Monday, March 9, 2026

Weekly Insight

One Simple Thing Families Can do to Help Restore Unity in Our Countries

There’s so much talk in the news right now about how we can unite as a region at a time when we’re more divided than ever. Often, we turn to policy to answer this...

Lenten Reflection From Bishop Erik Varden

Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, a Cistercian Trappist, converted to Catholicism in 2002, and, after years of study at Cambridge and Rome - he is an expert in Syriac - was ordained to the priesthood...

Saint Frances of Rome – Finding Your Path in Unexpected Ways

We should not be surprised that the saints speak to us through the ages. How they responded in their own era with its own troubles and crises offers us an example for how to...

Third Sunday of Lent: Thirsting for the True Water of Life

‘Give me a drink’ (Jn. 4:7). The conversation of Our Lord and the Samaritan woman revolves around the gift of water. This request is presented to us to contemplate on this third Sunday in Lent;...

The Radical Prodigal, Saint John of God

Saints are by definition ‘extreme’, for they live a liminal life, on the very threshold of eternity, seeing past the veil of this world. Hence, they act as though all that mattered were the...

The Stabat Mater

For our musical offering on this Third Sunday of Lent, here are a few renditions - amongst many - of the perduring Stabat Mater, the 13th century poem on the sorrows of Mary 'standing...

Daylight Savings Time Doesn’t Save Much

Remember to turn your clocks forward for Daylight Savings Time this evening, March 8th, a 2 am to be precise. Or, at least, since most of us keep time using digital devices, which automatically...

Saints Perpetua, Felicity…and Thomas Aquinas

Today marks the memorial of the early martyrs Perpetua and Felicity, put to death likely in the year 203, under the reign of Septimius Severus, an emperor who seems on the whole to have...

Saint Colette of Corbie

Nicole Boellet (1381 - 1447) was a miraculous birth. Her childless, elderly parents, Robert and Marguerite, prayed to Saint Nicholas - yes, 'Santa Claus' - that they might conceive, and lo and behold, as...

Bishop Sheen and the Shocking Scandal of the Eucharist

Fulton Sheen’s beatification continues. And I’d like to draw attention to something he once wrote:, “The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white Host,” and that sentence alone has...

What Hold Has China Over the Vatican?

Here is a disconcerting exchange between Pope Leo XIV and an EWTN reporter, when the Pope is asked to comment on the case of Jimmy Lai. As readers may know, Jimmy Lai is a Catholic...

Why and Wherefore Forever War?

'Epic Fury',  the attack on Iran by the United States, may last for some weeks yet, according to President Trump. Whether this is justified and proportionate is open to some doubt. The reader may...

Saint Casimir the Chaste, Patron of Poland

(Today's saint, one of the patrons of Poland, and of Lithuania, whose very name means 'bearer of peace', makes a very a propos intercessor for our troubled world. May peace prevail.) Ed. Saint Casimir died...

Katharine Drexel: The First All American Saint

Mother Katharine Mary Drexel (1858 - 1955) is a fitting intercessor for the racial tensions afflicting her native United States. For one thing, she is the first natural born canonized American citizen (Elizabeth Ann...

Second Sunday of Lent, and Seeing Beyond Our Eyes

Are old people wise? Have they learned anything from experience? Or are they all curmudgeons, continually grumbling about the young generation and contrasting it unfavourably with the way things used to be? Well, as...