Gaudete!—Rejoice!—is the name for the Third Sunday of Advent. The rubrics say the Advent penances and discipline are somewhat mitigated on this day. Gaudete Sunday is a respite, rather like one of those “film trailers” that give a tantalizing glimpse of what is to come. Even so, the sonorous hymns and rose colors of Gaudete…
As a rather observant child, I made a mental note of the fact that my maternal grandmother would ask me to “make a light” instead of asking me to switch it on. When she was a child, no one switched lights on. At night, light was not had without effort, not in her English town nor…
If you ask my family what I’m like during the holidays, they’ll tell you that I tend to go a little overboard. The get-togethers, the gifts, the good times with loved ones and treasured friends — I can’t get or give enough during this special season. My wife and kids make fun of me for…
Fifteen years ago, in 1999, Pope St. John Paul II declared that the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe would be celebrated in every Church in the Americas, because, he said, she is the Patroness, the Evangelizer, and the Mother of the Americas. John Paul said that through her intercession, the new evangelization in America…
I am writing this note almost exactly one year, to the minute, since one of the most wonderful and powerful moments in my life. A year ago, I was in Maryland at a hotel located along one of the many bays in the region. After a client event, I had an extra day to write…
Given the many theatres that are or have been within walking distance of our church on 34th Street, it is not possible to count the number of times stage curtains have come down on a final act. One block away from us is the theatre built by Oscar Hammerstein, to compete with the old Metropolitan…
If from time to time you have a sense that all things held dear in both Church and State seem to be collapsing, you might find a comrade in the Irish poet William Butler Yeats: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and…
In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, directly over the very spot where our Lord’s Cross stood, right where our Savior died for our salvation, there stands a Greek altar. Directly next to it stands a Latin altar. In between the two altars hangs an icon of the Mother of God. Right at…
Most of our Founding Fathers were not deeply informed about Catholicism, but they appreciated moral integrity when they saw it. When John Dubois, eventually the first resident Bishop of New York, fled the French Revolution, he lived for a while in the home of James Monroe. Patrick Henry taught him English, and Thomas Jefferson arranged for…
In my last article we looked at forming and accomplishing your vision, more on that later, and not worrying about being a people-pleaser. This month we look at someone whose actions demonstrate she cares more about the truth and doing what is right rather than worrying about what someone will think or say about her…
Scientists say that diamonds need more than 350 tons of pressure per square inch and heat levels above 2200 degrees Fahrenheit to form within the earth. And since we know that God’s own inner order and life imprint themselves on all of creation, this simple scientific fact has something to teach us about spiritual reality. …
Life in New York City can be hard for anyone who has difficulty accommodating paradoxes. For instance, the same City Council that has just banned the sale of foie gras on the grounds that it involves cruelty to force-fed geese, previously made New York the first city to pay mothers from other states to come…
Invite God into Your Life and into a world in desperate need of spiritual solutions for today’s challenges, a review of Rev William Watson, S.J.,’s Inviting God Into Your Life: A Practical Guide for Prayer. We live in turbulent times characterized by injustice, violence, and misinformation (what we use to call propaganda). Happiness and peace…
A 1973 film directed by Orson Welles was about forgers, and it turned out to be something of a forgery itself. Some of the information in “F for Fake” was itself faked. Later on, Welles claimed that this was deliberately done as a kind of joke, and he took to calling it an “essay” and…
Anyone who knows me understands that among the books I’ve written, one of my favorites is The Truth About Employee Engagement. My affinity for this book is the simplicity and efficacy of its message: employees only need three things from their managers to love their work. Really. And if that doesn’t sound unbelievable enough, those…
If “religio” is translated as being bound to a particular outlook on life, then everyone is religious. The saints simply have bound themselves to true religion. Today that is a socially unacceptable assertion, but “political correctness” is itself a form of religion. Early Christians were condemned as atheists because they refused to worship the gods…
It is time for us to look at some of the things influencing good, God-fearing people in the United States and to identify what is holding them back from taking action to accomplish an objective or preventing them from being people who don’t just know their faith but live their faith outwardly. Two of these…
Last week’s canonization of Saint John Henry Newman will have universal influences that I trust will include our own parish. It should be remembered that his achievements, for the most part, hardly seemed successful at the time. He might even be called a patron saint of the disappointed. Newman was so nervous in his university…
More than forty years ago, I told a wise Protestant theologian that I had been reading the Apologia pro Vita Sua of John Henry Newman (1801-1890). He warned me that it is “a dangerous book.” That was just the sort of advice that makes a young thinker all the more eager to read it. And so I did,…
CNA—It is important to consider what we are willing to die for, Archbishop Charles Chaput reminded students and faculty in a speech at the University of Notre Dame on Friday. “It’s a good thing, a vital thing, to consider what we’re willing to die for,” Chaput said in a lecture given to the Constitutional Studies…
