Month: March 2018

I used to discount the stories of the saints in my Roman Catholic upbringing, but a couple of times this week I am reminded that they are not only our inheritance. New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead pulled out an image this week to write about the March for Our Lives.The silent, head-shaven Emma Gonzalez reminded…
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I’ve been struggling with trying to be inspiring. I so believe in the power and, yes, even glory of the Holy Thursday Witnesses we in Philadelphia, and perhaps you elsewhere have been doing, and I’ve been searching and searching for something to inspire more people – like you – like you with your friends –…
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I was not going to write about this article by Ross Douthat, published on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times “Currents” section.  But half the page is such a beautiful photo I cannot resist. Pope Francis is facing the Holy Door of St. Peter’s, his hands on two bronze panels with Latin inscriptions.…
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It’s a bit difficult to see our faces in this photo of our 2015 annual Holy Thursday witness at the Cathedral of Saints Peter & Paul in Philadelphia, but really, how menacing could we possibly look? And yet, two years in a row, people, in protest to our presence, often in our faces, have held…
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I’m hearing voices! “Abraham, Abraham,” calls God’s angel, and then again, “Abraham, Abraham!” Then in our Gospel, Peter, James, and John think they see God when they actually see Elijah and Moses. But really they are only in God’s presence when they hear God’s voice. These passages made me think about voices. You know that…
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To avoid being buried alive, fairy tale author, Hans Christian Andersen, kept a note by his bed that said: “I only seem to be dead.” – from National Geographic Kids publication: Weird But True. With the above in mind, I suggest, when we feel buried alive by a smirkingly insensitive, sexist, entrenched church hierarchy, we…
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This is a quote from John Allen in Crux, who notes that every twenty years, “the Vatican has felt compelled to issue a major statement on the role of women.” Leave it up to Crux to remind us of Inter Insigniores in 1976 and Ordinatio Sacerdotalis in 1994. This time the major statement has been…
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The season of Lent can be a particularly trying time for those of us who are experiencing great sorrow. It can also be a trying time for those of us who are looking inward – and outward – to contemplate what sacrifices, what alms, what prayers we might make, give, offer up, to relieve the…
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Well, it’s not quite that bad. But it’s a bad situation. You may think it’s just in your parish, but it’s not only there. Just last week, a new book was published in Italy and Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, wrote the preface. Rita Ferrone in Commonweal…
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