The Wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is. In the face of the enormous problems surrounding the development of peoples, which almost make us yield to discouragement, we find solace in the sayings of our Lord Jesus Christ, who teaches us: “Apart…
It might seem an obvious thing now, what with so much talk about the environment and “going green,” but humans have taken many approaches to the natural world throughout history. Sometimes, even when we talked a good game, our actions belied that we viewed the created world as something to be plundered, used and abused,…
There’s a saying attributed to Attila the Hun, a fifth Century ruler infamous for his cruelty, which reads this way: For me to be happy, it’s not just important that I succeed; it’s also important that everyone else fails. I suspect that Atilla the Hun was not the author of that, but, no matter, there’s…
Deacon Greg Kandra April 30, 2023, Fourth Sunday of Easter Acts 2:14a, 36-41 Ps 23: 1-3a, 3b4, 5, 6 1 Pt 2:20b-25 Jn 10:1-10 Most of us would probably admit: we don’t know a lot of shepherds. (Where I live, in Queens, New York, they are pretty scarce.) But I met one a few…
Learning to live and celebrate this Easter season confers many benefits on us, writes Jason Osborne Many of us are better at being penitential than we are at celebrating, unfortunately. As Pope Francis said way back in 2013, “sometimes these melancholic Christians’ faces have more in common with pickled peppers than the joy of having…
The Vatican’s 1995 list of significant films is very eclectic, catholic with a small ‘c’ (meaning broad and open minded). If one theme emerges strongly from the panoply, however, it’s the damage caused by war and the importance of human fraternity. I suppose it should hardly come as a surprise – many of those who…
Most of us are familiar with that famous image of a heavenly knight plunging his spear into a serpentine creature, even if we’re not overly familiar with the mysterious hero it represents. That would be St George, who is venerated far and wide to this day, despite the lack of concrete detail we have on…
How much time is too much time online? It’s a question facing all of us in the 21st Century, as technology becomes more and more integrated into our lives. How do we balance work, shopping, reading, communicating – all the ways that we use technology – with a desire to be intentionally present in our…
If you’re at all like me, the Easter Triduum through which we’ve just passed has proven confusing at some point. We’re told Christ dies on Good Friday, and three days later, he rises again from the dead. First of all, Friday to Sunday isn’t three days by our modern reckoning. Secondly, the space between Christ’s…
In the musical Les Miserables, there’s a particularly haunting song, sung by a dying woman (Fontine) who has been crushed by virtually every unfairness that life can deal a person. Abandoned by her husband, sexually harassed by her employer, caught in abject poverty, physically ill and dying, even as her main anxiety is about what…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser
Ruadhán Jones