Category: Advancing the Kingdom

This year the arrival of the feast of the Holy Family so immediately after Christmas highlights a fundamental relationship between the two truths they celebrate, almost as though the two truths are inextricably linked. The first is the reality of God’s love. At Christmas those…

Gaudeamus Igitur (‘therefore, let us rejoice’). Readers of a certain age – fewer and fewer to be sure – will recognize these words as the opening lyric of a drinking song popular among university students years ago. Today is Gaudete Sunday, the third of the…

Because she died before Pop married, my siblings and I never knew our paternal grandmother. She was something of a giant in our eyes, maybe because our acquaintance with her was limited to family lore. Born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century into…

“We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks”.  What does it mean to glorify God? As implied in the Gloria, that ancient liturgical prayer which contains these words, to glorify must be different than to bless, or…

A national news station recently reported that U.S. passports will soon list three options for citizens to identify their sex: male, female, and other. Does this decision cause anyone else to pause and wonder? Where is the limit to such self-definition? Will we soon be…

In anticipation of her being confirmed next Spring my granddaughter’s parish provided her with an abundance of materials about the sacrament. Included among them is the YouTube link to Bishop Robert Barron’s address to the 2020 Los Angeles Religious Education Congress titled “The Real Presence…

Has ethical preaching supplanted eschatological preaching? Are we so caught up in making the most of now that we forget we are created to live in eternal beatitude with God? Even after the fracture of Christendom around the middle of the last millennium heirs of…

Years ago in some philosophy course at college I recall reading one author’s prophecy that mankind (so we were called then) will someday have to choose between totalitarianism and charity. Put metaphorically, will the wheels that make the world go around be greased by resources…

Recently I read that fewer than half of Italy’s Catholics believe life is eternal, that is that there is ‘life after death’. How many of us in our country who identify ourselves as Christians are of like mind?  What, if any, are our thoughts on…

One sometimes hears the phrase ‘the consolation of hope’. It is soothing in its implication, particularly so in such troubled times as ours. Less frequently encountered is the phrase ‘the consolation of truth’. Equally salubrious, this latter expression is perhaps more forceful. The consolation of…