Your Hand I’d Kiss Your hand, I’d kiss But not for this, The mundane games Men play. Your hand, I’d kiss For doing this, Absolve my sins Away. Your hand, I’d kiss But not for this, That any man Can do. Your hand, I’d kiss, For doing this God’s strong, His choice, the few. Your […]
Only one miracle of Jesus is recorded in all four gospels — the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. I once heard a homilist give what he said was the real meaning of the story: the people in the crowd took out food they were hiding under their cloaks and shared it. Jesus’ preaching inspired […]
Amidst the rhetorical pyrotechnics surrounding July’s debt-ceiling debates, another controversy streaked across the sky like a comet, flared for an instant, then receded into the maelstrom of ongoing partisan attacks. The shooting star in question involved an exchange between two of Congress’ most controversial members, Allen West (R-Fla.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), whose regard […]
One can hardly turn on the radio or the TV without hearing the melodrama being played out in Washington DC around the Federal Budget. Well, I guess it is not so mellow. There are no simple answers, there are no immediate cures. As is true in any question in life, there are two sides to […]
Author’s Note: I read with interest Mary Kochan’s article on the Catholic Lane website, “Catholics, Please Say Something about Jesus!” I was somewhat surprised by the passionate responses, both pro and con, to her article. As I said in my own response to Mary’s article: “I think the argument should not be over what you […]
The question of whether Catholics talk enough about Jesus was recently raised on this site. It came up as part of difference of opinion over whether believers of any stripe should be scandalized by expressions of devotion to Mary that don’t mention her divine son in the same breath. Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong was among […]
Must Wander Go up or down, whatever scale you see, A caterpillar crawling on a tree, A vapor-bloated cloud that’s sailing east, A beetle to a dead mole for a feast All in motion, tell, what is the soul, Cloud or caterpillar or a mole? Does it move or does it rest the same, Vapor […]
Saint Paul on God and love is simple for to the saint these are one and the same. That is his statement to the Christians at Rome and he declares this squarely in the middle of his Epistle to the Romans, his 5,000-word tour de force on love, God, sin, death, resurrection, and the salvation […]
“The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with them for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. Going out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You too go […]
The death of Terri Schindler Schiavo in 2005 is a distant memory for most Americans. But for the family that spent seven years fighting Terri’s estranged husband and the court system to stop the starvation of their daughter and sister, recollections of the 13 days Terri lingered without food or water before finally succumbing to […]
How many times have you heard someone ask the question: “What am I supposed to be doing with my life?” “Why am I here?” Too many to count, right? It seems too, that it is not a simple answer they want, but a large, extravagantly specific answer. They want answers directly from the source; definitive […]
Haiku Wrought From Rubble Purified by fire, beaten into submission, shaped for service: Gold! Mary Harwell Sayler
Had not the LORD been with us, let Israel say, Had not the LORD been with us, when people rose against us, they would have swallowed us alive, for their fury blazed against us. The waters would have engulfed us, the torrent overwhelmed us; seething waters would have drowned us. Blessed be the LORD, who […]
If you haven’t noticed, the traditional practice of Eucharistic Adoration is making a comeback. Many were given the impression in the seventies that adoration was passé, a relic of pre-Vatican II spirituality. But all the Popes since the Council have emphasized its importance, and in this year of the Eucharist we see more and more […]
I recently had the pleasure of reading Difficulties in Mental Prayer by M. Eugene Boylan, O.C.R. Ave Maria Press has issued a new edition of this work which was first published in 1943. Obviously the world has changed a great deal in nearly seventy years. The Church has changed a lot as well, as has […]
ST. NAZARIUS’s father was a heathen, and held a considerable post in the Roman army. His mother, Perpetua, was a zealous Christian, and was instructed by St. Peter, or his disciples, in the most perfect maxims of our holy faith. Nazarius embraced it with so much ardor that he copied in his life all the […]
Ours is not a God of desperation. The Almighty has no need to bless the terrorism perpetrated by Anders Breivik of Norway for the purpose of provoking a restoration of piety and Judeo-Christian civilization in Europe. However idealistic Mr. Breivik’s motives may have been, he adopted methods more akin to King Herod’s than to the […]
Weapon The cross is deep, a dagger, So firmly fixed is evil, Who can pull it out, extract This weapon of the devil? A relic in no reliquary, Heirloom of the race, It stands upright as humans do But has no human face And what became of Jesus’ cross When Christ was taken down? It […]
It is a Catholic tradition to acknowledge and honor the unselfish and holy life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. One way of doing that is for a family to plant, maintain and enjoy a Mary Garden. In the Middle Ages, missionaries and travelers spread stories across Europe about flowers named after Mary and various times of […]
American Catholics of a certain age can remember The Baltimore Catechism, a concise, systematic presentation of the faith in questions and answers, which was published in carefully graded editions for parochial schoolchildren. In the postconciliar years, when “experiential” methods of religious education were in vogue, textbooks came to resemble magazines with more color photography than […]
Meditation and Questions for Reflection or Group Discussion (Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 145:8-9,15-18; Romans 8:35,37-39; Matthew 14:13-21) Living Under God’s Economy They all ate and were satisfied (Matthew 14:20). We live under a tremendous economy — God’s economy, that is. Even as the world’s market systems soar and plummet, God’s economy remains stable because it is […]
I remember standing in my room in the Cosmos Hotel, sleep-deprived from airports and loaded down with equipment. The room may have once been handsome, but now its current condition is stale and threadbare — its blue carpet has thinned and its twin beds have sunken into visibly concave shapes. I turn the shower faucet, […]
Distributism would be of little practical use if it could not provide useful answers to practical problems of the type we face practically everyday. I believe distributism does indeed provide a useful set of tools to analyze these problems and to devise useful solutions. But the proof of this claim can only come in the analysis of […]
Swift As A Star Flicker Prayer, it does ascend Up from the mind into the air Through the highest cumulus In an orange dusky sky And higher still, like a tailed comet Out of earth’s realm of spiraling starlights And into the black of space, And higher still Past a rare jeweled galaxy With stars […]
