Pope John Paul In Arguing With the Pope, journalist Barbara Harrison wrote about Pope John Paul’s trip to Denver in August of 1993. He was there because it was the eighth World Youth Day. I remember little more than my complete sense of bafflement as I read her piece. How could this man evoke the thunderous adulation and […]
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God as mystery “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?” So they sent word to Joseph, saying, “Your father left these instructions before he died: ‘This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they
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Words are not always a blessing Brother Jerome Leo (RIP )’s understated remark, “Words are not always a blessing,” refers to Saint Benedict’s sixth chapter, The Spirit of Silence. His comment evokes a wry smile of recognition. The Benedictine monk makes us pause at the truth in the fifteen-hundred-year-old words: Let us do what the
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Arsonist of the heart is the last line of a poem by theologian-poet John Shea about the road to Emmaus. Shea’s reflection on the liturgical Gospel reading for Wednesday compels more than a cursory read of the too-familiar Gospel passage about Jesus’ disciples who have decided to get out of town: the road to Emmaus.
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Time belongs to God Time. It’s kind of like breath, or air, or water. We consume them as we do all commodities, thinking we have all we need, all the time in the world. Until suddenly, we don’t. Probably because of serious illness as a small child, I think about my death frequently. Hence my
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Jubilee, hope and a couple of movies Does the phrase read like a series of non sequitors? Jubilee, hope and a couple of movies? Assuming that’s a yes, let’s work backward to integrate them, beginning with “a couple of movies.” Until I met my husband, I had neither heard of nor watched Frank Capra’s classic
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Advent: It’s Wholly Counter-Cultural Reality Quietly competing with the banal and boring commercialism of Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays extended sales is another invitation. But it cannot be heard outside in the streets or while listening to babble. Instead we must silence all the shouts of the marketplace to listen to another voice…more like a
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Used by permission copyright 2020 Jeff Haynie Priests, Prophets and Kings, Really? With the sacrament of baptism, we become priests, prophets and kings. We know this. Or do we? Since baptism happened to most of us a very long ago, reviewing this most precious of sacraments is apt. The word baptism means literally to be
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Recovering our lost integrity “What does God want?” “He wants his creation to recover its lost integrity.” Bishop Barron’s words from his homily for the first Sunday in September, Be Opened, explain everything. While God’s creatures search madly for answers to their despair and sense of meaninglessness, there is just one remedy. Only one method
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Who is the Holy Spirit? In December of 2016, Papal preacher Father Raniero Cantalamassa preached his first Advent sermon on the second “post-concilior” period. With the passage of fifty years since Vatican ll, we’ve ended a period “characterized by problems with reception” of the litiurgical changes and entered, the Franciscan Capuchin theologian declared, “new innovation
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