Photo: Zac Boesch/St. Louis Review From The St. Louis Review: From inside a dark home, through a cracked door, a faceless voice tells Jim G’Sell, “Go away. I’m pagan.” G’Sell walked away and said “Hey, we need to pray for her, ‘Lord, she’s suffering because she doesn’t know You and maybe next time we knock on her door, maybe she’ll be a little more receptive.'” As part of the door-to-door evangelization ministry at St. Anthony of Padua Parish in High... Read more
From Christian Post: A Roman Catholic priest and director of a diocesan newspaper in Malaysia is facing prosecution for using the word “Allah” to refer to God in his publication, something that is prohibited by law in the Muslim majority nation. “The situation is quite serious. There is great concern in the Catholic Church because the story has taken a turn for the worse,” Friar Augustine Julian, a missionary of the Brothers of Christian Schools in Kuala Lumpur and former... Read more
Do you remember where you were? Neither do I. But what happened then has dramatically altered how we live, communicate, interact. It changed everything. HuffPo explains: Seven years ago on Jan. 9 Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Jobs said Apple wanted to grab 1 percent of the global market for cell phones by the end of 2008. Today Apple holds 12.9 percent of market share for cell phones and, more significantly, has totally revolutionized the digital marketplace. In the... Read more
A remarkable testament, from the website Aleteia: The Rev. Fabrizio De Michino was born in Naples on 8 September 1982. Nearly 3,000 people gathered in Ponticelli to bid him a final farewell at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Snows, where he served as a parochial vicar. Fr. Fabrizio suffered greatly in his last few months, which he lived with great faith and with strength of mind. He always had a smile and words of comfort for his family... Read more
I wonder how the kids feel about this. Details from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: The digital age giveth and it taketh away. For students in northern climes, the ritual of turning on the TV or radio on winter mornings, aquiver with the anticipation of a snow day declaration — indeed the snow day itself — may be threatened by the inexorable march of technological progress. Several local Catholic schools have substituted “Cyber Days” for snow days, taking advantage of ubiquitous Internet... Read more
You may remember that they offered this course last year. Deborah Wilhelm contacted me over the holidays to let me know she’s offering another chance to hone your skills from home, starting later this month. Interested? Details: Description Preaching improvement entails practice–and expert and peer response to that practice. Alternating instruction, conversation, practice and feedback, this 10-week course provides students, both lay and ordained, with a theology of and formation in preaching. It includes preparation for and the work of... Read more
I needed this today. A great and inspiring ad from P&G for the Sochi Olympics. Watch and share. Read more
A priest friend sent this my way. You may want to wait until Spring to put it into practice. DGK. +++ Pastoral Note #2141995 The Rite of Blessing Automobiles Among the many blessings of the Second Vatican Council, the newly revised Book of Blessings ranks as one of the newest but most promising. Yet by its very nature it will require frequent revision, updating and additions in order to bring it into greater conformity with the other liturgical books of... Read more
I would normally ignore something like this. But when it appears in a media outlet as prominent as U.S. News & World Report, this demands attention. The author, Jamie Stiehm, takes issue with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s New Year’s Eve ruling in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor—and then unleashes what can only be described as a bigoted rant. Try to imagine a sentence like this appearing in any mainstream publication: Jews often try to impose their... Read more
Details from Reuters: Reported cases of Christians killed for their faith around the world doubled in 2013 from the year before, with Syria accounting for more than the whole global total in 2012, according to an annual survey. Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 “martyr” killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said. “This is a very minimal count based... Read more
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