I AM SETTLING into my cramped seat in a small aircraft when I smell it: the nauseating odor of fried food in close quarters. I turn, ready to glare, when I see that the culprit, a middle-aged man, is bowed in prayer over his meal with his hands folded, eyes closed.
We are still in the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy, which Pope Francis proclaimed from Dec. 8, 2015, until Nov. 20, 2016. Before you know it, Nov. 20 will be here and we will be asking ourselves: “Just what did I do in the Year of Mercy?”
You’d think presidential candidates would have learned that shooting from the lip in front of deep-pocket donors is asking for trouble.
Three renditions of St. Francis of Assisi by AnnaMarie Prono. Watercolor and ink were used to create the likenesses at left and above, while the depiction of the saint holding a cross and dove is acrylic on wood.
Recent remarks by the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, have fueled speculation about a possible exchange of diplomatic representation between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
“Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded,” Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical on the environment “Laudato Si’.”
LIKE SHELBY FOOTE’S three-volume masterpiece, “The Civil War: A Narrative,” Francis Parkman’s seven-volume colossus, “France and England in North America,” is worth reading and re-reading for its literary elegance as well as its historical insight.
POPE FRANCIS ADDRESSED the question of why he called for a Jubilee Year of Mercy in his homily for First Vespers for Divine Mercy Sunday:
Québec, a flourishing Catholic region for centuries, is now Catholicism’s empty quarter in the western hemisphere. There is no more religiously arid place between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego; there may be no more religiously arid place on the planet. And it all happened in the blink of an eye.
Cardinal Robert Sarah caused a rumpus this summer by proposing that the Catholic Church return to the practice of priest and people praying in the same direction during the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
