What Father Sherbrooke has done at St. Patrick’s in London in his 17 years as its pastor is little short of miraculous.
The Catholic Difference
Rediscovering baptism in plague time
Let me urge you again: make this time of plague and quarantine the occasion to dig the “Catholic paper” out of your records, find your baptismal certificate, and learn the date of your baptism. And then, with appropriate celebration, ponder just what happened to you that day.
Flannery O’Connor and friends, revisited
At the end, that is the deepest impression her letters leave: here is a woman of extraordinary courage whose configuration of her life to the Cross was a source of both personal strength and literary genius.
Christmas, freedom and obedience
The Christmas story is a lengthy meditation on a counterintuitive but essential truth: true freedom, genuine liberation, comes through freely chosen obedience to God’s purposes.
The well-fought fight
Alas, like many other hymns, “For All the Saints” is an endangered species today, gutted by parish music directors and pastors who commit the grave sin of not singing a hymn in its entirety — or worse, who bowdlerize the lyrics to coddle the sensibilities of the Church of Nice.
The ideological hijacking of Pope St. John XXIII
The dying parts of the Church are those still misreading John XXIII.
What kind of “believers”?
Catholicism is dying in the German-speaking world, not because the Gospel has been proclaimed and found incredible or hard, but because it hasn’t been proclaimed with joy, confidence, and zeal.
As “The League” begins its centennial season….
Gino Marchetti of the old Baltimore Colts was a big man in several ways.
Heroism and priesthood, Dachau and Amazonia
The heroes of Dachau’s priest-barracks found a way to keep sacramental life alive, in full fidelity to the Church’s tradition. Is that impossible in Amazonia? Or elsewhere?
The Ratzinger Diagnosis
The Pope Emeritus did the Church a service by offering a diagnosis of the abuse crisis that should be taken seriously by anyone serious about healing the wounds inflicted on the Body of Christ by the abuse of Holy Orders for wicked, self-indulgent purposes.
Cleansed and conformed to God’s will
We must all intensify prayer and penance. We should all be inviting to church those who have left out of boredom, anger, confusion, or disgust.
A century after the Armistice
The Great War destroyed Western confidence in traditional authorities and bred a deep skepticism of, and even contempt for, “the great and the good” that remains a factor in our public life.