Our parish will be showing a video for the Annual Catholic Appeal this Sunday. Homilies will be brief. Here’s my homily, however, from the 2nd Sunday of Lent in 2008. How is your Lent going? Right about now is when the newness and fervor start to wear off. We’ve left the ashes in the bathroom sink – or maybe on the pillow. The things we gave up – chocolate, TV, deserts – are starting to look better and better. Absence... Read more
This may be the only situation quite like this in the United States. Certainly, the recent parish history is—to put it mildly—out of the ordinary. Details from The Washington Post: Some members of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill., dare to hope that Pope Francis can save their parish after an awfully rough couple of years. Their beloved longtime pastor was forced out by the bishop in the summer of 2012 for improvising prayers during Mass. Just when... Read more
Photo: Eddie Moore/Albuqurque Journal From The Albuquerque News: Seventy-five-year-old Dave Burgett shows up four or five times a week in Questa to shovel sand through a screen, winnowing out the large chunks so it can be used to make adobe bricks for the massive, weathered old church behind him. He is not alone. Dozens of parishioners and others are using their smarts and their brawn to make a once-collapsing shell of a church if not new, at least functional, to... Read more
This is news to me: The cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris is exposing relics of the Passion of Christ for the veneration of the faithful: the Crown of Thorns, a piece of the True Cross and one of the nails of the Passion will be exposed each Friday of the month at 3 pm, each Friday of Lent at the same time, and on Good Friday from 10 am to 5 pm. The veneration of the instruments of the Passion of... Read more
From NCR: Hired less than a year ago, Kim Daniels has left her post as the spokeswoman for the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The conference confirmed the departure Wednesday, saying Daniels, the first to hold such a position, left by her own choice earlier this year. “Kim left in January to be at home fulltime with her family,” Mercy Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the conference, wrote in an email Wednesday.... Read more
An interesting turn of events across the pond, via London’s The Tablet: A deacon who runs a Catholic website that criticised bishops, theologians and lay groups for being out of step with church teaching has been asked to stop posting material. Deacon Nick Donnelly has been asked by the Bishop of Lancaster to stop posting on his Protect the Pope site and undergo a “period of prayer and reflection”. A spokesman for the Diocese of Lancaster said that Bishop Campbell had asked... Read more
A young deacon I know who will be ordained a priest in June sent me an email the other day, describing his life these days as “formation on steroids.” I reprint part of it below with his permission. If you want to know what the life of a seminarian is like, take a look: This week I practiced Mass with EP I (the Roman canon) and even had four concelebrants (who were practicing concelebration) around me. I later heard a... Read more
I spent part of last week in Ohio, and in four days visited three dioceses: Cleveland, Youngstown and Toledo. A highlight was having a chance to meet some of the deacons of Toledo, where I gave a talk to them and their wives about my own vocation and my career in the media. We all met at St. Alphonsus Parish in Peru, Ohio. It’s a gorgeous setting—and a noteworthy shrine. St. John Neumann lived there for a time in a... Read more
From The Washington Post: Congressional leaders have invited Pope Francis to address a joint session of Congress during his expected visit to the United States next year. Francis, who marked his first anniversary as leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics today, is reportedly planning to visit the U.S. next year in order to attend a global conference on families scheduled for late September in Philadelphia. The Holy See has not confirmed the trip. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), as the constitutional officer... Read more
Some ingenious advertising from a few years ago in Chicago: That’s a classic example of “outside the box” advertising, and you can find numerous other examples at this blog. They are fanciful and sometimes delightful. Like this billboard for Bic razors: Or this: See ’em all. Advertising—even something as simple as a billboard—doesn’t have to be predictable and dull. Meantime, speaking of thinking outside the box, how about “thinking outside the circle”? From Japan, a piece of ingenuity known as the... Read more
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