One of the children making their first confession made a mistake in the Act of Contrition and said, “I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to end my life.” Sorrow for sin is one  thing, and our Lord did say, “Unless you hate your own life you cannot be my disciple”, but that’s taking things a bit far. It reminds me of one of the requests entered into the prayer request book at school,... Read more

What if every priest and every Catholic read this passage from Hebrews before Mass? This is what Mass is about: But what you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a ‘first-born son’ and a citizen of heaven. You have come to God himself, the supreme Judge, and been placed with spirits of... Read more

In a previous post I spoke about the evils of divorce, and a couple of people commented on the tough cases. They agreed with me about the evils of divorce, but said sometimes the relationship and family life is so terribly awful that divorce is the only option. I am certainly sympathetic to such appeals, and I know how very terrible family life can be when one partner in the marriage is insane or addicted or just plain evil. When... Read more

…hang all the law and the prophets. The two things are the two essential commandments that we love God and love our neighbor.  One of the problems in the church is between two groups of people: the God lovers and the people lovers. The God lovers focus on liturgy, spirituality, prayer, adoration, consecrated life, vocation, religion and worship. The people lovers focus on peace and justice, the church as the pilgrim people of God, the fellowship of the brothers and... Read more

I just got news from Leslie Kauffman at Kauffman Publishing that she is going ahead with the publication of my volume of poems later this month. It’s called A Sudden Certainty – Priest Poems. The cover is pictured here and is done by Chris Pelicano–a parishioner at St Mary’s who also did the illustrations for Praying the Rosary for Inner Healing. If you’d like to read some samples of my poetry, click on the ‘My Poetry’ label for a link... Read more

Palm Sunday Read more

Check out the processions with hooded people in Spain. Can anyone out there explain to this poor convert what all this is about? Read more

Fr Ray has some cool pictures of Palm Sunday at the Vatican. This is my favorite. Boy, I am so jealous of those purple birettas. Read more

This afternoon I con-validated a marriage for the first time. It was very short and sweet, but it reminded me of all the glory of marriage and horror of divorce. Some time ago a friend of mine was contemplating divorce. He and his wife were having a hard time and he wanted out. So I asked him, “Jimmy, who benefits from this divorce?” “I do.” he said. “Anybody else?” “The kids.” “No Jimmy, the kids do not benefit. All the research shows that the... Read more