The night before Pope Francis officially released Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), I was chatting about it with Fr. Dave Dwyer on the Busted Halo radio show. Revealing that he had been able to get his hands on an advance copy, Fr. Dave told me, “You’re going to love it. He says a lot […]
Sometimes it can be hard to find the words to pray, both in times of celebration and when we are hurting. Maybe we haven’t prayed in so long, we aren’t sure where to begin. As Grace Mazza Urbanski writes in the introduction to Talking to God: Prayers for Catholic Women (Franciscan Media, 2016), “We encounter […]
It’s a well-known story of forgiveness in John 8, but it remains mysterious. “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.” Upon hearing this, Jesus kneels and begins to write in the sand. What was Jesus writing? Scripture doesn’t tell us, but the reactions of those in the crowd give us […]
A number of years ago, my wife and I were contacted by the mother of a sixteen year old girl who had a positive pregnancy test. I will call the teenager Katie (not her real name) and her mother Joanne (not her real name). Katie was obviously in a crisis pregnancy: It was a crisis […]
Held by terrorist captors, an Iraqi woman named Khalia resisted their demands that she abandon her Christian faith. Her story was told at the UN this week, along with other accounts of atrocities suffered by Christians and religious minorities in the Middle East at the hands of the Islamic State, or ISIS. According to experts, […]
I have been going to physical therapy a lot this past year. One kid has had two knee surgeries, another a shoulder injury, and my back has finally decided that having four kids wasn’t so good for it. I spend a good amount of time getting to know the people that work there. There is […]
One of the most perplexing puzzles in human salvation is the confrontation between taking salvation and sin seriously on one hand and, yet, feeling an almost insurmountable uselessness in one’s daily effort to save one’s soul on the other. The paradox is clear: we have to take salvation seriously, but the more seriously we take […]
Sperm donation, egg donation and surrogacy: Third party reproduction seems to be a “done deal” in Western society. Even ardently pro-life people do not seem to see the problems. Hey, these techniques are making babies, not killing them. So what could possibly go wrong? A lot of things can go very wrong. Let me describe […]
About ten years ago Regina and I were going through a stretch of pretty rough road together, and all the hidden fault lines in our marriage were exposed. My best friend who had been one of the priests on the altar at our wedding heard my confession one day and said, “Gerry, for your penance, […]
The four keys to a lasting marriage are faithful, free, fruitful, and total love, as we explain in our newly released book on Catholic marriage. Pope Francis stresses these same four themes in his recent exhortation Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love). Our last article looked at what the pope had to say about the first key, […]
The early part of the first century A.D.: Herod was the one who had John arrested and bound in prison on account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, whom he had married. John had said to Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ Herodias harbored a grudge against […]
The Committee on Energy and Commerce in the US House of Representatives has convened a Select Investigative Panel to probe the marketing and sale of aborted baby body parts. The website tells us that the Committee has been established to “gather information and get the facts about medical practices of abortion service providers and the […]
Every city has its hip area with trendy shops offering locally made trinkets, markets for vendors of organically grown produce, and faux-French cafes. Accountants and stockbrokers who wear power suits Monday to Friday may transform on Saturday into hipsters in faded jeans, t-shirts, bandannas around their heads or floppy straw hats to saunter around trendy […]
In the mid-eighties I met with Elliot Abrams, who was then serving as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, to call his attention to the victims of China’s one-child policy. I told him that massive numbers of forced abortions and forced sterilizations had occurred in China over the past few years as the Communist […]
Islam is the unique cause of Islamic terrorism.
This is the third in a series on unconventional propositions about last days and the resurrection of the dead. The first was on that of the Russian mathematician, Andrej Grib, dealing with quantum logic; the second on that of the American physicist, Frank Tipler, dealing with his physics derived Omega Point; this, the third, on […]
Many women today living in immigrant communities in the United States face discrimination, mistreatment, or resentment from family members if they fail to bear a son. Disproportionately girls are being targeted for abortion in some parts of these communities. The choice to abort is a coerced one, more often than not one pushed by husbands […]
More money, fewer jobs.
I can’t even begin to estimate how many times I have sung “Amazing Grace.” That includes all the solo renditions in my car, sung with heart and soul. Indeed, that first verse is a wonderful prayer: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m […]
Reading the full text of Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia, I experienced the odd sensation that the Pope and I must have been poring over the same exact Church documents for the past two years. The themes of faithfulness, personal freedom, fruitfulness, and total gift of self are woven throughout the Pope’s exhortation, and of course […]
When Nick Foligno’s daughter Milana was born with a congenital heart defect two-and-a-half years ago, he knew he could rely on his Catholic faith for solace and strength. His mother Janis had died four years prior to that — an experience that initially threw him but eventually helped him gain a more positive outlook on […]
Civilizations: Barbaric, Vigorous, Decadent.
