Lent is a transition, a journey of return and repentance. But it is not the final destination. Traditionally, as the ashes are placed on our heads, we are told, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This is a reminder of the death of our bodies, but we also...
Dad had always wished to be buried in his ancestral grave. His great-grandparents and his parents are buried there. When he passed away in January 2019, he was buried in the parish cemetery for many reasons. The graves at the parish cemetery are not ancestral graves. Every three years, the remains of those...
In our desire for justice, to be more holy, or to bring about the conversion of others, how do we respond when the results we desire are slow in coming? Are we patient, or do we act recklessly and hope for immediate results? Often when we think of patience, we think of how...
Book review of Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States by Massimo Faggioli. Massimo Faggioli’s new book Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States, published by Bayard Press on the day of Biden’s inauguration, is the first book-length treatment of the new US President’s life and worldview in the context of...
I’ve often thought about the benefits of a seminary program where aspiring priests would be required to spend a semester helping a family get ready for Sunday Mass every week. If nothing else, the experience would hopefully help our clergy grow in charity, compassion, and understanding of the efforts taken by the laity...
A reflection on the Sunday readings for February 14, 2021 — the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Since the beginning of this year, I have had to self-quarantine twice for seven days. And then, in order to leave the quarantine, I had to be tested for COVID-19 at the end of the seven days....
“[C]larity is not served by certain abstract subdivisions of the Church’s social doctrine, which apply categories to Papal social teaching that are extraneous to it. It is not a case of two typologies of social doctrine, one pre-conciliar and one post-conciliar, differing from one another: on the contrary, there is a single teaching, consistent...
In a 1969 German radio broadcast, Father Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, predicted where he believed the Church was headed. Ratzinger envisioned that the Church of the future generations would lose political power and social acceptance. He said: “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a...
In December, in an apostolic letter entitled Patris Corde (With a Father’s Heart), Pope Francis proclaimed a year of devotion to St. Joseph. We don’t know much about Joseph. His wife and adopted son, rightfully so, get most of the attention. Nonetheless, St. Joseph is a mysterious, and yet also compelling figure, known...
“The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.” Pope Francis said these words in his famous September 2013 interview with his fellow Jesuit, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, but in the more...
On February 1st, the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal published an article by Gunnar Gundersen, entitled “The Dead End of Counter-Cultural Catholicism.” I highly recommend reading the piece in full, in which Gundersen accurately diagnoses the problems caused by “countercultural Catholicism.” When Catholics say we are called to be “countercultural,” they...
The image above, from a study by the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Dr. Gina A. Zurlo, co-director of Center for the Study of Global Christianity, drew from a variety of sources (including the World Christian Database, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations) to create a one-hundred person village model representing the...
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