IN WRITING “Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II,” one of my secondary intentions was to bury two urban legends: that John Paul II asked me to write his biography and that “Witness to Hope” and its sequel, “The End and the Beginning,” are authorized, or official biographies. Alas, the straightforward refutation of these myths in “Lessons in Hope” hasn’t done the job in some quarters. So let’s try again:
How is God calling you? Start with the advice that Pope Francis offers. It’s where the story of Elijah leaves off: “Listen to God’s still, small voice in your heart where God loves to talk with us and embrace us in His Love.”
by Msgr. Steven Ferrari
“LET THE DEAD bury their dead” (Matthew 8:22), declared Our Lord Jesus when confronted by a would-be disciple. Yet, one of the corporal works of mercy in our Christian tradition demands that we, the “living” Body of Christ, bury our deceased sisters and brothers with dignity and honor.
IN THE WEEK ahead, the Catholic Church in the United States is celebrating National Vocation Awareness Week. It is a celebration that is dedicated to promoting vocations to priesthood, religious life, the permanent diaconate and married life through prayer and education.
ONE HUNDRED years ago, on Nov. 7, 1917, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party expropriated the chaotic Russian people’s revolution that had begun eight months earlier, setting in motion modernity’s first experiment in totalitarianism. The ensuing bloodbath was unprecedented, not only in itself, but also in the vast bloodletting it inspired in wannabe-Lenins over the next six decades.
by Effie Caldarola
THE TALL, GOOD-looking priest had the craggy profile prompting the comment, “He had the map of Ireland written all over his face.”
VERY OFTEN people will ask me why I chose to become a priest. My answer is that God chose me first (John 15:16). Let me share with you a story that helped me in my discernment.
Despite the formulation you’ll hear before and after the October 31 quincentenary of Luther’s 95 theses, there was no single “Reformation” to which the Catholic “Counter-Reformation” was the similarly univocal response. Rather, as Yale historian Carlos Eire shows in his eminently readable and magisterial work, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450 – 1650, there were multiple, contending reformations in play in the first centuries of modernity.
IN THE LATEST debate over “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and family, a fervent defender of the document sniffed at some critics that “the Magisterium doesn’t bow to middle-class lobbies” and cited “Humanae Vitae” as an example of papal tough-mindedness in the face of bourgeois cultural pressures. It was a clever move, rhetorically, and we may hope that it’s right about the magisterial kowtow. I fear it also misses the point – or better, several points.
A FEW YEARS ago I came across a paper I wrote in high school. The topic was, “If you were a pilgrim in ‘The Canterbury Tales,’ what would be said of you?”
