This week I had a wonderful conversation with Sr. Carino Hodder from the The Dominican Sisters of St. Joseph. I first met Sr. Carino when she participated in one of my online workshops about spiritual abuse in the Catholic Church....
Any call to action, no matter how necessary and well-meaning, will devolve into platitudes unless we have some idea of when and how to put it into practice. In his 2019 motu proprio letter Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis...
What do catechizing the faithful and safeguarding them from abuse have in common? Both, the Church teaches, are responsibilities belonging to the entire Catholic community. In his 2019 letter Vos Estis Lux Mundi (“You Are the Light of the World”),...
LISBON, August 2, 2023 — World Youth Day (WYD) is featuring a new model of catechesis: the Rise Up Encounters. During a press conference held yesterday, Fr. Nuno Amador, the Pastoral Director of WYD 2023, listed these Rise Up Encounters...
I first met Monica in 2017. At the time I was the Director of Religious Education at my parish and I attended a retreat for catechists and DREs that my diocese was hosting. The retreat was called Kerygma Encounter. Monica was...
The Readings for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Please forgive the tardiness of this post. Since it is the fifth Sunday of the month, our regularly scheduled reflection-writers were off the hook, and I dropped the ball in finding...
A few items of interest today. The first is that I was quoted in a Washington Post article yesterday by Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli about the continuing opposition to Pope Francis from within the Church. Published under the headline...
Anyone who has played youth baseball or softball has seen a backstop, a large structure made of chain-link fencing that is erected behind home plate to serve as a barrier in case a wild pitch or errant throw gets past...
November is the month of All Souls. It is a time when we Catholics remember and pray for those who have died. The Church sets aside this month especially for prayer on behalf of the souls of those in Purgatory....
Editor’s note: This is the eighth and final article in “Combat For Contemplative Life,” a series about the responses — inside and outside the cloister — to Pope Francis’s reforms for women religious in contemplative communities. Part one, by Mike...
In Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, he expressed his desire for a renewed missionary impulse throughout the entire Church. Francis called for the Church to become more mission-oriented by making “ordinary pastoral activity on every level more inclusive...
In the United States, a pervasive intellectualism continues its stranglehold on Catholics, thwarting our flourishing. Again and again, we hear the need for “doctrinal clarity,” or about how Pope Francis is “confusing.” Many seem to believe that being clear-minded and...
Popular Posts