Effie Caldarola Today, I spent time with the Gerasene demoniac. At least I did so in my imagination. I journeyed there in prayer and then stood with Jesus, watching the tortured and screaming man descending the hillside and identifying his demons as “legion”. Praying with the imagination is a hallmark of Ignatian spirituality. It’s an…

Maria Wiering “He was the world’s flower and glory, and has rendered superfluous the writings of doctors (of theology) who shall come after him.” St Albert the Great is said to have exclaimed these words upon the news of the death of St Thomas Aquinas, his former student, in 1274 at age 48. July 18 marked the…

The Pianist, about a Polish Jew’s experience of WWII, was a bit of a passion project for its Polish-Jewish director, Roman Polanski. Since coming out in 2002, it has been hailed as a classic. It stars Adrien Brody as pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman, a real-life Holocaust survivor who wrote a memoir also called The…

Saint of the Week July 22 sees the Church celebrate another of its greatest saints; indeed, one of those closest to Christ as he walked among us. The ‘Apostle of the Apostles’ according to Christian tradition, Mary Magdalene was the first to encounter the risen Lord, the first to catch a glimpse of the heavenly…

María Ruiz Scaperlanda In December 2016, Pope Francis officially recognised Fr Stanley Rother’s martyrdom, making him the first American-born martyr. In September 2017, he became the first male born in the United States to be beatified. How a 46-year-old diocesan priest from a small German farming community in Oklahoma came to live and die in…

Sincerity is the life blood of a robust spiritual life. It’s one of those good habits I call “worldly virtues,” meaning virtues essential for living a good life in the middle of the world – in this case, being honest about our weaknesses along with our strengths, our confusions along with our certainties. Honesty But…

The daily Office of Readings includes an excerpt from a homily by St Augustine, which may be a funny place to begin a film review. Nonetheless, I’m going to take an excerpt from it now: “What fresh sort of suffering, brothers, does the human race now endure that our fathers did not undergo,” the great…

Saint of the week If you’re at all like me, the distances the Gospel has reached constantly astounds you. This week’s saint, remembered and celebrated by the Church July 14, is a good reminder of that. Born in 1656, St Kateri Tekakwitha was the child of a Christian, Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father, both…

Mike Nelson We can learn much from Scripture and the teachings of the Church about the value of encountering those different from ourselves. Certainly, Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well (Jn 4:4-42), his dining in the tax collector’s home (Mt 9:10-17) and his parable about the good Samaritan (Lk 10:30-37) speak clearly about recognising…