This is a piece I was asked to submit to the Catholic Herald newspaper in London after the Marathon bombings from the perspective of a Catholic in Boston. This is the original I submitted. It was published in print in the April 26, 2013, edition. The events of the past week in Boston are both [...]
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Why not to take 5 small children to Easter Vigil, or How to reaffirm priests in their celibacy
Happy Easter! We ventured out last night to the Easter Vigil with all five kids and while it wasn’t a complete disaster, it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. We’ve made it a habit in the past few years to go to both Christmas Midnight Mass and Easter Vigil with the kids. I was dubious the first [...]
A Mother Who Weeps: Our Lady in Bouguereau’s Pieta
At the start of this Holy Week, I’ve been contemplating two different pieces of religious art by the same artist, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a 19th-century neo-classicist that some associate mainly with portraiture and paintings of naked ladies, but he’s also painted some fairly well-known religious art. He was a devout Catholic, who especially in his latter [...]
An introvert’s embrace of the cross
From his last General Audience, Pope Benedict offers essentially a guide for all those introvert mothers, fathers, priests, religious and bishops, called to minister to others when all they really want is to retreat to a private place for prayer, for reading, for some blessed time alone. It is the Way of the Cross for [...]
Searching for meaning in great tragedy
When we see large tragedies like the Newtown shooting, they’re often followed by stories of people helplessly searching for ways to “do something and you don’t know what to do”. They feel helpless. It’s a natural feeling, but I wonder if people who have a deep abiding faith are less prone to it. There’s something [...]
Of Gnostics and Religion Professors
In September, Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King ignited an international controversy when she claimed to have found a piece of what she claims is a fourth-century papyrus that refers to Jesus’ “wife”.[1] (To be fair, she doesn’t claim that she believes that Jesus was married, only that whomever wrote the scroll believed He was. [...]
Pats’ fan Moms at Mass
I’ve noticed a trend in the last couple of weeks of moms of school-age kids showing up to Mass in jeans and Patriots jerseys. Now, people dress down all year ’round, not just during football season, and men and children are dressed down just as frequently. So why is it that these jersey-wearing moms stand [...]
John 6:60 is Consolation for Priests, Deacons, Bishops
While much of the discussion of the Mass readings for this 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time focuses on the second reading from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, with it’s talk of submission, I think today’s Gospel shouldn’t be overlooked. I particular, I think the end of the sixth chapter of [...]
The Life of the Mind for a Good Marriage
Before I was married I used to lead a Bible study in my parish that brought together mainly young adults. As the resident guy with the Theology degree, I became the study leader, leading the discussion and doing the research into what we were reading at the time. I enjoyed it immensely, because it was [...]
Memorial of Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati
July 4 is the memorial of Pier Giorgio Frassati, the young man from Turin, Italy, who died in the early 1920s and who has become an unofficial patron for youth and young adults of our modern times. I’ve maintained webpages devoted to Pier Giorgio online since about 1994 or 1995, when they lived at my [...]
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