I have fallen in love twice in my life. The first time was with Katie. I fell in love with my wife two or three years before I got up the courage to ask her out. Once I had asked her out, we had a four-month courtship and twenty-five years of marriage, and counting. I love Katie as much as I ever have. People adore Katie—hey, she’s adorable—and I happen to be the lucky fool she agreed to marry. This... Read more

At the heart of the Catholic Church is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is not a symbol. The Church teaches that the Eucharist is the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. I assert this as truth, as the Church’s truth, yet the Eucharist remains an unfathomable mystery to me. I was reminded of this tonight while reading the latest post by The Anchoress. (In case She has moved on by now, and She moves fast, the post I mean... Read more

Today’s Magnificat offers a quotation from the founder of Communion and Liberation, in honor of Labor Day. Like much that Fr. Luigi Giussani wrote, it invites us to bring our faith directly into our daily working lives:We must always remind ourselves that our first work does not arise from the capacity to create new structures, but rather it is . . . a sensibility to the common and singular needs that exist: the use of your intelligence and energy to... Read more

My father came to me in a dream just before dawn this morning, and though I promised Ferde I’d turn off the blog machine until Monday, my father is a higher authority even than Ferde. In my dream my father was sick, weak with fatigue and nausea just as he was last summer, his last summer, when he was dying of melanoma. He walked toward me dressed in black and slumped into my arms and said, “Oh, my son.” I... Read more

Anyone arriving at the base of Mt. St. Helens in the weeks following the 1980 eruption would have known something huge had happened. They would have needed no photographic images of the eruption itself, like the one shown here. They would have needed no eyewitness accounts. All they would have needed to see was the thousands of bare tree trunks aligned in one direction after the primary shock hit. Something happened here, they would have been forced to conclude. Something... Read more

I first saw Ferde Rombola in the pulpit of St. Mary Star of the Sea Church in our town of Beverly, Massachusetts. He is the Monday-morning lector. As a retired professional actor, he has a powerful baritone delivery. After mass, I approached him outside church and said he reminded me of an Old Testament prophet. I think he liked that. None of us became Catholics all by ourselves. We all felt called by something, some might call it God, some... Read more

I am amazed how quickly this blog spreads and comments make their way back to me. My first post was just eighteen days ago. In fact, I began writing “Why I Am Catholic” mostly for my wife and daughters—to share with them my joy in being Catholic—and they continue to receive each of my posts automatically by e-mail. But others have been touched. It must be the work of the Holy Spirit. Or as my pal Ferde put it when... Read more

A Jesuit priest, Hopkins was virtually anonymous as a poet in his life. He gave up writing poetry when he entered the Society of Jesus, but a superior urged him to write a poem in honor of five nuns killed in a shipwreck. The result was his dense epic “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Still he earned no fame as a poet, though he continued to write, AMDG, and a friend published the first volume of his poetry after Hopkins’s... Read more

Like an ice hockey game, my spiritual life has had three periods. From birth to fifteen, I attended church with my parents—first a Congregational parish that I remember mostly as Sunday school; then an Episcopal one, where I was confirmed and served three years as a conscientious acolyte. Then I went to boarding school and fell away from Christian worship. From fifteen to fifty-six, two years ago, I was adrift with some dear friends in a life raft. At boarding... Read more