Today, the Church commemorates the memorial of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary. Pope St. Pius V originally instituted the feast to mark the victory of the Christians at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. On that occasion, the rosary obtained the help of the Queen of Heaven in a contest against flesh and blood. [...]
If God really is our happiness, then the greatest kind of hope is not an expectation of earthly felicity, but rather a bold trust in God’s love for us in spite of every challenge and suffering. “Nothing will be impossible for God” (Luke 1:37). By this one little phrase the weight of despair is lifted [...]
The reason for Walsingham’s importance is its association with the Marian apparitions to a pious English noblewoman in 1061. By the middle of the fourteenth century, people considered England to be “Our Lady’s dowry” and that she was, in some special sense, the protectress of the English people. Few people in today’s godless England have [...]
The Platonic world of Forms was shattered by God, bursting down through the clouds to enter into the womb of a young Jewish girl! Picture yourself sitting alongside Plato at a local Greek restaurant, a couple of gyros between the two of you. What do you say? Is there anything you know that could possibly [...]
From the Annunciation to the Presentation, from the Wedding at Cana to the upper room in Acts 1 and 2, the Mother of God’s life is undergirded and infused with humility. About a year before being received into the Catholic Church in 2004, the biggest obstacle to conversion for me, a Protestant, who had moved in [...]
We are Sons and Daughters of the Father with and through Him, and Mary was so before us all. She is our model of collaborating in redemption for the sake of His body the Church—a model even of our sorrows on earth, and please God, of our eternal joys. Matthew 12: 46-50 is brief but [...]
That God's love is ever present to us is of no doubt. The question is, what are we doing to receive it? It is only by daily turning away from self-absorption that we can become absorbed in the love of God that is continually poured out upon us by his son, Jesus Christ. When going [...]
In Mary’s body, we see the total gift of God’s grace in raising and glorifying our lowly bodies to that “lofty goal” unattainable by our own efforts. All the evil which eats up our bodies—our diseases, discomforts, lusts, and addictions—will be trampled upon not by abandoning the body, but by glorifying it. As a child, [...]
Vivaldi's music draws our attention to divine mysteries unknown to Socrates, overlooked by the Scribes and Pharisees, and difficult even for Christ’s disciples to grasp. It offers us valuable assistance as we advance virtue by virtue to the brightness of the saints, pointing us to the sources of heavenly aid without which even the mightiest [...]
England’s triumph in the World Cup had nothing to do with the prayers of the Virgin, nor was Our Lady of Guadalupe failing to answer the prayers of those Mexicans who sought her intercession on Mexico’s behalf. If their prayers were answered, it might have been in the form of the gentlest of reproofs to [...]
In the month of May the Church honors Mary as the queen of Heaven. Why this title? To understand, we first need to look to God; specifically, to the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. Since our Lord is God, he is of course omnipotent, omnipresent, and infinite. However, we can also call him [...]
God searches for every soul like the Lover searches for his Beloved in the Garden. The soul of the believer is the beautiful daughter, lovely like Jerusalem. As God walked in paradise with Adam, so he now dwells in the believer through grace. Before I entered the Order, I had the privilege of spending an [...]
The Feast of the Annunciation is placed in the midst of Lent as an oasis in the desert. Just as the Lord did not leave the Israelites without food and drink for their forty years in the exodus from Egypt, he does not leave us empty-handed in our fast. Along the way, we are blessed [...]
Today Christians of all stripes are responding in defense of the embattled family, but our eventual success will be enabled by the image of the Madonna, the Mother of God, especially as the "Stabat Mater," the Mother standing beneath the cross of her bruised and broken Son, suffering more than any other human creature has [...]