A reflection on the readings for Sunday, September 26, 2021 — The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time The first person I ever spoke to about becoming a Catholic priest was a Methodist minister. I remember it like it was yesterday—I was sitting in a hospital waiting room during my freshman year of college. A friend’s...
“No, it cannot be permitted that laymen who profess to be Catholic should go so far as openly to arrogate to themselves in the columns of a newspaper, the right to denounce, and to find fault, with the greatest license and according to their own good pleasure, with every sort of person, not...
Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. Hence they ought to be “agents in their own redemption”. No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice,...
[Editor’s note: I was surprised when I awoke this morning with an email from Spain, sent to me by the author from a breakfast bar in El Toboso. So enjoy this bonus letter from the Camino. The next episode will appear in the usual Monday slot, “If God wishes it,” as the author...
These days the term “gaslighting,” meaning the emotional manipulation of someone that causes them to question their sense of reality, is frequently used in the context of the news media and interpersonal and organizational dynamics. The word comes from the title of a 1944 movie called Gaslight, which was based on a 1938...
In a recent conversation with a Reformed Christian acquaintance, I was commended for converting to Catholicism even though certain aspects of Catholic teaching are extremely offensive to my preexisting political and moral opinions. I told him that in some sense I converted to Catholicism because of that. I felt that I needed and...
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis discusses how “spiritual worldliness” can creep into the Church. He writes: This worldliness can be fuelled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which...
Have you ever had an “a-ha” moment? Six decades on this earth have taught me two lessons about “a-ha” moments. One: when they arrive, pay attention. Two: when it passes, spend some time looking back and more deeply. This week’s CatholicsRead books drive home these two points splendidly. Lesson #1 A few years...
As the rate of Covid cases and deaths has risen in North America over the past two months due to a surge caused by the Delta variant, different groups of Catholics seem to hold diametrically opposed views of how to respond to the pandemic. Archbishop Valery Vienneau of the Archdiocese of Moncton in New...
This and the next article are coming ‘live’ from the Camino de Santiago during the Compostela Holy Year, as I walk for two weeks across La Mancha to Toledo and possibly as far as Avila. As always on the Camino, I will just have to see how the pilgrim journey works. It was...
This weekend, Pope Francis delivered a video address and Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley delivered the keynote to open a four-day conference in Warsaw, “Our Common Mission of Safeguarding God’s Children.” This conference comes as the Church begins to reckon with the global scope of the scourge of sexual abuse by clergy, where in...
A reflection on the readings for Sunday, September 19, 2021 — The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time “Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from?” (James 4:1) We have little knowledge about the actual happenings in James’s community, but whatever was going on, it compelled James to pose this rhetorical...
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