The Church has had martyrs since her earliest days, and will have them unto the end of time. A number of prophecies attest that the number of martyrs towards the end will exceed those of all other centuries, and our times attest to that. But today, we look way...
After Jesus was baptized, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan (Mk. 1:12).
On Ash Wednesday we began the observance of the holy season of Lent with the imposition of blessed ashes, an external sign of our interior resolve...
The Chair of Saint Peter, is a comforting one, a symbol of the 'pillar and bulwark' of the truth, which is the Church, signifying by synecdoche the office of the papacy, instituted by Christ, as recounted in today's Gospel from the sixteenth chapter of Saint Matthew:
Simon Peter replied, "You...
EUCHARISTIC CELEBRATION WITH THE NEW CARDINALS
HOMILY OF JOHN PAUL II
Thursday, 22 February 2001
Feast of Saint Peter's Chair
1. "'Who do you say that I am?'. Simon Peter replied, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God'" (Mt 16: 15-16).
This conversation between Christ and his disciples, which we have just heard again, is...
Not many in the hierarchy write like Saint Peter Damian (+1072) anymore, whose direct and blunt condemnation of the unnatural sexual sins of the clergy he condemns in his vivid Book of Gomorrah, as told in summary form by Carl Sundell.
Then again, not many today in the hierarchy write...
On this day in 1920, February 20th, nine-year old Jacinta Marto died after great suffering, as she lay alone in a hospital bed. She had endured for weeks, including a vain attempt to alleviate her symptoms by removing two of her ribs, without proper anesthetic. The same illness had...
Nothing is more doomed to failure than a layperson trying to tell the clergy what they ought to do. Well, perhaps if such a person held several academic degrees in Theology or Mariology, or bore visible stigmata, they might garner a momentâs interest. Otherwise, in the best-case scenario, they...
Things are, shall we say, fractious in the Church, when an Irish priest likens receiving Communion on the tongue to âfeeding animalsâ, while the bishop of Charlotte forbids altar rails and discourages kneeling. Latin and chant are almost non-existent outside a few refuges. Liturgical aberrations, if not abuses, great...
BENEDICT XVI
GENERAL AUDIENCE
Paul VI Audience Hall
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Ash Wednesday
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
On this day, marked by the austere symbol of ashes, we enter the Season of Lent, beginning a spiritual journey that prepares us for celebrating worthily the Easter Mysteries. The blessed ashes imposed upon our forehead are a...
The Seven Founders of the Servite Order commemorate the group of merchants who in 1233 left everything to follow Christ, with a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, particularly in her own union in the Passion of her Son under the title of Our Lady of Sorrows. They each...
(Contributor Tadgh Quil-Manley offers a reflection here on distributism, an economic philosophy derived by Chesterton, Belloc and others from Leo XIII's landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Readers, myself included, may take some pause over the notion herein of a 'universal basic income', but much depends on how one understands and...
Nietzsche either warned or advocated - depending on your point of view - the transvaluation of all values, which is to say, the inversion of the moral law. After all, from his perspective, after the 'death of God', there was no moral law, and never has been. Christianity was...
On this fourteenth of February, in the universal calendar we celebrate the ninth-century monks and missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius, patrons of Europe, who translated the Liturgy into Slavonic, with Cyril constructing the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets for this purpose. This vernacular allowed for the conversion of untold thousands...
The words themselves are chilling: 'Pre-death approval by the coroner':
And on it goes into the abyss:
"17: The Chief Coroner may allow the removal of organs or tissue after the death of a person notwithstanding that death has not yet occurred if: (a) in the opinion of a physician the...
I'd like to say publicly that the students here at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College, under the direction of our staff and faculty, did a wonderful, even a quasi-miraculous, job with the musical Anastasia - the vivid acting, the coordinated harmonized singing, the choreography (from waltz to ballet),...
PILGRIMAGE
OF HIS HOLINESS JOHN PAUL II
TO LOURDES ON THE OCCASION OF 150TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE PROMULGATION OF THE DOGMA
OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
HOMILY OF THE HOLY FATHER JOHN PAUL II
Prairie de la Ribère
Sunday, 15 August 2004
1. "Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou". The words which Mary spoke to Bernadette on 25 March 1858 have...
Our Lady of Lourdes is one of the few visions of the Virgin Mary to be placed in the public Liturgical calendar of the universal Church, along with her appearances at Fatima and Guadalupe. All three have in common that the visionaries to whom Our Lady manifested herself were...
Saint Scholastica (+543) was the sister - some sources say the twin - of Saint Benedict. Like her brother, she forsook everything to follow Christ, setting up a community of virgins at the foot of her brother's monastery at Monte Cassino, where she too followed the path of orans...
Saint Apollonia (+249) was a virgin martyr put to death under the reign of Philip the Arab, just before the far more violent persecution under his successor, Decius. She was known as a 'deaconess', which was not an ordained order, for the Greek term diakonos simply means a 'minister',...
A woman in Canada was recently euthanized against her will, making a macabre mockery of the 'free choice' aspect of this evil. God rest her soul, but she is the canary in the proverbial coal mine, a 'hard' case that will make the future 'cases' all the easier. After...
On this day in 1947, February 8th, Sister Josephine Bakhita completed the long and eventful journey of her life. Born around 1869 - she was never quite sure the precise date or year - her childhood was spent happy and fulfilled growing up in the region of Darfur, Sudan,...
