A wretched year came to a sorrowful end when Father Maciej Zięba, OP, died in his native Wrocław, Poland, on Dec. 31. The birthplace of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wrocław was also the home of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who grew up there as Edith Stein when the city was known as Breslau.
When I thought I was alone during a downtime in the church, a man came in and knelt to pray. After praying, he approached me and asked for my blessing. I gave him what he was asking for with the sign of the cross. Then the unexpected happened.
One of Dr. LeRoy Carhart’s “Clinics for Abortion & Reproductive Excellence” — named to yield the Orwellian acronym CARE — is located about a mile away from my parish in Bethesda, Maryland. Earlier this year, 40 Days for Life prayed daily outside Carhart’s abortuary, which specializes in late-term “terminations.” Parishioners from a number of local churches participated in the 40 Days program, hoping to save some innocent lives and to help women in crisis pregnancies find genuine care.
Among the tenured professorial skeptics, few Gospel episodes have been sliced, diced, and tossed to the dissecting room floor as “mythology” more often than the story of the Magi: the “wise men from the East [who] came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him’” (Matthew 2:2).
Joshua Wong is a young Chinese human rights activist, recently sentenced to 13 and a half months in prison on the Orwellian charge of “incitement to knowingly take part in an unauthorized assembly” — meaning, in Chinese Newspeak, urging others to protest peacefully the tyranny now throttling Hong Kong.
On how this project has been turning out, our parish is just fascinated and elated. We want to share this gift with everyone. Come and contemplate the great mystery of the Nativity in Corpus Christi Church in Woodside, where we have a crèche in the right place at the right time.
When the news broke about Pope Francis’ comment on promoting the “civil union” of homosexual couples, many people were asking my opinion on the issue. I admit that, at that time, I was also caught by surprise. I simply shrugged, not being able to say anything. Like everyone else, I needed to know more to substantiate any opinion I would be making.
From 1991 until 2005, Cardinal Camillo Ruini served Pope John Paul II as the papal Vicar for Rome — the man who handled the daily affairs of the diocese of which the Pope was, of course, bishop. Ruini was a creative cardinal-vicar who energized the Diocese of Rome for the New Evangelization — a concept he grasped perhaps better than any other Italian prelate.
How bad a year has it been? Let me not count the ways. Good books can hearten us in 2021 and beyond, though. Herewith, then, some suggestions for Christmastide book-giving.
The juxtaposition of Thanksgiving with the Church’s annual month of prayer for the dead hadn’t previously struck me with force; that it did this year has something to do, I expect, with my late sister-in-law, Linda Bauer Weigel.
