In the immediate post-New Testament period, after the event of Jesus Christ, the early Christian community was faced with a mammoth challenge. They needed to reimagine, even to reinvent, their understanding of God. A tall order! The traditional Jewish conception of God did not work anymore in the light of the New Testament talk of…
Q: As a divorced, over-50 Catholic man with an annulment, I met a Catholic woman my age with the same history of divorce and annulment. After dating for a while we began to talk about marriage and went to see our priest. He asked if we were open to the idea of having kids. We…
The classical atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Frederick Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach, taught that all religious experience is simply human projection. God does not exist. We create God, and we create him in our image and likeness, ultimately to serve our needs. We create the notion of God because we need a…
The question I proposed as the title for this article was framed when I was at a vigil Mass in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the city centre recently, and it was a question that was running around as I saw more people come into the chapel for confessions and to attend Mass. However, are…
Nothing says “pilgrimage, not holiday” more than sleeping on the floor of an airport. The night before my early flight to Rome for the canonisation of our two newest saints, there was a certain sense of silent solidarity between all those who, for one reason or another, had to find somewhere comfortable, or tolerable, to…
Tthis week in 1988 I began my studies for the priesthood. My mother bought me a crucifix for my room as a going-away present. I didn’t realise then how much I would come to depend on it for solace in some tough days to follow. The best mental health advice I ever heard was from…
Even in the mess, God is beneath it all, catching the pieces as they fall, says Fr Chris Hayden These are challenging times for the Church. Times, of course, have always been challenging; it was our Lord himself who said, “In the world you wil have trouble” (John 16:33), and that biblical realism has never…
It would not be atypical in contemporary parlance to describe a significant friend or other person we know as a ‘living saint.’ But what do we mean when calling one a ‘saint’ and how that person is so recognised by the Church? Catholicism’s 2,000-year history has seen the process for the proclamation of saints develop…
Last Sunday, September 7, Pope Leo XIV canonised Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati as saints in Rome. There is an Italian phrase associated with Pier Giorgio Frassati that has taken on a deeper significance over time. ‘Verso l’alto’ translates as ‘towards the heights’. It was scribbled by him on a photograph in 1925 and…
Pope Leo XIV reaffirms the natural family as the key to peace and harmony in society, writes Fr Kevin O’Reilly OP Shortly after his election to the See of Peter, Pope Leo XIV’s stated during an audience that family is “founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman.” While orthodox Catholics welcomed…
Fr Ronald Rolheiser