I attended my first post-reversion First Communion last Saturday. My friends’ daughter Sylvia wrote and shared with me a terrific journal entry at the end of the day. Favorite observation: “The Wine was much better than I thought it would be,” which if you think about it is probably what the guests at that wedding in Cana wrote in their journals afterward, too. Inspired by Sylvia, my reflections on the event. We offer you these gifts . . . In... Read more

There are much better photos of Saturday nights’s Supermoon, but this is how I saw it, turning the night to day and looking like nothing so much as an enormous Host elevated over the Chalice of the world as I left my young friend Sylvia’s First Communion party. And because every moon is super and our sister and full no matter from what perspective it appears and a reflection of its Creator, some Mechthild of Magdeburg (from Book 8 of... Read more

Today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States–or, as President Obama put it in his either-ironic-or-clueless-depending-on-how-much-slack-you-give-him presidential proclamation, our National Day of Giving Thanks for the Freedom of Religion that Allows Us to Abstain from Praying. There used to be an interfaith prayer breakfast hosted by the White House on this day, but the President has chosen to exercise his right to abstain from eating food that might have gotten blessing all over it, and canceled that.... Read more

Daily, daily sing to Mary Sing, my soul, her praises due All her feasts, her actions worship With the heart’s devotion true Lost in wond’ring contemplation Be her majesty professed Call her Mother, call her Virgin Happy Mother! Virgin blest! ~ May hymn from the St Gregory Hymnal, lyrics recalled from (50+ years of) memory A day late. I wanted to post about this yesterday, but I was too busy trying to catch up with my real jobs (promoting Catholic... Read more

Catholics are reminded to keep Friday as a day of penance, a little Lent all year long. Although it’s no longer the abstinence fest it was in my childhood–pining here for the fleshpots of Mom’s tuna noodle casserole and “Welsh rarebit” (Velveeta on English muffins, run under the broiler)–Friday still offers a weekly 24-hour window of opportunity to review my life and make better choices. Today, I’m giving up opera. Not real opera, of which I am deeply fond, having... Read more

When I was confirmed in 1963 as a 12-year-old seventh grader, then-Auxiliary Bishop Timothy Manning bestowed a gentle slap on my face as a sign of my induction as a soldier of Christ. His homily, preached to a pimply gang of barely pubescent Hollywood kids, was a lot less gentle. “You are growing up in a moral cesspool,” he told us. “You are in a war for your immortal souls.” Welcome to the Church Militant. On that spring day, the... Read more

Yes, I am celebrating Earth Day. And no, in spite of what you read in my blog or in other people’s comboxes, this does not (necessarily, anyway) make me a pagan disciple of Gaia-worshiping hippie nuns with degrees in creation-centered theology, thank you. I am also not going to use this space to trigger a combox steel-cage match on global warming, the wisdom of filling the earth and subduing it, or the outrage of being deprived of my inalienable American... Read more

This morning I did something I thought I’d never find myself doing. Watching the TODAY Show, I screamed at a woman who had been emotionally abused by her husband. And if I could scream at her in person, I would. There was Bernadette Sugrim, blow-dried and made-up and smiling, seated on the interview couch with her two children, talking to an empathetic Matt Lauer about how she had claimed the courage last summer, after years of marriage, to turn her... Read more

. . . I may be admonished, by the thought of my vanishing years, that it is high time to flee from Babylon. ~ Petrarch, “On the death of Laura” In the wake of yesterday’s announcement of the CDF’s intention to impose reforms on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, I wrote an angry post. It was not as angry a post as it started out to be, but it was as much anger as I’ve directed at the Church... Read more

Honest to You, God, I don’t get You. I mean, if You had told me anytime before noon today that I would end up feeling sympathy (a weird, twisted, highly reluctant sympathy, but sympathy all the same) for a bunch of schismatic anti-Semites, I’d have guffawed. But then came the release of the public report on the latest . . . I don’t even know what to call it, though Rocco Palma uses the term inquest, which is generally used... Read more