I need to get this off my chest: my husband is not my best friend. He’s never been my best friend and never will be. I experience some envy of the young brides and long-married wives who contentedly call their spouse “my best friend.” Facebook has a site called “My Husband Is My Best Friend” […]
Judge me if you will, but I’m completely unimpressed by celebrity culture. While I’m sure that these are all perfectly lovely people in real life, I just can’t fathom why I should care about who is in/out of rehab (again), or what the Kardashians are wearing. If you wanted to torture me, you’d force me […]
Editors note: This was given as a homily on Sunday, October 14th, 2012 at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in New Brighton, MN. The gospel was for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, Mark 10:17-30. Recently I spoke with a senior at a Catholic high school and he was telling me that […]
If bananas thrived in Alabama, my family and I would be eating banana leaves using bare hands every single meal. Scratch that. For all meals, we’d have bananas all day long so I can dispense with cooking. Then we’d all have to wear disposable banana leaves uniforms as clothes every single day. Also, anyone under […]
Soon citizens in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington State will vote on whether to redefine marriage. Perhaps the following article will help deter some voters from playing an accessory role in waging war against “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In proportion as people plunge into practices which are, as the Catechism indicates, […]
A while back, we began a 4-part exploration of the four marks of God’s love (Free, Total, Faithful, Fruitful) as explained in Humanae Vitae, and, for me anyway, it has been a good experience. We’ve explored the true fulfillment of hippy love. We’ve brushed up on our Latin and, consequently, our swag. We’ve even taken […]
If we look at the four components of God’s love for us (free, total, faithful, fruitful) and compare God’s love to marital love, we can discover how to live the Sacrament of marriage as the ultimate expression of spousal love. Free: We need to be able love our spouse freely. If we ask for conditions, […]
My husband and I had hit rock bottom. Our marriage was strained to the breaking point. We were expecting our seventh child, conceived unexpectedly while I was working to finish my bachelor’s degree after a fourteen-year hiatus from college. We had been too busy, we thought, to work through difficult communication problems. For several years […]
Dear Anthony, The way you speak about marriage, I think I can say I have never seen it in anyone’s marriage, least of all my parents. All my family’s marriages were bad, unhappy. So, how can I expect to be happy? And please do not mention God! Sadness is the key to being truly happy. […]
After looking at the comments left on my last post, Was Jesus Really Silent on Same-Sex “Marriage”?, I recognized the need to be more explicit on a point. Even though the gospels record only a few statements from Jesus regarding marriage, it is enough to undercut any claim by Christians that marriage should be redefined […]
Totus Tuus: a brief, yet brilliant play (Christmas morning, eager child poised in front of tree with one large present, puffy-eyed parents on couch clinging to coffee mugs, How Deep Is Your Love plays softly in the background) Child: Can I open it? Mum: Certainly, dear, it’s yours! (child rapidly tears through wrapping paper, exposing […]
We have been teaching NFP for nearly 28 years. We have volunteered much of our time preparing and teaching classes of many couples over the years, as well as lecturing to marriage preparation courses and youth group meetings, but let me share with you what we have gotten out of it. Admittedly, when we first […]
I recently read an article written by a Protestant about modern worship. The author explored all the new ways, through technology and media, to keep the members interested in the worship service. The article was about how to keep the attendees feeling like they had a good God experience, new songs, new music, new films, […]
Remember “live and let live” — or, as the gay-rights variation goes, “live and let love?” Remember that heady time not so long ago when Americans concerned about the unintended consequences of same-sex marriage were told that we had nothing to fear because the redefinition of marriage to accommodate gays and lesbians would not affect […]
It’s a common misconception that any form of natural family planning (NFP) doesn’t work very well for women over forty because, oddly like teenagers, the body doesn’t produce the hormones that affect ovulation consistently and, therefore, following the natural signs of fertility is unreliable. I’ve had people knit their brow at me plenty for being […]
Pope Benedict XVI offered an encouraging message to the recent meeting of the Equipes Notre Dame (translation: Teams of Our Lady), a pro-marriage apostolate. The Holy Father invited all Christian married couples to be “the gentle and smiling face of the Church.” There is no greater way for couples to achieve this than to joyfully […]
Most Catholics are familiar with the three vows taken by most religious of poverty, chastity and obedience. To these three, St. Benedict (whose feast we celebrated July 11), added a fourth for the Benedictine order, the vow of stability. Our summer seminarian who had considered joining the Benedictines at one time spoke to us today […]
In my position with the Diocese of Toledo, I get to instruct people on the joys of Catholic marriage: The two become one flesh. Marriage is gift of self. My path to holiness is through my spouse. Marriage is free, total, faithful, and fruitful. As Christ died on the cross for his bride the Church, […]
I wrote my senior thesis for the Catholic University honors program nearly 10 years ago. In my youthful zeal and eager for my own upcoming marriage, I tackled the prompt of “Nature and Technology” with a 35 page analysis of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s vision of human nature, nature and morality, and contraception as “technology.” […]
Lately, I’ve been involved in a number of ongoing efforts and conversations regarding community. Basically, we’ve been trying to get at the crux of what community really is and how to live it, and that’s got me yearning to dig deeper into the subject. We hear the word “community” all the time, used in many […]
Fr. Carlos was a dear family friend and spiritual director for both Mark and I before and also after we were married. German-born, but having been stationed in Argentina for fourteen years, Fr. Carlos had an amazing German-Latino accent that was endearing and sometimes frustrating to those who didn’t know the origin of his unique […]
No matter how many times I attend Mass, I still rarely attend with the presence of mind to realize I am attending a marriage ceremony. This is the most central and important aspect of my Christian life, and it just doesn’t occur to me that this is a wedding taking place. More specifically, the Mass […]
As busy people with spouses, kids, jobs, responsibilities, we’re all bound to fall into a funk from time-to-time — a phase when we feel dejected, overwhelmed, ungrateful, unappreciated or just plain blah, sometimes for no good reason. So what can we do about it? Ride it out? Throw up our hands? Yell at our kids? […]
{disclaimer: I realize that NFP is not always used to avoid pregnancy, but can also be used for medical awareness and to help achieve pregnancy. For purposes of this article I am referring to NFP used as “periodic continence”, that is, to avoid pregnancy.} There is a faction of Catholics who, in their desire to […]
