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.
ON JAN. 13 THE General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops published a “preparatory document” for the 2018 Synod on Young People, Faith and Vocational Discernment.
by Maureen Pratt, “CONFESSION IS GOOD for the soul,” they say. I agree. I also find that it helps us to live well no matter what our station or situation in life, especially if we make it a time to move fully out of our own comfort zones.
ON JAN. 20, Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to publish decrees acknowledging the “heroic virtues” of six men and one woman: two diocesan priests, three priests in religious orders, the foundress of an Italian religious community and a Polish layman.
The suicide of someone you love is shattering. You think that you have lost your mind, that you are crazy, that you won’t be able to live through the next hour, let alone the rest of your life. You are convinced that you’re the only person who has ever felt this way, that no one in the world could ever experience such devastation and be able to survive
DURING THE HEYDAY of the Solidarity movement, a famous Polish slogan had it that, “For Poland to be Poland, 2 + 2 Must Always = 4.” It was a quirky but pointed way of challenging the communist culture of the lie, which befogged public life and warped relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, colleagues and neighbors.
by Richard Doerflinger
THIS PAST PRESIDENTIAL campaign, one of the most bruising and discouraging on record, left many of us dissatisfied with the electoral system and politics in general. As usual, Catholics voted for the winning candidate – despite internal divisions between churchgoers and nonchurchgoers and between white and Hispanic Catholics.
SPEAKING OF PUBLIC policy debates, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that, while everyone had a right to his opinion, no one had a right to his own facts. Something similar might be said about today’s debates in the Church: everyone has a right to their own opinion about the state of Catholicism in 2017, but no one has a right to invent their own Church history.
by Dr. Hosffman Ospino U.S. CATHOLICISM AND the Hispanic experience in the second decade of the 21st century practically go hand in hand. The evidence? Well, just look around. Look at the families attending Mass in our parishes, the children being baptized and receiving first Communion, the faces of young Catholics today, the various rhythms that give life to liturgical music in our parishes, among other signs.
William Christopher passed away on Dec. 31, 2016, but he became a weekly presence in people’s living rooms during the 1970s and ’80s playing Army chaplain Father Francis John Patrick Mulcahy on the TV series “MASH.”
