The Church and the Public Square

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…

New Pulpits

“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…

Networking

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…

The efficacy of dreams

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…

A precious witness

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…

Campus Radicals

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:

Venerable antiquity

More than likely most Catholics in the United States consider the Catholic Church to be the Roman Catholic Church and think that what makes it ‘Catholic’ is the universality manifested in its presence throughout the world. This is a limited understanding. A fuller understanding of…

Who versus What

The liturgical year will end in a few weeks with the feast of Christ the King. In the modern world the religious imagery of a kingdom, as in ‘Thy kingdom come,” may seem odd since it refers to a system of social organization long since…