As he approached end-stage renal failure, Petar Vukelich had been running out of options. His kidney function was at less than 10%, and in an anguished attempt to find a living donor for him, he and his family were reaching out to his Sunnyside community and beyond.
There is a freshly baked tradition at St. Francis Preparatory School, dating back decades. Chocolate chip cookies, made in-house, are entrenched in the warm tradition the Catholic school works to create, and are given sporadically to the students throughout their four years to commemorate special parts of their academic career.
Almost halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan on May 26, “amazing” was the only word Riya D’Souza-Pereira could come up with to describe the scene around her of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage.
Just after 4 p.m. on May 26, Bishop Robert Brennan looked from halfway down the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan, where he saw a monstrance being carried under a canopy, and a sea of thousands of faithful Catholics from the Archdiocese of New York coming towards him.
Since his beatification less than four years ago, Blessed Carlo Acutis has been an integral part of the prayer life in the Diocese of Brooklyn.
May 24 is the World Day of Prayer for the Church in China, a day announced by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. The pope asked that the day be dedicated to Our Lady Help of Christians which is venerated at the Marian Shrine of Sheshan in Shanghai.
Of all things, it was a car ride that started Zion Charles on the road to a closer commitment to his Catholic faith. It all began when his mother, Jeanneth Lopez, a car service driver, was sent by her dispatcher to St. Bernard of Clairvaux Church in Mill Basin to pick up a parish priest, Father Michael Tedone, and drive him to Kennedy Airport one day last year.
Luis Marquez was teaching at New Jersey City University several years ago when he came across a young woman in tears in the university library. It was a vulnerable time in her life, as she had just learned she was pregnant. At the moment Marquez encountered her, she was thinking about getting an abortion.
For 27 years, people have filled a triangle park in this neighborhood around Memorial Day to honor its namesake, Marine Corps Maj. Eugene McCarthy, who died in Operation Desert Storm. But this year’s observance on Sunday, May 19, took on a new significance — a rededication to include a plaque for McCarthy’s older brother, Dennis.
Throughout World War I, Catholics in the French village of Ban-de-Laveline had no pastor, because their priest was taken hostage by the Germans. But in 1918, a U.S. Army chaplain from Brooklyn came to bury 18 of his men killed in action, and a special bond formed between the village and a new parish in Jackson Heights, Queens.
