We’re only about a week away from Lent, and so the Church is getting serious about our preparation, placing before us the ultimate consequences of our either doing God’s will or failing to do it. Johnny and Mary Mullins are here with us today, to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary, and we might wonder why [...]
Just before we started reading the weekday Gospels of the Passion of Christ in preparation for Lent, we heard a few days’ worth of apocalyptic readings from the Gospel of Mark. This Saturday we have another Gospel of end-time scenarios, this time from St Luke (21:8-9, 25-36). What is the Church trying to tell us? [...]
Let us understand the fullness of the meaning of virginity. To be virginal is not only to maintain a certain type of bodily integrity, and here is where we can have a more spiritual connection to the Blessed Virgin. Most people in this world are not called to be virginal or celibate, so most people [...]
[I wrote this article about three years ago for our monastery newsletter—I didn’t know I had any more stuff that wasn’t already recycled for the blog!—and since I’ve been writing and thinking and praying about Our Lady quite a bit since last April, I thought it would be good to share with you as much [...]
Sometimes the Lord gave his teachings only to his disciples. Sometimes He gave them also to the crowds and multitudes. And sometimes, as in today’s Gospel (Lk 20:45 – 21:4), He gave them to his disciples, intending that the rest of the people overhear what He said to them. So let us now overhear Jesus’ [...]
I mentioned a while back, when recounting the near-death experience of a woman who was destined for Hell but was mercifully brought back to this world so that she could testify to her experience, that I’d share something about the lessons to be learned from her experience of judgment and of the presence and glory [...]
Do you believe in Christ? Or do you “live by faith in the Son of God” (Gal. 2:20)? The two do not necessarily mean the same thing, though if you are in fact doing the latter you are also thereby doing the former. Belief and faith are not identical, and the difference can have eternal [...]
In the Epistle today (2Tim. 3:10-15), St Paul tells us that the “sacred writings are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” So we can be sure that the instruction we receive from Christ Jesus Himself in the Gospel (Lk. 18:10-14), will be for our salvation, if we will but listen [...]
We hear in the Gospel (Lk 18:1-8) a parable of Jesus that is recounted only by St Luke. As this evangelist sometimes does, he gives us a little hint as to what the parable is about, in case we wouldn’t get it. So he begins by saying that this parable is meant to encourage us [...]
A friend recently pointed me toward an interesting account of reported apparitions of Our Lady in India, from the mid-1990s to 2002. She is called Our Lady of Kanjikode (or Kanchikode) because of the region in which she appeared. There are evidently a number of miraculous events associated with these apparitions, and there are quite [...]
