The light poles along our town’s main street are decorated with banners honoring many of the city’s veterans. One of them happens to be our next-door neighbor, a police officer who was greatly influenced to expand his service to the…
A friend texted me, asking me and my family to pray for his wife who was diagnosed with a form of cancer. I texted back the only thing I could think of to give him comfort. “Of course we will.”…
“We did it Ma. We got her to the finish line. Thank you to everyone who helped along the way.” That thank you note printed in the Mass Program for Rosie Day summarizes the success story of a friend whose…
If you’ve ever received an AMBER alert on your smart phone (from America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response network), the missing person it was about probably wasn’t anyone you knew—that you know of. That’s true with most people, which means the…
Some of history’s greatest pro football coaches were credited for promoting this philosophy: “When you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.” In non-philosophical terms, spiking a football and dancing in the end zone is just…
Gamblers have made that phrase as popular as “Put your money where your mouth is.” It’s biblical too, and the theme of this Sunday’s liturgy. Christ’s disciple James uses a far more poetic version in the second reading (Jas 2:14-18):…
People with and without faith see shame as a Catholic thing. They say it’s an instrument church authorities use to control the faithful. Tragically, our church’s sex scandals have earned several of those authorities a place of dishonor in the…
Millennials and their younger brothers and sisters might appreciate this Sunday’s Mass readings. Our kids tend to be tech savvy and they realize their intelligent devices come preloaded with software. What they may not realize is that by using these…
Many marry their faith as faithfully as they do their spouses. So the fact that the population of “Nones” (unaffiliated with any religion) is rising in the Western world along with the divorce rate shouldn’t be surprising. A Pew Research…
Jesus didn’t have much use for hypocrites—those intelligent “authorities” who liked telling people how to live but relished even more representing themselves as something they weren’t: wise. We have modern-day Pharisees in every field today—politics, showbiz, science, even in our…