In recent months and years, I’ve become aware that the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (also known as the Tridentine or Traditional Latin) Mass is becoming increasingly popular again.  I am very pleased, because I definitely love this form of the liturgy and have loved it for years.  My husband and I even had our wedding celebrated in this form!  However, we don’t attend the Extraordinary Form exclusively.  We are very blessed to belong to a beautiful parish where the Ordinary Form (Novus Ordo), Extraordinary Form, and even the Anglican Use (a valid Catholic Mass modeled aft ..read more

In recent months and years, I’ve become aware that the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (also known as the Tridentine or Traditional Latin) Mass is becoming increasingly popular again.  I am very pleased, because I definitely love this form of the liturgy and have loved it for years.  My husband and I even had our wedding celebrated in this form!  However, we don’t attend the Extraordinary Form exclusively.  We are very blessed to belong to a beautiful parish where the Ordinary Form (Novus Ordo), Extraordinary Form, and even the Anglican Use (a valid Catholic Mass modeled aft ..read more

Laura Berquist, the founder of Mother of Divine Grace School, tells a story that many years ago when her children were small, she was teaching an eighth-grade CCD class, and there was a lesson about the early Christian martyrs of Rome. Naturally, she praised the early martyrs’ courage and dedication. One boy in the class objected to the martyrs’ decision to die for Christ, arguing that “God wants us to be happy.  I think religion is okay as long as it doesn’t interfere with your life.”  Mrs. Berquist suggested that religion is life- that what we believe determines how we live and wha ..read more

There’s no denying that this Lent that is now drawing to a close has been the most unusual one ever.  It’s so strange now to think back only six weeks to Ash Wednesday when life still seemed normal, when we all thought that we were entering into another ordinary Lent like every other year.  I remember frantically hurrying off to Ash Wednesday Mass, and later going to Long John Silvers with my family for Ash Wednesday fish dinner.  The little restaurant was full of other people with ashes on their foreheads.  Little would I have guessed that before Lent was over, dining-in a ..read more

Dear Saint Pio of Pietrelcina: A little more than 100 years ago, on September 20, 1918, you received the Wounds of Christ.  You were 31 years old at the time and had been a priest for eight years. This was at an extremely grim moment in human history; the bloodiest, most expansive, and probably most utterly pointless war ever known to man had been ravaging for the past four years.  It would be another nearly two months before the nations signed an armistice for this devastating war, followed later by a horrible treaty that would do far more harm than good.  And as if that weren ..read more

In recent years, especially since the 2016 presidential election, I’ve been noticing a lot of debate, or should I say internal fighting, about what it means to be pro-life.  Gone are the days when there appeared to be a single, unified “pro-life movement” with mutual support all around and a shared common goal of ending abortion and preventing euthanasia.  Perhaps such a unified movement never truly existed to begin with.  Perhaps there was always internal fighting and I simply do not remember it or was too young to be aware of it when it was going on.  But one way or anoth ..read more

In my previous post, The Mere Name Doesn’t Make It Christmas, I discussed PragerU’s video Just Say Merry Christmas.  Today I would like to follow up with some clarifications about including non-Christians in our celebration and using the greeting “Merry Christmas” while out and about.  There is a much stronger reason for doing so than what Prager discusses.             For all my objections to Dennis Prager’s presentation, I do of course still agree with his conclusion, that “Merry Christmas” is the thing to say.  One reason ..read more

Three years ago, though I only saw it for the first time last year, Dennis Prager of PragerU put out a video entitled ‘Just Say Merry Christmas.’  For those who don’t know, PragerU is a conservative media outlet that, among other things, puts short video lessons on YouTube featuring different speakers and discussing various current issues.  I myself tend to agree with PragerU’s message in some instances and not so much in others. And this particular video I found fairly interesting, but it gave me some food for thought that I would like to share. To summarize, Prager asserts that the ..read more

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