Recently, I celebrated a birthday. It was not a milestone year, but a happily ordinary one that was a beautiful time to count blessings, celebrate friendships and enjoy the company of loved ones. But, coming up soon is another landmark that I often let slip by without notice.
When I was a kid, my dad told me over and over again, “In life, you’ve got to get comfortable being uncomfortable.” My mom wasn’t much easier. She didn’t allow us to use the word “bored” and even convinced us that it was a swear word.
After suffering child sexual abuse in the 1960s, Maria (name changed for confidentiality) spent the next several decades in the church feeling invisible.
In Pádraig Ó Tuama's book, "In the Shelter," he tells a story about a young woman traveling through Europe in the 1980s. In France, she meets a man and falls in love for the first time. They agree to meet at an embassy in Rome the following week, and on the appointed day, she goes there. But he doesn't show up. She goes the next day, and the next, but to no avail.
The church pronounced the year of St. Joseph as an opportunity to grow closer to her patron saint, as well we should. Yet it’s also a chance to more deeply appreciate the men among us who emulate St. Joseph in so many ways — something I’ve tried to do in reflecting on the recent deaths of two great men I knew personally.
The sense of place and pull to the wild that inspired Nick Ripatrozone’s new book is tucked in his very name. The rip-roaring surname is the name of a mountain town in central Italy, which the 40-year-old writer has visited.
Q. What prayers does one say in silence when you first enter your seat in church? And what about after Communion? I have developed my own but am wondering if I have been missing something for all these years. (Youngstown, Ohio)
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Jesus Christ’s final command to his disciples before ascending into heaven, called the Great Commission, might seem a simple and straightforward order for action. But its use on the Sunday dedicated to the mystery of the blessed Trinity tells us that something more is going on.
The highlight of my Little League career was a two-hitter I threw against the Knights of Columbus, the class of our league in Sharon, Pennsylvania. My team was sponsored by the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE AFL-CIO Local 617).
Corpus Christi
St. Thomas Aquinas was greatly blessed with one of the sharpest minds of any saint in the church. In addition, and more importantly, he was a mystic, a man of deep, deep prayer. His intellect, combined with prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, led him to proclaim in reference to the Eucharist, “O precious and wonderful banquet, that brings us salvation and contains all sweetness! Could anything be of more intrinsic value?"