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…
Questions of Faith There is an enormous gap between the public perception of sainthood and the reality of it. The vast majority of people believe that saints are born rather than made, titanic figures of myth and legend that we devote art to and tell stories about, nearly like Hercules or Prometheus, except that their…
When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he held up bread and wine as two elements within which to make himself especially present to us. Since that time, now more than 2,000 years ago, Christians celebrating the Eucharist have used the same two things, bread and wine, to ask Christ to bless this…
Deacon Greg Kandra The Sunday Gospel July 23 – 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time Wis 12:13, 16-19 Ps 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16 Rom 8:26-27 Mt 13:24-43 As a city dweller who is more familiar with steel and cement than weeds and wheat, I never really connected with this Sunday’s Gospel. I’m sure the people of Jesus’s…
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…
Spend any time around Protestant denominations as a Catholic and you’re likely to be asked: “What’s the deal with Mary?” Or depending on who you’re chatting with, you might be more aggressively accused of “worshipping” Mary. Our initial reaction might be something along the lines of laughing it off, insisting that of course we don’t…
Ruadhán Jones
Fr Ronald Rolheiser