When Greeks came to Jerusalem and asked to speak with Jesus, this Sunday’s gospel tells us, he recognized that the time of his Passion had arrived, that his hour had come. At a town-hall style event in Cleveland Wednesday, President Obama said he wished he had recognized on his first day in office that the hour was at hand to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

"I didn't because at that time we had a bipartisan agreement that it should be closed," said Obama. "I thought that we had a consensus there that we could do it [in a deliberate] fashion.” Instead, he continued, "The politics got tough, and people got scared by the rhetoric around it. ... The path of least resistance was to leave it open, even though it's not who we are as a country."

Homily hint: Locking people up and throwing the key away does not get at the root causes of division and violence. Our cities and our nation will only know peace when we reach across the divide and find our common humanity. Reach out to someone different from you and build a bridge of understanding.

For more on the Guantanamo Bay prison, see: Obama: I should've "closed Guantanamo on the first day"