Young people from 155 countries had a long journey to prepare for this global event of the church. Many were young adults committed to ministry who, inspired by other pilgrims, renewed their zeal for sharing God's love and mercy.
I am fond of saying that home should be a soft place to land. I believe it to the core of my being. I have always wanted to parent in such a way that my children know that when they walk through our doors they will find refuge. We’ll challenge them to live lives of virtue, but we’ll also be the place where they can ask honest questions, sort things out, and admit mistakes knowing that love is always unconditional.
The "abortion rights" movement now insists that abortion itself has more fundamental rights than women and children do.
No one said fatherhood would be easy. Every family is unique, but we all desperately need to renew our vision. I want to look back on these decades of parenting knowing that there was a faith-filled method to the madness, that my wife and I intentionally led rather than reacted or merely survived.
I suppose that a theological purist might say that there is no definitive church position on the ultimate fate of a miscarried child.
Out on the Sea of Galilee, the time for catching fish is at night.
For my son's 12th birthday, I took him to New York City, where we stayed in a Brooklyn rectory and did all the things a 12-year-old boy would naturally want to do in such a big place.
During the Eucharistic prayer, our diocese prays by name both for our current bishop and also for our retired bishop. Yet I have never heard our pope emeritus (Pope Benedict) mentioned during the Eucharistic prayer.
Today’s readings invite us to ponder a critical, yet occasionally uncomfortable element of our Catholic faith — the prophetic role of Christ and his disciples.
Is Jesus speaking to me?
Just before this passage in the Gospel of St. Luke, we find Jesus calling his disciples to himself, then, from among them, calling the Twelve Apostles. We pick up the story this Sunday when those disciples and apostles arrive with Jesus “on a stretch of level ground” where “… a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon ...” have come to meet Jesus. To complete the context of the passage we hear this Sunday it is helpful to notice two verses which are left out. Those verses say that the great crowd “… came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured. Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.”