A sub-category of News.
By the time I was nearing high school graduation in the 1970s, my friend Jimmy Patridge, a young Marine, had already returned from Vietnam—missing both of his legs. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was in full swing, abortion had been legalized, and the Church seemed as confused as I was. At the same time,…
I was nearly ten years old when Pope St. John Paul II died. I remember watching his funeral on the tiny television in the corner of our kitchen. Being so young, I had no significant grasp of who the Polish pope was—and never could have imagined that, some years later, my Polish wife and I…
May the Lord in His infinite mercy look upon the prayers, tears and sacrifices of all true Catholics who love our Mother Church, who in these days humbly and confidently implore the infinite Mercy of God to grant us a new Pope, who burning with the zeal for the glory of Christ and the salvation…
May the Lord in His infinite mercy look upon the prayers, tears and sacrifices of all true Catholics who love our Mother Church, who in these days humbly and confidently implore the infinite Mercy of God to grant us a new Pope, who burning with the zeal for the glory of Christ and the salvation…
The Gospels do not tell us precisely where the apostles went after the crucifixion, but there is some evidence that they retired to the upper room where the Last Supper had taken place. Perhaps, as we are told they did later, they locked the doors out of fear. I have been trying to do a…
I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore and a man came up to me to say, “Sorry for the loss of the blessed father.” I presume that he was not Catholic but felt because I was in a priest’s uniform that it was an appropriate gesture. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, even though…
In the post-Conciliar calendar this is the “Second Sunday of Easter”. In the 1962 Missale Romanum and in previous editions this Sunday is labelled: Dominica in Albis in Octava Paschae… Sunday in white garments on the Octave of Easter. In traditional parlance today is called “Low Sunday” or sometimes “Thomas Sunday” because of the Gospel…
I am looking at a couple of random lines lifted from a bleak little poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., written at a sad time near the end of a short and, by his own reckoning, unfulfilled life. He was quite mistaken about that, by the way. His last words, whispered aloud about how happy…
De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est. This Latin phrase means “Of the dead nothing but good should be said.” Its origins, however, are not Latin, but Greek. It is attributed to Chilon of Sparta, whose Greek original is τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν. This is slightly different than the Latin translation, as the Greek says…
The way God set up the Church is one Pope, a lot more Bishops, and exponentially more laymen. This should tell us something about our role in the Church. Clearly, the “institutional” Church is not our role, either to be in it or be overly concerned with it. A few years ago, I wrote a…
