Discerning a vocation: What not to do...

What makes the ‘Star Wars’ theme so epic? A technical breakdown...

The 7 best portable grills you can buy...

Love Lifted Me: A homily for the Ascension of the Lord...
Msgr. Charles Pope
In more dioceses than not, the Feast of the Ascension is celebrated this Sunday. The liturgist in me regrets the move from Thursday, but here we are any way. Let’s ascend with the Lord, three days late! This marvelous feast is not merely about something that took place two thousand years ago, for though Christ our head has ascended, we the members of His body are ascending with Him...

The icy Antarctic village where you must have your appendix removed before moving in...

The world needs COVID-19 vaccines. It may also be overestimating their power...

3 profound things Jesus revealed to Julian of Norwich about a hazelnut...
Regis Martin
Imagine you’re having an encounter with someone really quite special. Not an avatar, for heaven sake, whose existence is entirely unreal even as you create one after another amid the sad solipsisms of cyberspace. But an actual human being, a someone with whom real presence is possible. A person, in fact, so captivating and close that nothing can get in the way to block the perfect unity of the experience. “I to my beloved, my beloved unto me.” It doesn’t get much better than that. An ideal intimacy, in short, for which nothing in this world can match the joy and the harmony it brings. And not because the two of you are identifiably the same. But because neither of you is expected to replicate the other, thus reducing real unity to a state of dull uniform sameness. In other words, it’s not about self-love, which is unfulfilling, but love of the other as other.

Opening salvos in Pope Francis’ financial ‘Reform 2.0’...
John Allen
Facing both a looming economic crisis and reminders that the anti-financial scandal measures adopted to date haven’t been fully effective, Pope Francis and his Vatican team this week have moved to try to defuse the bomb before it goes off, closing several Swiss holding companies responsible for portions of its assets and reallocating internal control over financial data collection.

Bishops should stop trying to be “players” in the larger socio-political order, and start putting God’s house in order...
Jeff Mirus
Phil Lawler made several excellent points in Rendering to Caesar in an epidemic: the limits of authority. We agree that it is not quite fair to make adverse judgments against the bishops simply for complying with civil restrictions designed to control the pandemic. But as Phil pointed out, there is certainly good reason to be concerned about the general deference of our bishops to the dominant culture, as frequently represented by civil authority.

Protecting Grandma after the pandemic: The secret war on the elderly...
Rick Becker
Back in March — remember March? It was like 100 years ago; a thousand years ago — yes, back in March, I reposted an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal called, “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They say?” It was by a couple of Stanford medical researchers, Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya, who were pushing back against the COVID-19 panic. I’m an RN, and I suspected early on that this new, highly contagious disease would be deadly...

After the death of its Grand Master, tensions resurface in the Order of Malta...
Edward Pentin
The death last month of the Order of Malta’s grand master, Fra’ Giacomo Dalla Torre del Tempio di Sanguinetto, has sparked internal discussion over who could succeed him, while at the same time reigniting intrigues and painful tensions between those pushing to modernize the order and others who believe in its traditional character. Dalla Torre, a kindly and highly cultured librarian who did much for the poor and came from a noble family in Treviso...

23 dangerous things you should let your kids do...

Mystery is attractive, and curiosity can lead people to Christ...

Who knew? Who cares? Well, there is no such thing as the “Catholic Church of Illinois”...
Terry Mattingly
Week after week, I get emails from ticked-off readers who have seen run-of-the-mill mistakes in stories about religion. A few times a year I write posts about these cries for help. The typical writer tries to imagine, to cite one example, a newspaper publishing a story containing a reference to the St. Louis Cardinals playing in the American League, as opposed to being one of the most famous franchises in the National League...

Getting angry makes us happy. God says no...

Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu, Nepal, for the first time in living memory...

Is it “Holy, holy, holy (pause) Lord God of Hosts” or “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord (pause) God of Hosts”?

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