My good friend, Father Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R., died Oct. 3 on the same date as St. Francis of Assisi, after praying a rosary. He was a renowned Christian retreat director, author, preacher, teacher, counselor and guide to many. He was perhaps the most well-known priest in the U.S. It was my privilege to call him co-founder of Good Counsel Homes as well as my spiritual director and friend.
When you think about it, faith and trust go hand in hand. People believe in the power of prayer because they believe they see results. They pray for strength to get through a challenge, and then they find the strength to overcome that obstacle.
This year marks a big “birthday” for me and a group of classmates. Over the years, we have been having class reunions across the globe, wherever we are scattered. Many of us went to school together from first to 12th grade at the Maryknoll Sisters School in Hong Kong.
It’s sometimes hard to tell at this time of year, but there is more going on at Notre Dame than football. Spirited debate continues about the university’s Catholic identity and what that means for everything from curriculum and faculty hiring to the campus’ master plan.
Feelings about two important news stories of the past few weeks can be described with one word, but it’s not the word most people are using.
When I was a kid, “sharing” meant splitting your lunch sandwich with a friend or sharing a book or toy. Today, “sharing” usually means writing a status update on Facebook, posting an Instagram photo or talking via Snapchat.
Pope Francis has called a special session of the Synod of Bishops, which will meet from Oct. 5-19 and prepare the agenda for the ordinary session of the Synod that is scheduled for the fall of 2015; both sessions will focus on the family.
Catholics in the U.S. may soon know North Dakota as the cutting edge of Catholic higher education reform.
Research based on a survey of 3,000 young people by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton shows that most youth believe in a moral and benevolent God who wants us to be good, watches over us and solves our problems in our quest for personal happiness… as the authors termed, a “Divine Butler.”
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Krakow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called and demanded to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate.
