After the Valentine’s Day shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. in Parkland, Fla., left 18 people dead and provided another grim reminder that school shootings are no longer rare, Msgr. McClancy Memorial H.S., East Elmhurst, decided to take security into its own hands by installing bulletproof doors.
Last week, the readings illustrated God’s never-ending work of bringing light into darkness. Today, we look to a different element born at creation — water.
During and after the grim martial law period in the early 1980s, many freedom-minded Poles would greet each other on Jan. 1 with a sardonic wish: “May the new year be better than you know it’s going to be!” As 2020 opens that salutation might well be adopted by Catholics concerned about the future of the church, for more hard news is coming. So let’s get some of that out of the way, preemptively, before considering some resolutions that might help us all deal with the year ahead in faith, hope, and charity.
Something strange and wonderful happened in my life in relation to my previous column. Just before writing that column, I had lunch with some people in service professions.
New Year’s Day was extra special for Tamara Darnley, who celebrated the holiday with her parish “family” at St. Margaret Mary Church in Astoria. To understand the significance of Darnley’s day at the church, one must go back to 1995, when she was a newborn.
CNN has settled a multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuit filed by a student of Covington (Ky.) Catholic H.S. over the cable news network’s coverage of an encounter between the student and a Native American elder during the annual March for Life rally in Washington last January.
As we trudge into 2020, a year that promises to be just as rancorous politically as the year we recently ended, I find myself thinking about forgiveness.
Father Joseph A. Gancila, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn who was serving as parochial vicar at Our Lady of Guadalupe Roman Catholic Church, Dyker Heights, died on Jan. 6. He was 50.
Pope St. John Paul II made history in 1986 when he visited Rome’s synagogue. Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome during the time, called the Holy Father’s visit a “gesture destined to go down in history” and a “true turning point in the policy of the church.”
While Giacomo Casanova is usually remembered as a womanizer, the 1700s Italian adventurer was also a gifted writer and translator. His memoirs are a 12-volume, 3,500-page fascinating portrait of Europe in the 18th century. Many years ago, while reading the book, I was struck by this paragraph:
