David Mills A friend of Dorothy Day’s told her that her children had called Peter Maurin “ragged and unkempt”. They were sure “that he never bathed, and he seemed to sleep in his clothes”. When Day asked him why he didn’t try to look better, he told her, “So as not to excite envy”. Maurin,…
Silvio Cuellar In today’s world, we are surrounded by constant noise and distractions. At home, we are always connected to media such as smartphones, computers, television and tablets. In the car, we are also saturated by noise and radio programs with commentary often inappropriate for our children’s ears. How do we bring some peace into…
St John Henry Newman knew that the Catholic Church was the Church of the earliest Christians, writes Mike Aquilina At the heart of St John Henry Newman’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism was his study of the early Christians, the fathers of the Church. As an Anglican clergyman, he believed that they held the answer…
You cannot will yourself to faithfulness, writes Bert Ghezzi I gave up ‘trying’ to pray daily many years ago. I discovered that if I did not build praying into my routine, then I routinely replaced it with lesser priorities. Willpower does not account for my faithfulness. My will is not strong enough to get me…
Brett Salkeld I don’t own a smartphone. Well, that’s not quite true. I have an old phone that could technically access the internet, but I have never set it up to do so. I use it to call my wife when I am traveling and, very occasionally, to text. I have taken a small handful…
David Mills An internationally best-selling novelist who might have won the Nobel Prize in literature, a patriotic Pole, a devout Catholic, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka was also an ardent anti-semite. And she is a model for us – not despite her bigotry but because of it. “Our feeling toward the Jews has not changed,” she wrote in…
Mother Teresa’s imitation of Christ provides an example for us all, writes Amy Welborn No modern figure has been more revered as a saint in life, so the rapid progress of Mother Teresa’s cause from her death to her canonisation within two decades came as no surprise. From the day Mother Teresa rode on a…
Scott Richert A decade or more ago, I went to Confession one Saturday afternoon. Like many other priests, the particular confessor who heard my confession that day frequently defaulted to three Hail Marys as the standard penance that he assigned. But not that day. Whether led by something I had confessed or by his own…
Jaymie Stuart Wolfe How we live our lives is substantially different from how our parents and grandparents lived theirs. We no longer need to wait a whole week for the next episode of a favourite TV show; we can watch all five seasons in a single binge. We don’t have to buy tickets or drive…
St Pope John Paul II’s insightful encyclical has yet to be studied and implemented as it should be, writes Carl Olson August 6 marked the 30th anniversary of St John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendour of Truth”). It is the first and only papal encyclical focused on moral theology. Its continued importance cannot…