What should you do if someone in the Communion line chooses to kneel to receive? The short answer: give them Communion. And leave it at that. There’s been some discussion about this today on social media; a communicant tells of kneeling to receive recently, and being lectured by the priest after Mass that “we stand at this church…the bishops want us to stand.” Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Anyone distributing Communion needs to be aware of this, from the 2012 GIRM: The norm established for the Dioceses of... Read more

From Australia:  The Islamic State has hijacked a Sydney church website and replaced its homepage with a graphic video and threatening message. The video relayed footage of gruesome deaths of Islamic State victims who have been beheaded, shot and even burned alive in the Middle East. ‘Hacked by Islamic State,’ text on the black homepage read on the Our Lady of Mercy Syriac Catholic Church website, based in Concord in Sydney’s west. ‘We don’t negotiate except with cannon, we don’t... Read more

Could America be next? Maybe. At least one presidential candidate is proposing it.  Details:  France is likely to close up to 160 mosques in the coming months as part of a nationwide police operation under the state of emergency which allows places of worship that promote radical views to be shut down, one of the country’s chief imams has said. Following news that three mosques have already been closed since the November 13 attacks on the capital, Hassan El Alaoui, who is... Read more

Then this is for you: a great overview on the diaconate has just been published in The Brooklyn Tablet. It comes from Deacon Jorge Gonzalez, the director of the diaconate program in my diocese, Brooklyn: The Deacon is a man of faith called by the Church to serve God and God’s people as an official representative of the Church in service to others. Deacons share in Christ’s mission and grace in a special way.  The sacrament of Holy Orders marks... Read more

This seems pretty unusual to me: A father filed a lawsuit against a Catholic grade school in Glendale on behalf of his teenage daughter, alleging she was wrongfully expelled following false rumors of sexual misconduct. Roberto Pangilinan claims that his daughter, who had attended Holy Family Grade School for nine years, was expelled during her last semester of eighth grade after she reported being bullied by her peers, according to the complaint filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior... Read more

A fascinating piece of detective work, reported in The New York Times: The new crisp, acidic and mineral white from a high-end Israeli winery was aged for eight months — or, depending on how you look at it, at least 1,800 years. The wine, called marawi and released last month by Recanati Winery, is the first commercially produced by Israel’s growing modern industry from indigenous grapes. It grew out of a groundbreaking project at Ariel University in the occupied West... Read more

Vatican Radio has the scoop:   Pope Francis blessed a mobile chapel built into a car –  an “Autocappella” –  belonging  to the “Marian Mission of the Rosary of the Shrine of Pompeii” just before the Wednesday General Audience. The chapel carries an Icon of the Virgin of Pompeii to Dioceses around the world, and aims to carry out evangelization based on the Marian devotion of the Rosary. Missions organized by the Shrine of Pompeii bring copies of the icon... Read more

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the martyrdom of four women who served as missionaries in El Salvador.  In 2009, I used their story as a springboard to talk about missionaries and sacrifice for my homily on World Mission Sunday. That homily is reposted below. +++ Anyone who lives and works around Brooklyn knows Bishop Ford High School, right off the Prospect Expressway.  And I imagine a lot of Catholics who live in the diocese know the story of Bishop Francis Xavier Ford:... Read more