St. Jean Vianney is a “hard act to follow.” As a parish priest for most of the last 38 years of my priesthood in the Diocese of Brooklyn, I have never spent as many hours as he in the confessional. I may never have ‘run away’ from my parish, but I do take my weekly day off every Friday. I may have gotten better grades in the seminary than he, but I certainly would never compare myself to him in holiness.
So, did I tell you that I got a letter from the pope? Yes, that’s right, the pope. You know, the one in Rome.
This column almost made a liar out of me.
“I’ll write about leisure,” I decided one morning at Mass, snuggled next to a rarely calm child, soaking in the Sunday quiet.
A perfect topic for July’s sultry weather and summer vacations. Gentle reminders that God calls us to rest.
A few years ago, my husband, David, and I were asked to give a retreat to a group in the Peace Movement on the topic “Inner Peace.” If someone had asked me then what inner peace was, my response would have been different from what it is now. I thought peace meant quiet within and without, a total lack of disturbance from anywhere. Now I know no such state exists in this world. What did Jesus really mean when He told us He would give us peace, peace that the world cannot give?
A world without Jesus Christ is a world without hope – unrecognizable, within which our neighborhoods, communities, and our common humanity cannot truly flourish. For our sake and for those we must lead to Christ, we cannot lose sight of who we are, from Whom we came, and to Whom we look to return. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves, and get to work.
Married couples have the awesome task of witnessing God’s faithful love to each other, their children and society. Over the years, a couple can expect to face many issues, both big and small. One issue that is constantly brought up during discussions is the planning of family and space of children.
It was Wednesday, the day the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (R.C.I.A.) meets at my parish. At the start of each session, we engage in a modified Lectio Divina. This past Holy Week, we were reading the Gospel about the two disciples walking to Emmaus. We focused in on how the disciples knew it was Jesus that they had asked “to stay with us.”
While many thousands of teens in the Diocese of Brooklyn will spend a portion of their summer descending upon the famed Queens Center Mall on Queens Boulevard, some will go just a few steps further. A few steps further toward greatness …
My fingers were white-knuckled tight, anxiously gripping the steering wheel as I drove through the hailstorm tornado. Driving eastbound on Interstate 84 through Danbury, Conn., on Tuesday afternoon, May 15, shortly before 5 p.m., I was heading to Southbury, some 15 miles further east.
Our Memorial Day was originally known as “Decoration Day,” an opportunity to decorate many graves of the over 600,000 men who died in the Civil War. It was, by far, our nation’s costliest war in terms of human life, about two percent of the entire population. Today, that would translate into 6.5 million people. Memorial Day honors all who have died in military service to our country since its inception. But why should we, as a nation and as Catholics, remember something so … grim?
