Pope Leo: Pray the Rosary for Peace
Pope Leo XIV has asked us as Catholics to pray the Rosary daily for peace throughout the month of October. The Holy Father is not alone in singling out the Rosary as our path to peace – yet we should...
Category: Reflection
A Personal Reminiscence (with an Afterword)
My paternal grandparents owned a home in Rosedale, Queens. Although I was there only a handful of times, I remember their Tudor house in striking detail. I can still feel the fibers of the large, oval braided rug set beneath...
Pope Leo XIV Echoes St. Oscar Romero’s Prophetic Vision
At the ecumenical Commemoration of the Martyrs and Witnesses of the Faith of the 21st century held at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls on September 14, 2025, Pope Leo XIV began the ceremony quoting Oscar Romero: Let...
Hypocrisy and the Dangers of Disillusionment
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” (Mt 23:27-28). The word...
Carlo Acutis: The Eucharist Celebrated, Adored — and Lived!
In the lives of the saints, we always discover luminous paths that can inspire Christians today, especially the young. Carlo Acutis, the Milanese teenager who died in 2006 at the age of fifteen, has already become a beacon for this...
When a Book Belongs to God
Writing a book is a lot of work. And I mean a lot of work. I’ve written two. The first one, The Goodness Within: Reaching Out to Troubled Teens with Love and Compassion, was published by Paulist Press in 2004,...
A Decapitated Church?
Credo in unum Deum! I remember, when I was 10 years old, looking forward to high Mass at 10:00 am on Sunday at Old St. Mary’s Church in San Francisco, when I could sing the Credo along with the choir....
Roger and Out: How the last moments of a saint changed me
Twenty years ago Brother Roger Schutz was murdered during evening prayer in the ecumenical community of Taizé which he founded in a small Burgundy village in 1940. The violent manner of his death shocked France and the Christian world. I...
Faith: Life’s Greatest Gift
What is particularly interesting about faith is that most of what we do every day is based on faith, not so much supernatural faith, which is a theological virtue, but natural faith in the sense of accepting as true something...
On Gaza
This is a loud cry of pain from children whose dignity has been wounded. It cannot and must not leave anyone indifferent. -Pope St. John Paul II …yet how indifferent have we become. The utter tragedy of Gazan families has...
Bread into Stones
A new friend, an accomplished writer whom I met for the first time last weekend, gifted me a copy of The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. I couldn’t put it down. While I’ve studied World War II as history,...
New Martyrs in Africa
A very brief post, but all the more significant for that: Last night in Komanda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an all-night Eucharistic liturgy was interrupted by men armed with guns and machetes, believed to have been members...
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