Author: Dana Robinson

For many of our non-Catholic friends it is an anomaly. Some even consider it borderline idolatry. But, for Catholics the veneration of the Jewish girl who became the mother of Jesus and the Mother of God is a practice that began in the early centuries…

Several months ago this column under the heading “Venerable Antiquity” reported on the Maronite Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in communion with the Holy See. Word has arrived today that following the resignation of the esteemed and elderly Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir, a successor has…

Much has been written in recent years about the exodus of so many in the United States from the Catholic Church. Indeed, it has been observed that while Catholics make up the largest denomination in America, the second largest comprises ex-Catholics.

Agnes Orcutt, 103, has been living at New Cassel Retirement Center for five years. Her family encouraged her to move to the Catholic assisted living facility after her neighborhood of 70 years became more dangerous and her home was robbed five times.

While we Christians are taught to be “in the world” but not “of the world,” we are encouraged by our faith – indeed required by it – to change the world. This is what it means to be the “light” that guides, the “yeast” that…

“In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.” If we contemplate this declaration that opens the Gospel of John we develop a profound appreciation for the identity of the word as the fundamental means of communication with…

Duc in Altum. Many will recall these written words of Pope John Paul II who, citing the fifth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, urges us to be trusting and bold as we “put out into deep water” in order to grow and to develop and to…

Since its earliest days when its Greco-Roman branches grafted themselves on to its Judaic roots, Christianity has advocated the pursuit of truth through education. While it is true that in the course of the ensuing millennia some “branches” of Christianity have eschewed education as a…

Catholics in the United States of America will in the not too distant future witness a most edifying blossoming of the faith. It is a blossoming of a tree whose roots go back as far as the mid-16th century Florida. In more recent years its…

A priest in the Diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey, kindly passed on the following message from Brian Flanagan, president of the Catholic Student Association at Rutgers University: