Am I praying right? You often hear people talking about mindfulness and breathing exercises and the like, and opinion is divided about whether these practices are allowed for a Christian. Well, worry no more! Back in ‘89, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, while still working at the CDF under John Paul II, put out a document on…
Take up the Sword of the Spirit” St Paul tells us, in order to “stand against the wiles of the devil.” October, the month of the Rosary, recalls how this prayer, entrusted to St Dominic by Our Lady, became the Church’s spiritual weapon. Every Dominican still wears the rosary where a medieval knight would wear…
It’s Jesus’ own mission you have been given: ‘As the Father sent me, so do I send you’ writes Jason Conroy Why live? Now there’s a question! To put it another way: what is it that makes life worth living? What are we living for? Many of us know how to give the ‘correct’…
Nothing says “pilgrimage, not holiday” more than sleeping on the floor of an airport. The night before my early flight to Rome for the canonisation of our two newest saints, there was a certain sense of silent solidarity between all those who, for one reason or another, had to find somewhere comfortable, or tolerable, to…
Thinking about the end has helped me prioritise and actually do what’s truly meaningful, , writes Jason Conroy A 2018 letter, available online, the straight-talking Cardinal Eijk from Holland indirectly ‘dropped the A-bomb’ – that is, he brought up the dreaded word ‘Apocalypse’– and, worse ‘Antichrist’! He did this by referencing Catechism of the Catholic…
With the feasts of the Holy Spirit and the Sacred Heart coming up, both celebrations of the Love of God, we can ask the perennial question: what is love? What does it mean to say ‘God is Love’? And what clues can love, as we know it, give us about the nature of God? There’s…
Last week, I managed to get my hands on a copy of a PhD thesis from 1987 entitled ‘The office and authority of the local prior in the order of Saint Augustine’ by one Robert Prevost, then a doctoral student only a few years older than myself. For years it had lain totally untouched in…
A few months ago, a friend and I here in Leuven went on one of those carnival rides that look, frankly, insane. It was basically a huge pendulum. If you think of it like a clock-face, it swung as high as one o’clock on the one side, and eleven o’clock on the other. All the…
I remember seeing Pope Francis at World Meeting of Families back in 2018. His reserved reception of the higher echelons of Irish society in Dublin Castle contrasted nicely with his off-script and familiar remarks to us who went to see him in Croke Park. I felt like he was standing up for us who have…
Although suffering is unavoidable, we can see in it an ultimate meaning and value, says Jason Conroy Well, how has your Lent gone? Forgive me if I’m not surprised if your record isn’t exactly pristine. I’ve always noticed that by the time Good Friday comes around I’ve often been practically brought to my knees trying…