Pope Francis SJ
PAPAL VISIT REPORT: Biblical Reflections on Seeing a Pope
Like many this past week, I was blessed to have the rare opportunity to see Pope Francis up close and personal during his U.S. tour. I’ve seen friends and acquaintances share their stories of their varying successes in seeing the Pope. Some got outside the U.S. Capitol building and saw him as a distant dot in a…
The Inconvenient Truth for Liberals in Laudato Si
By Guest Author Terri Aluise The Vatican is set to release Pope Francis’ much anticipated encyclical Laudato Si on Thursday. A leaked draft version of the encyclical was released earlier this week and shows that Pope Francis believes that man is the primary cause of climate change. Not surprisingly, Conservatives are already in an uproar…
Metz Yeghérn (“The Great Evil”)
In the summer of 2005, my family and I had the pleasure of visiting Dr. Mitchell Kalpakgian at his home in New Hampshire. I have followed the work of Dr. Kalpakgian since the early nineties. I first recall reading him in the New Oxford Review as a high school senior. At the time, I was being fed a steady…
Kerygma for a Magdalen Ministry
About 20 years ago a friend of mine wrote a satire of modern ecclesial life in which he parodied the Bishops of the United States in a classic inversion of priorities in which the High Holy Day of Easter took second place to a “Magdalen Ministry”–some sort of outreach where women’s contributions could be celebrated…
Miracle: St. Gennaro’s Relics Re-Vivify for Pope Francis [VIDEOS]
I used to watch the Bob and Penny Lord shows because they had a great way of traveling around and finding some great things worldwide about the Church that were really neat. I don’t recall them covering Naples and the miracle of St. Gennaro (Januarius). I can hear what they would be saying, though. I…
A Jesuit to the Core: Pope Francis Manifests Sincere Practice of Exercises
Too traditional to be understood today in American Catholicism, and despite the constant grind against him by the news, and the ill feelings generated by those within the Church, Francis is teaching well, thank God — A Jubilee of Mercy and why his thoughts of death produced it.
New! Now 36 Doctors of the Church- Armenian Narek added
Surprise! We now have 36 doctors of the Church! Reported today, Pope Francis has named St. Gregory of Narek to be a doctor of the Universal Church. This move is interesting on many levels, partly because of when Narek lived: he was born a mere 58 years before the Great Schism. So his life straddled the oncoming schism, but…
Out-Loud Discussions
In past generations, communication was limited. Society was largely agrarian and the modes of communication and the technology to deliver such to people outside one’s immediate circle was limited. It wasn’t non-existent, nor was it undesirable. Quite the contrary. Human beings are social animals and all have a desire to communicate and need to communicate. In modern times, it was the…
Pope Francis on Rabbits and Large Families
In his recent trip to the Philippines, Pope Francis spoke forcefully on marriage and the family and sparked further headlines with his comment that Catholics should not “breed like rabbits.” Lost amidst the glaring headlines that the Holy Father has instructed Catholics to stop having kids are beautiful reflections on the family and its importance…
The Legacy of Junípero Serra
Guest Patrick Laurence presents a realistic examination of Serra’s contribution to the Native Americans versus what the secular State might have done and did.