In his reflections on the Sunday Gospel during the Regina Coeli, Pope Francis recalls Jesus' words to the Apostles, “I do not call you servants any longer, but friends," and encourages us to grow in friendship with the Lord and sharing it with others. At the same time, he offers prayers for flood victims in Brazil and for dialogue and peace in Ukraine, Palestine, and Israel ..read more

In the Sunday Gospel, Jesus cuts right through the modern Western tendency to place love in opposition with law, and law in opposition with joy. Jesus joins all three concepts and summons us to a new attitude. Note how the Lord joins the three concepts of love, law, and joy. This is precisely the opposite of what Western culture does. The best that Western culture will admit of law is that it is a necessary evil ..read more

On the night before he died, Jesus was thinking about our joy, not his pain — and he shared a secret that we only now may be ready to understand. The Church has been looking back on that night for weeks now, because what Jesus said in his Farewell Discourse on Holy Thursday reveals the deepest meaning of what he wants us to do now, on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B ..read more

What has happened in Catholic moral theology with the publication of Amoris Laetitia? Some claim that everything has changed. In particular, they argue that one can no longer refer to Veritatis Splendor, an encyclical that has supposedly become obsolete because there has allegedly been a shift from the rigorism of “moral absolutes ..read more

Sometimes when you are part of a subculture, it is really important to step out of it or to be shown what it looks like from the outside. In the United States, to be a Mass-attending Catholic is to be part of a religious subculture (please, spare me the discussion of whether Catholicism is the ‘real’ culture and thus America is the subculture). American Catholics were given the chance to see themselves from another point of view ..read more

I am convinced the primary reason Flannery O’Connor was so serious about her Catholic faith is that it was the one place where she experienced being seen and understood and loved; it was the one place in which she felt that she fit—that she belonged, because at the center of Catholicism is a crucified misfit ..read more

Flannery O’Connor spent most of her life living on Andalusia farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, with her mother. From her imagination emerged some of the most unforgettable characters in 20th-century American literature: Hulga, the one-legged intellectual who fancies herself better than the country bumpkins that surround her; Ruby Turpin, a proud farmer’s wife who categorizes people by race and class; a one-armed drifter who marries a dimwitted girl and abandons her at a truck stop ..read more

The meaning of reparation in the Church is the focus of an international conference organized in Rome to mark the 350th anniversary of the Apparitions of the Heart of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary of Alacoque in Paray-le-Monial, a small town in the Bourgogne region of eastern France ..read more

Today I learned that the US Navy traditionally allows the infant children of crew members to be baptized in the upturned ship's bell. A 2021 Navy press release about such a baptism onboard the USS Kearsarge says that this tradition was borrowed from the Royal Navy which permitted the such rites in foreign ports either in or under the bell ..read more

Chapter 4 of the Book of Exodus contains one of the strangest passages in all of Sacred Scripture. Verses 18-26 describe how Moses, living in exile in the land of Midian, goes to his father-in-law Jethro to request permission to return to his own people back in Egypt. Jethro consents, and so Moses sets off together with his wife, Zipporah, and their sons ..read more