Ed Wilkinson, a member of The Tablet staff for more than 45 years, is Editor Emeritus. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Cathedral College and studied theology for a year at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Huntington, N.Y. He is an active parishioner at Our Lady of Angels parish in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Below is a Currents News special about Wilkinson as well as an archive of his columns from The Tablet.
Brooklyn-born Bridgeport Bishop Frank Caggiano can say some very profound things in a very simple way. When he told the Diaconate Convocation in Douglaston last weekend that our permanent deacons were on the front line of the New Evangelization, his words sounded nice but they should have made every deacon in the chapel stop and think.
We think of saints as perfect people with halos on their heads. At least that’s the way they are pictured in religious art. But in his new papal exhortation, “Gaudete et Exsultate,” Pope Francis tells us that saints are actually ordinary people, who do ordinary things, day-in and day-out.
A Queens parish that has a very high record of bringing new members into the Church has set its sights even higher and has asked Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio to hold it accountable.
When I was a student at Cathedral College in Douglaston, we celebrated Easter morning with a sunrise prayer service. We would go up to the roof of the then-recently opened college seminary and wait the first light of day.
Holy Week is the most dramatic time of the year when it comes to the Church’s liturgy. During this upcoming week, we celebrate the essence of our faith – the passion, death and Resurrection of Jesus.
Welcome to the weekend of St. Patrick and St. Joseph, two of the most popular saints on the Church calendar! Their feasts have been occasions for much revelry for centuries but each bears even growing significance in our time.
The problem with a weekly newspaper is that interesting stories can break as the paper is going to press and there is no time to get it into that week’s paper. In this new age of cyberspace, however, we can post those stories on our web and Facebook pages to keep our readers up-to-date.
I hope you’ve been watching “On the Block,” my interview show on NET-TV. On it, we travel to different neighborhoods to interview priests about their vocations. We talk about when the call to priesthood first struck them, the process of preparing for priesthood and what their lives were like before they were priests.
Some people give up things for Lent and others take on a spiritual practice.
CNS reports that Brooklyn-born Bishop Frank J. Caggiano of Bridgeport, Conn., asked his Twitter followers what they were giving up for Lent or doing as a spiritual work. He also asked if there was a way they could do both. In another tweet, he said he had decided not to choose between the two but to do both “in the hope that the Lord, in his mercy, will grant me an ever greater personal renewal of faith, hope and charity.”
The Church has been a patron of the arts since before the Middle Ages. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone when a parish centers a new project around artists.
