Our twin nephews made their First Communion this weekend, and I was so excited for them.

Let’s get started and lend our voices to this symphony through our charity to the sick and the elderly on the World Day of the Sick!

If we neglect our “heart of hearts,” our inmost self, our soul – where flashes the spark of divine love, that point of encounter between ourselves and God, then our efforts to improve how we look and how we function will largely be in vain.

Most Americans do want a solution to the perceived chaos on our borders. The U.S. bishops following Catholic social teaching do recognize that national sovereignty affords nations’ the right to control their borders. We have never advocated for “open borders” or that “bad actors” should be admitted indiscriminately or that wrong doers of any type be free to roam our streets and endanger our citizens.

The only one who can keep us from heaven is ourselves.

As part of swift and sweeping changes to immigration policy, the Trump administration is aiming to end or severely curtail two forms of immigration status that have been granted to hundreds of thousands escaping war, disaster, violence and humanitarian crises — Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole.

These last written words from St. Thomas More offered a timely reminder to have courage and lean on Christ in the face of struggles new and old for his strength “is made perfect in weakness.”

The willful participation of physicians and other medical professionals in the practice of abortion flatly contradicts the Hippocratic Oath — long the moral framework for sound medical practice — in its original form.

Married life gives us a glimpse of the eternal union of God and his church and calls each spouse to build the other up for everlasting life in heaven.

A faithful Catholic may indeed receive holy Communion twice in one day — but the second reception must be within the context of a Mass.