by Father William R. Dulaney Here’s an important question for engaged couples: As you’re planning your wedding, why not consider having a beautiful nuptial Mass or wedding ceremony in your parish church, making God a part of your special day and inviting Him to be a part of your life together? As much a part […]
Sunday Scriptures
God’s Kingdom Has Room For All of Us
by Father Thomas Catania “Get off my property!” I can remember to this day the little boy next door to me, only a few years younger than I was, demanding that I step back the few inches that he saw distinguishing his “territory” from mine. We’d had an argument, and he was not about to […]
Draw Your Identity from Jesus
by Father Thomas Catania FAMOUS FOR SAYING, among other things, that “anyone who dislikes children and dogs can’t be all bad,” W.C. Fields has gone down in our dark comic tradition as one of the great curmudgeons; we may forgive that acid remark, but that is only because we won’t take it altogether seriously. Not […]
Presence Informs the Practice
by Father Thomas Catania To this day, I can hear him roaring, “Oh, GAD, NO!!” He, my first-year English teacher, left no doubt in your mind when you had blundered into some unimaginable (to him) gaffe. Subtle he was not, but pointed he was. A no was a no, and — rarely — a yes […]
A World of the Deaf and Mute
by Father Thomas Catania Hearing aids, however necessary and however much they have become all but imperceptible, have not, unlike eyewear, become fashion statements. It is a long while since those “ear trumpets” represented in 18th-century paintings have formed part of our apparatus, but even the little buds that, in teenagers, betoken “I’m tuned into […]
What Went Wrong?
by Father Thomas Catania THE RECIPE CAME straight out of Julia Child; every last detail of it was followed meticulously, but here on the table, what should have been a mouthwatering sole a la Florentine bears an uncanny resemblance to a fish tank whose inhabitants and warranty have both expired in the past 24 hours. It wasn’t […]
Everyone Has a Role in The Celebration of Mass
by Father John P. Cush TODAY IN OUR proclamation of sacred Scripture, we conclude this brief, five-week excursus into John’s Gospel. As we’ve mentioned, the Gospel readings in the Year B liturgical cycle are normally taken from the Evangelist Mark, but for the summer, we take a break and go and delve into the eucharistically […]
The Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharist
by Father John P. Cush WE HAVE BEEN reading over the past four weeks from the Evangelist John’s sixth chapter, the Bread of Life Discourse. In light of these readings, all of which are ultimately about the Eucharist, we have been discussing the context of this section of the Johannine Gospel, as well as […]
Believe in What You Receive — The Real Presence in the Eucharist
by Father John P. Cush We have been reading as the Gospel at Mass over the past few Sundays from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, the Bread of Life Discourse. In these columns, we have begun a study of these Johannine inserts into the Marcan Gospel cycle and, to date, we have firmly placed […]
Delving Deeper in the Faith and Applying It to Daily Life
WHEN WE LEFT off last week, we were looking at this extended passage from which we are reading over the next several weeks, namely the Bread of Life Discourse in the fourth Gospel. The Evangelist, John, places this selection firmly in the middle of the first part of his Gospel, what most scripture scholars call […]