By Elizabeth Foss
For fifteen minutes or half an hour or even an hour—depending on the day—I’m about as close to heaven as I can get. I have fallen in love with this place and this time. Mostly though, I’ve fallen in love with Christ exposed. I cannot articulate the perceptible change in my spirit since acquiring this habit, and I will claim my right as a Catholic grandmother to just smile and say, “It’s a mystery.”
7/8/19
Reading Time
3
min
By
What treats do you associate with July 4? I enjoy bomb pops and potato sticks.
7/3/19
Reading Time
1
min
By Greg Erlandson
For those who say the church doesn't get it, or the Vatican doesn't get it, I offer up Msgr. John Kennedy.
6/27/19
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3
min
By Fr. Kenneth Doyle
It is true that the position of the Catholic Church against the use of the death penalty has been strengthened because of a textual change in the Catechism of the Catholic Church announced by Pope Francis in August 2018.
6/26/19
Reading Time
2
min
By Fr. Kenneth Doyle
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, quoting St. Augustine from the 5th century, Mary "remained a virgin in conceiving her Son, a virgin in giving birth to him, a virgin in carrying him, a virgin in nursing him at her breast, always a virgin" (No. 510).
6/26/19
Reading Time
2
min
By Fr. James C. Hudgins
There is no storyteller in the New Testament greater than St. Luke.
6/26/19
Reading Time
3
min
By Elizabeth Foss
In an effort to start the summer with a clean slate, I bravely went into the library with a family’s worth of cards and cleared up all our overdue fines.
6/26/19
Reading Time
3
min
By Mary Beth Bonacci
I saw my friend Shelly the other day for the first time in 28 years.
6/26/19
Reading Time
4
min
By Frank Moncher
Although Pope Francis has been extending warnings about the ideology of “gender theory” in its many forms for years now — for example, “Amoris Laetitia,” 2016 — a new document on the subject, “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education” from the Congregation for Catholic Education describes the crisis in greater detail and offers some ideas for addressing it.
6/26/19
Reading Time
4
min
Does purgatory exist?
The Catholic Church does indeed believe in the existence of purgatory. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this:
"All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect" (No. 1030-31).