There are now more than seven billion people on this Earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the centre of the Universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighborhoods and in our families.  And no one’s to blame for this, save God…

“God, as I understand him, is not very well understood.” A colleague of mine, now deceased, was fond of saying that. It’s a wise comment.  Anyone who claims to understand God is deceived because the very first dogma we have about God affirms that God is ineffable. That means that we can know God, but…

Sometime soon we will witness the canonisation of Dorothy Day. For many of us today, especially those who are not Roman Catholic, a canonisation draws little more than a yawn. How does a canonisation impact our world? Moreover, isn’t canonisation simply the recognition of a certain piety to which most people cannot relate? So why…

An American humourist was once asked what he loved most in life. This was his reply: “I love women best; whiskey next; my neighbour a little; and God hardly at all!” This flashed in my mind recently when, while giving a lecture, a woman asked this question: Why did God build us in one way…

Just because something is politically-correct doesn’t mean that it might not also be correct. Sometimes we have to swallow hard to accept truth. Some years ago, I served on a priests’ council, an advisory board to the bishop in a Roman Catholic diocese. The bishop, while strongly conservative by temperament, was a deeply-principled man who…

Devotional prayer to Mary, the mother of Jesus, has always been the centre-piece within Catholic piety. Among other things, those devotions have focused upon various Marian shrines, places where Mary allegedly appeared, Lourdes, Knock, Fatima, Guadalupe, Medjugorje, among other places. Karl Rahner, studying the phenomenon of Marian apparitions, points out that all these apparitions have…

"Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of Heaven and a son of Earth.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin…

A recent book, by Robyn Cadwallander, The Anchoress, tells the story of young woman, Sarah, who chooses to shut herself off from the world and lives as an Anchoress (like Julian of Norwich). It’s not an easy life and she soon finds herself struggling with her choice. Her confessor is a young, inexperienced, monk named…

All of us live with some wounds, bad habits, addictions and temperamental flaws that are so deeply engrained and long-standing that it seems like they are part of our genetic make-up. So we tend to give into a certain quiet despair in terms of ever being healed of them. Experience teaches us this. There’s the…

Today we no longer understand the value and power of ritual. This is more than an individual failing. It’s the cultural air we breathe. In the words of Robert L. Moore, we’ve gone “ritually tone-deaf”. The effects of this can be seen everywhere. Allow me to give two examples. First, we see this today in…