By Ann M. Augherton
Thanks, Mike, for all the great years doing what we both have loved for so long, telling the story of the diocese. You must know how very glad I am that we’ve had this time together.
3/6/20
Reading Time
3
min
By Stacy Rausch
Catholic artist Rebecca Pohlmeier shares an update with readers on the success of her growing business illustrating saints.
3/4/20
Reading Time
2
min
By Jack Peterson
The church takes us for a walk up a high mountain on the second Sunday of Lent to join Jesus, Peter, James and John on a prayer adventure. It was the last leg of a six-day journey. I have often considered in meditation that Jesus had a series of very warm, personal conversations with the three Apostles on this journey, especially as they climbed Mount Tabor, clarifying questions, convincing them of his deep care, encouraging them for the sacrifices that they were making for his sake and gently inviting them to deeper conversion of heart. Jesus had prepared these future church leaders for what would happen after they reached the summit.
3/4/20
Reading Time
3
min
By Colette Lienhard
Following his recent publication of “Celebrating a Merry Catholic Christmas,” Father William P. Saunders, pastor of Our Lady of Hope Church in Potomac Falls and episcopal vicar for faith formation and director of the Office of Catechetics, just released his newest publication, “Celebrating a Holy Catholic Easter.” Best known for his Straight Answers columns in the Catholic Herald that ran for decades, later published as a two-book set of answers to questions about the Catholic faith, Father Saunders does more than just provide insight to the faith.
3/4/20
Reading Time
3
min
By Steve Weidenkopf
People have used events in the church’s history to attack her credibility for centuries. Modernity, with its emphasis on science and technology, turns frequently to the story of Galileo in presenting the belief that science and faith are incompatible. False narratives concerning the Galileo Affair are rampant. The Enlightenment thinker Voltaire (1694–1778) viewed the Italian scientist as a celebrity, martyred by the evil church on the altar of intellectual freedom.
3/4/20
Reading Time
4
min
If you want to become a more grateful person — or at least recognize how lacking in gratitude you are — it helps to wake up one morning to an email requesting you to speak to a parish group on “the power of gratitude in the Christian life.”
3/4/20
Reading Time
3
min
By Russell Shaw
Obituaries of Virgil C. Dechant, former Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus who died peacefully Feb. 16 at his home in Leawood, Kan., were factually correct but superficial. Dechant was a much larger man, with far more influence on the church, than the mere listing of dates, offices held, and honors bestowed can suggest.
2/28/20
Reading Time
3
min
By Fr. Joseph Rampino
This first Sunday of Lent is the temptation of Jesus in the desert, a powerful scene that shows us both the Lord’s humility and the truth of how we are to resist temptation.
2/26/20
Reading Time
3
min
By Elizabeth Foss
What if this Lent, this were the goal? To live is Christ.
2/24/20
Reading Time
3
min
Cast aside
The poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is one of those literary classics you’ve heard quoted time and again without even knowing it. Its most famous line, “Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” images a sailor dying of thirst, surrounded only by saltwater. Saltwater, of course, cannot quench thirst. Drinking enough of it causes death by dehydration. Some refugees, adrift on an open sea and dying of thirst, have actually given into the maddening temptation, and drank seawater to their own death. Sometimes that which looks like sweet relief is, in cold reality, lethal.