The fact that I needed glasses came as a surprise to everyone, most of all to myself. I was about eleven years old, having a late breakfast at Panera Bread after Saturday morning Mass with the family. My go-to order was a cinnamon roll, but that day I decided to try something new. But when [...]
Love draws you up, but it does not sweep you off your feet. Not yet. Charity paradoxically manages to give you both heaven and earth. Jesus, Paul, and indeed all Christians, keep their sights high and their feet firmly planted. Saint Paul can catch you off guard. Just when you think you have a grip [...]
Critical theorists seek to confuse concepts through the manipulation of language and promote ideas that fail to correspond to reality. Academic theories designed to confuse rather than to clarify must be confronted with calm reason. This is the most charitable thing we can do for those who will come after us. Self-evident Truths It can [...]
The woman's life was meant to be lived at least on a human basis of justice. In the divine life of charity, she attains her fullest development, her fullest happiness; for here justice and love rule, not strength. On such a basis, she has open to her a life of fullest perfection, the kind of [...]
The Catechism praises almsgiving as, “Money or goods given to the poor as an act of penance or fraternal charity.” It may sound like a humdrum practice, but almsgiving would have been unthinkable, strange, to the ancient, pagan world. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was no virtue to give to the poor. In [...]
Patience encourages us to accept humbly that we will not be as good as soon as we want to, due to being part of the fallen world. This understanding need not lead to despair, but rather to hope, for if we keep patiently at it, eventually we will look back on the struggle as well [...]
Ronald Reagan had a deep and abiding faith in the prudence and wisdom of people at the grass roots level to manage their own lives well, if left free from government intrusion. Is the government an appropriate venue for compassion and charity? Reagan’s answer was no. He believed the private sector does a better job. [...]
Tradition! Tradition! Sing it like Tevye. We all know that not all traditions are healthy or good or right. Fiddler on the Roof, much as I find it entertaining, strikes me on every viewing as just a bit too much in the spirit of the 1960s in its glee at razing traditions sensible or no. [...]
The silence from the pulpit about the low-wage workers, 44% of the population, is disgraceful, although understandable, because Christianity in America has rarely challenged the ethos of capitalism. As a result, churches have virtually no role in political or economic life. The COVID-19 Pandemic has revealed that we no longer have the equivalent of such [...]
In “Sir Gibbie,” George MacDonald shows us how goodness is not in action only, but also in the doer first. The virtuous person sees truly, judges rightly, and acts. It is the love of God within Gibbie that prompts him to do so. Sometimes you read a book that causes you to marvel at the [...]
Learning another language helps me to not only understand, but to better experience first-hand how another person thinks, feels, and interacts with the world; this creates the possibility for empathy, fellow-feeling, and ultimately, charity. Having taught high-school Spanish for the first time last fall, I have been wondering why it is that we teach foreign [...]
I keep reminding myself to look beneath and beyond labels and remain focused on the individual. Because ultimately it is the individual who matters most and who is most deserving of praise or condemnation, affection or disdain. It is a surprisingly hard lesson to learn and to remember given the current political and cultural tensions [...]
In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium [EG], Pope Francis insists that we need to anchor our approach to the Church’s missionary task in the Incarnate Word as the principle of reality (“il criterio di realtà”: 233). This principle can be a guide for “the development of life in society and the building of a people,” [...]
St. John the Baptist came to prepare the way of the Lord by proclaiming the Good News of the coming of the Redeemer, and by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. According to Abba Apollo, a desert father who lived about 1,700 years ago, the devil has no knees. He had them [...]