The current coronavirus crisis isn’t keeping parishioners at Our Lady of Grace Church from doing God’s work.
Month: April 2020
Advocates Ensuring Kids’ Catholic Education in COVID-19 Era
Futures in Education has started an emergency relief fund to offer financial help for unemployed parents who suddenly find themselves struggling to pay their child’s tuition.
Pope Composes Prayers for End of Pandemic to Be Recited After Rosary
Pope Francis asked Catholics to make a special effort in May to pray the rosary, knowing that by doing so they will be united with believers around the world asking for Mary’s intercession in stopping the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump Says He’s ‘Best President in History of the Church’ in Call With Catholic Leaders
President Donald Trump identified himself as the “best [president] in the history of the Catholic Church” in a conference call for Catholic leaders and educators April 25, where he warned that issues at stake in the upcoming presidential election, particularly on abortion and religious liberty, “have never been more important for the Church.”
Grieving Family of Father Jorge Ortiz-Garay, Brooklyn Priest Who Died of COVID-19, Say They Can’t Get His Body Home to Mexico
“If not for our faith, I don’t know how we could have been able to go through the last weeks,” Socorro Ortiz-Garay told The Tablet from Mexico during a recent interview. Socorro is the eldest sibling of Father Jorge Ortiz-Garay, the pastor of St. Brigid’s parish in Brooklyn, who died March 27 at the age of 49 due to complications from COVID-19.
Catholic Agencies Sign Climate Compact to Help Combat Climate Change
More than 80 NGOs, including major Catholic service organizations, have entered into a Climate Compact pledging a “concerted, unified, and urgent action to address climate change,” through a full-scale review of their operations.
In Anticipation of The Eucharist
One of my earliest memories is watching Mass on TV with my Nonna. I would patiently await the time during the Mass when she would walk over to her china closet and tear off a piece of an Oplatki Christmas Wafer she kept inside.
On the Road to Emmaus
When we read the accounts of the Lord Jesus’ appearances in his resurrected Body, we find some curious things. First, people that know him well, those for whom he taught and with whom he lived and loved, somehow don’t recognize him at first and second, these people who encounter the Risen Lord Jesus only recognize him at the Lord’s initiative.
Rediscovering Baptism in Plague Time
On April 29, 1951, Father Thomas Love, S.J., baptized me in the Church of Sts. Philip and James, near Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Family legend has it that I raised such a furor during the proceedings that my cousin Judy hid in a confessional.
A Special Presence
I am having a really interesting experience as I re-read sections of Robert Johann’s “Building the Human” (New York Herder and Herder, 1968, pp. 192), a book I first read about 50 years ago. Re-reading Johann’s reflections on the mystery of a person, I find him expressing views about the meaning of a person that I have come not only to embrace but to believe deeply.