Category: Advancing the Kingdom

Readers who recognize the term ‘Frassati Fridays’ are either members of the Catholic cognoscenti or students at Martin Saints Classical High School in East Norriton, Pennsylvania. Otherwise, how would they recognize the Frassati reference? Born in 1901, Pier Giorgio Frassati belonged to a prosperous family…

With mixed emotions, we report on the death of our first Trustee Emeritus. George Creel, whose obituary is attached here, left this world on May 7th at the venerable age of ninety-two.   George was an early and longtime booster of the National Catholic Community Foundation.…

It is a fair question. Those familiar with the services of the National Catholic Community Foundation may understandably ask it. After all, NCCF, now completing its third decade of ministry, has enabled donors in the United States to support a broad array of charitable organizations…

Have you noticed how over the past half-century the trend in religiously affiliated real estate has been one of secularization?  Churches have become theatres, chapels boutique salons, and convents office buildings. Even some one-time Catholic campuses have become industrial parks. Could it be the trend…

‘Ambiguity’. ‘Adventure’. In the visiting priest’s homily at Mass last Sunday in our local parish these two words galvanized the congregation.  Faith in God is like marriage. It is a covenant more than a contract, a relationship whose ambiguity, while not without risk, is pregnant…

Through his fund at NCCF, one of our advisors recently initiated a distribution to the Saint Ignatius Parish in Msaladzi, Madagascar. He has forwarded to us the following response and two photos from the pastor, Fr. Heribert Muller. Readers will be as moved as we…

Though we may gainsay the characterization, we Americans are romantic. Perhaps our sesquicentennial is an opportune time to remind ourselves of this feature. We are romantic because we demonstrate and celebrate the mysteriously symbiotic relationship between freedom and purpose. We understand that together they are…

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, (Deut. 30:19) With these words in his final…

What saint is associated with a sword and rosary? Most hagiographers would likely name as their first choice Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century nobleman who, after being a soldier for Spain became as ‘soldier for Christ’ and founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in…

In the welter of today’s unsettled world those of us old enough to remember the Baltimore Catechism might in retrospect be struck by the astonishing simplicity of its pedagogy. To the question ‘why did God create us’ its brief answer was ‘to know, love and…