Hong Kong Catholics are right to fear Beijing’s henchmen...

A guide to celebrating the Sacraments of Initiation outside the Easter Vigil...

Coronavirus on the edge of a grimpen, where there is no secure foothold...
Fr. Dwight Longenecker
The pandemic has suddenly thrown our affluent and seemingly secure and safe lives into a tailspin. In fact, the security and certainty was always an illusion, and in East Coker T.S. Eliot ponders life’s shifting uncertainty. The line that always catches my imagination is, “On the edge of a grimpen, where there is no secure foothold.” Eliot liked word games, and the very strangeness of the word “grimpen” served his purpose. The word is not in the dictionary. We may not know what a grimpen is, but we suspect it is the endless bog, the slough of despond, the windswept moor with hidden pits of tar, or the jungle swamp ambushed with quicksand.

What role has prayer played in driving down COVID-19 deaths?
Msgr. Charles Pope
What do you think? The graph shows a steady drop the day following Pope Francis’ Urbi et Orbi Eucharistic Blessing. Is it a coincidence? Is it the result of prayer? Surely the drop was also fostered by human activities such as staying at home, the shuttering of many businesses, and the cessation of certain activities. However, these mitigations were going on before the Pope’s blessing as well.

The incredible story of the U.S. Army’s earth-shaking, off-road land trains...

The pastoral costs of the lockdown will, I fear, be enormous. But our Lord can bring good out of any evil...
Phil Lawler
This morning, in an effort to shift my thoughts away from the epidemic and the lockdown, I thought I’d look back a few months, to remember what I was writing before this unhappy subject began to dominate our consciousness. I came across a column I’d written in February, “Want a Liturgical Renewal? Start with Repentance.” Immediately my mind flashed back to an excellent column that I had read just a few minutes earlier...

Till we have faces...
Mark Langley
I miss the human face, don’t you? Isn’t it interesting how that is? Did you think you would ever miss the human face? Who would ever have guessed it? What is about the face that is so important? I suppose it’s the mouth and the cheeks and the chin. It really is difficult to communicate with other people who do not have a mouth or cheeks or a chin. What is it exactly? Obviously, it is difficult to communicate with someone who has no mouth or an obstructed mouth.

Working by hand helps us reconnect with our humanity...
John Cuddeback
We have lost something today, but we can get it back. Our very humanity calls for living and working in our bodies, with natural things, regularly. This means all of us. We have been separated from our own humanity, from our proper homeland, and we are suffering, even if we have never known anything else. I say we can ‘get it back’—not because we ourselves have necessarily had it before, but because it is our birthright. Our own ancestors had it; we need it; and we can still do it, even if differently, and by fits and starts.

Extraordinary evangelization in extraordinary times...
George Weigel
I’d heard about Father Alexander Sherbrooke long before we met in June 2011; Father Sherbrooke had been a mentor for young friends of mine who had worked at St. Patrick’s Church in London as pastoral assistants and catechists. When we finally got to know each other in person, I had that wonderful experience of knowing, almost instantly, that here was someone on whose friendship I could rely as spiritual ballast.

Father McGivney died amid a 19th-century pandemic that may have been caused by a coronavirus...

Pope Francis held aloft the Blessed Sacrament at his extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing on March 27 — and Italy’s COVID-19 death rate has been dropping ever since...

COVID-19 has made it clearer than ever: Bishops, priests and deacons need better homily and social media training...

Meet the contemplative Carmelite nuns known in London as ‘the heavy artillery’...
K.V. Turley
There is a community of enclosed Carmelite nuns who are gaining a reputation in London. The community, the Carmelite Sisters in Tangiers, lives in Morocco, however, many miles from the British capital. So how have these contemplatives attracted a devoted and grateful group of supporters and friends in London, centered mainly in the capital’s business district known simply as: “The City”? In recent years, bankers, stockbrokers and City lawyers have started talking of these Carmelite nuns as “the heavy artillery.”

How St. Philip Neri defeated the devil’s attacks...

“Lord, teach us to pray” — Reflections on Fulton Sheen...

When demons flee dying people: The hidden saving power of the Divine Mercy chaplet...

How George Washington led the Continental Army, and the new nation, through two epidemics...