Msgr. Cuong Pham is a father of fathers. The 50-year-old pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Astoria is a mentor to young priests with whom he keeps in close contact and to whom he offers advice and counsel as they navigate their way through life.
As befitting a diocese known as the Diocese of Immigrants, the ordination of new priests at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph in Prospect Heights on Saturday, June 1, was an international celebration centered on three men from such faraway places as Brazil, Colombia, and Nigeria and one man who is Vietnamese American.
Music is a universal language, so when leaders of the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra sought to bring two different cultures together in Bensonhurst, they used music as the vehicle.
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.
