Recently I read, in succession, three books on suicide, each written by a mother who lost one of her children to suicide. All three books are powerful, mature, not given to false sentiment and worth reading: Lois Severson, Healing the Wound from my Daughter’s Suicide, Grief Translated into Words, lost her daughter, Patty, to suicide;…

Some years ago, I officiated at a wedding. As the officiating priest, I was invited to the reception and dance that followed upon the church service. Not knowing the family well and having church services the next morning, I left right after the banquet and the toasts, just as the dancing was about to start.…

What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but suffer the loss of your own soul? Jesus taught that and, I suspect, we generally don’t grasp the full range of its meaning. We tend to take Jesus’ words to mean this: What good is it if someone gains riches, fame, pleasure, and…

Recently, at an academic dinner, I was sitting across the table from a nuclear scientist. At one point, I asked him this question: Do you believe that there’s human life on other planets? His answer surprised me: “As a scientist, no, I don’t believe there’s human life on another planet. Scientifically, the odds are strongly…

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…