by Dr. Hosffman Ospino,
FOUR YEARS HAVE passed since the Holy Spirit inspired the election of the first Latino pope: Pope Francis. Wait. Did you say Latino or Latin American? Well, it depends on where you draw the line. I would argue that it is fine to speak of Pope Francis as a Latino pope.
FOR LENT 2016, I adopted a new Forty Days discipline in addition to intensified prayer, daily almsgiving and letting my liver have its annual vacation: I quit sports talk radio, cold turkey.
HAVE YOU FOUND yourself wondering if Jesus loves you? Think you don’t deserve this love? If you want these doubts dispelled, try praying the Stations of the Cross.
THE BEST LENT OF my life involved getting up every day at 5:30 a.m., hiking for miles through ankle-twisting, cobblestoned city streets, dodging drivers for whom traffic laws were traffic suggestions, avoiding the chaos of transit strikes and other civic disturbances, and battling bureaucracies civil and ecclesiastical – all while 3,500 miles from home sweet home.
by Maureen Pratt FOR CATHOLICS AND other Christians who observe meatless Fridays, fish figure prominently, and this makes me (pardon the pun) happy as a clam. But I understand that some people are not as enthusiastic as I am about fish. The smell might be off-putting, the texture “slimy.”
We live in a culture of greed where grasping for wealth and security can mask the emptiness we feel. Perhaps the Gospel story of Lazarus and the rich man would make a challenging daily reflection during Lent.
I think liberal democracy is in grave danger… And yet I think there are things that can and must be said for the “liberal world order” and for liberal democracy.
IN APRIL 2016, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, England, issued a pastoral letter on the interpretation of “Amoris Laetitia” (the pope’s apostolic exhortation on marriage) and re-affirmed the Church’s long-settled teaching: The divorced and civilly remarried, while members of the Christian community, are not living in full communion with that community, and should not present themselves for Holy Communion until their manner of life changes or their irregular marriage has been regularized under Church law.
ON JAN. 9, 2017, I was at the Mexican American Catholic College in San Antonio, Texas, speaking to a group of second-year theology students from Saint Meinrad Seminary in Indiana.
Second in a series, EARLY IN HIS book “Our One Great Act of Fidelity: Waiting for Christ in the Eucharist” (New York: Doubleday, 2011), Ronald Rolheiser stresses that the Eucharist is a great mystery that we will never completely understand. He confesses that in his studies he took excellent courses on the Eucharist, but in the end he realized that he did not understand the Eucharist.
