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today.” (22:3)
Paul speaks in the present tense: “I am a Jew”. To sit at someone's feet was the posture of a pupil. Gamaliel is the honoured teacher of the law who counselled moderation at 5:34. Paul does not renounce his people or their God. Later he asks, “has God rejected his people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1).
“I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’” (22:7)
The name is doubled, as when God calls Abraham (Genesis 22:11) and Moses (Exodus 3:4). And the question has a startling word in it: “me”. Saul thinks he is arresting men and women. Jesus says that what is done to them is done to him.
“I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Then he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.’” (22:8)
“Lord” here may first be simply a reverent address. Then the answer comes. The whole of Paul's later theology of the Body of Christ can be found in this short exchange.
“I asked, ‘What am I to do, Lord?’” (22:10)
The second question is the true beginning of conversion. Saul had always known what to do. The answer is not given by the voice from heaven. He must go to the city and be told by someone in the Church.
“A certain Ananias, who was a devout man according to the law and well spoken of by all the Jews living there,” (22:12)
Speaking to this audience, Paul describes Ananias by his Jewish piety (at 9:10 Luke calls him “a disciple”). The one who restores Paul's sight is a Jew faithful to the law. Ananias's greeting is one of the most moving words in Acts: “Brother Saul” (v. 13).
“And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.” (22:16)
The great light does not replace the sacrament. Even Paul is baptized by another. “Calling on his name” is what Christians are known for (9:14), and it echoes Joel's promise (Joel 2:32; Acts 2:21).
How the Church reads it.
The Catechism teaches that all sins are forgiven by Baptism (CCC 1263), and it sees in Paul's words about his calling the Christian confession of Jesus as the Son of God (CCC 442; Galatians 1:15–16). St Augustine loved the words “why are you persecuting me”. The head in heaven cries out for the members on earth, he says, and so Christ and his Church are one (in substance). This is the root of the Church's teaching on the Body of Christ (CCC 787–795). St John Chrysostom, who preached seven homilies in Paul's praise, says that what made Paul was his love for Christ, which he prized above all things (in substance).
Setting.
Psalm 117 is the shortest psalm in the Bible, only two verses. It belongs to the group of Psalms 113–118, the Hallel, sung at the great Jewish feasts and especially at Passover. Many scholars think that the hymn Jesus and his disciples sang after the Last Supper (Mark 14:26) came from this group. The response today comes from the Gospel: “Go out to all the world and tell the good news.”
Structure.
Key words.
Verse by verse.
“Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples!” (117:1)
St Paul quotes this verse at Romans 15:11, in the Greek wording, in his argument that Gentiles and Jews together are to glorify God. So the apostle of the Gentiles found his mission already sung in the Psalter.
“For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord!” (117:2)
“Great” here translates a verb of strength: his love prevails. The two verses say in small what Paul lived: God's faithfulness to Israel is good news for all peoples.
How the Church reads it.
Sung on this feast, the psalm reads as a commentary on Paul's life. The Church reads it as a sign that God's plan always included the nations, and she teaches that all peoples are called to the one People of God (CCC 831; Lumen Gentium 13). It is short enough for anyone to learn by heart.
Setting.
These verses belong to the “longer ending” of Mark (16:9–20). The two oldest complete Greek manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, end the Gospel at 16:8, and many scholars think the longer ending was added by another hand, drawing on the other Gospels and on Acts. But it is very old: St Irenaeus knew it in the second century. The Council of Trent received the books of Scripture entire, “with all their parts”, and the Church reads these verses as inspired Scripture, whoever wrote them.
The Church chooses this reading today because it describes what happened in Paul. Most of what is promised in vv. 17–18 can be found in the Acts of the Apostles, and much of it in Paul's own story.
Structure.
Key words.
Verse by verse.
“And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” (16:15)
This verse gives the feast its Gospel. The man who said “Who are you, Lord?” spent the rest of his life doing this, from Damascus to Rome.
“The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” (16:16)
See the question below. Faith and Baptism go together, just as in Ananias's words to Paul.
“And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues;” (16:17)
Acts shows these things: demons cast out by Paul (16:18), tongues at Ephesus when he lays hands on new believers (19:6).
“they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (16:18)
Paul is bitten by a viper on Malta and “suffered no harm” (Acts 28:5). He then heals the father of Publius by laying his hands on him (Acts 28:8).
How the Church reads it.
The Catechism quotes these verses on Baptism and faith (CCC 977, 1257), and on the Church's ministry to the sick, which the risen Lord confirms through signs done in his name (CCC 1507). It also grounds the whole missionary work of the Church in the Lord's command (CCC 849–851). The Second Vatican Council teaches that the Church is by her very nature missionary (Ad Gentes 2).
Did Saul change his name to Paul at his conversion?
No, this is a common mistake. Acts goes on calling him Saul for several chapters after Damascus, and then says “Saul, also known as Paul” (13:9). Saul is his Hebrew name, and Paul is the Roman name he uses in the Greek-speaking world. Many Jews of the time had two such names. What changed on the road was his life, not his name.
Did those with Paul hear the voice or not? Acts 9:7 and 22:9 seem to differ.
Acts 9:7 says they heard the voice but saw no one. Acts 22:9 says they saw the light but did not hear the voice. Luke wrote both and kept both, so he does not see a contradiction. Some explain that they heard a sound but could not make out the words. In both accounts the point is the same: the others knew something happened, but only Paul received the message.
What about “the one who does not believe will be condemned”? Are those who have never heard lost?
The verse speaks of someone who has truly heard the Gospel and refuses it. The Church teaches that faith and Baptism are necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed (CCC 161, 1257), and also that those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel, but seek God with a sincere heart and try to do his will, may attain eternal salvation (CCC 847; Lumen Gentium 16). The mission remains urgent, because it brings people the joy of knowing Christ.
Should Christians handle snakes as a test of faith?
No. The verse promises protection to messengers in danger, as with Paul at Malta. It does not command anyone to seek danger. Jesus refused to throw himself from the Temple, saying, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7).
In the Roman Rite today's feast has its Gloria, and it closes the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The General Roman Calendar keeps no other saint's conversion as a feast. The closing of the week on this day is fitting. Paul asked the divided Corinthians, “Has Christ been divided?” (1 Corinthians 1:13), and the man who once wanted to bind the Church came to spend his life for her unity. Popes usually close the week with Vespers at the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome. Today every parish may pray for the unity of all Christians, and pray with respect for the Jewish people, Paul's own people, whom he never stopped loving (Romans 9:3–5).