Father Mark Bauer, A lifelong fan of the Detroit Tigers, was a young seminarian in Rome in 1984 when he returned on vacation just in time to see his team win the World Series.
Lamar Hunt Jr., a member of the founding family of the Kansas City Chiefs, was in the afterglow of the franchise’s second Super Bowl victory when he received a call in March from a Legatus magazine staff writer in New England. The writer confirmed that he is a Patriots fan himself.
This year we experienced a true Lent! I don’t think many of us have prayed, fasted, and practiced almsgiving during any other Lent in the same way we did this year.
September 11, 2001 changed a lot of people’s lives. For Ronac Mamtani, a senior in college about to launch his financial career at a firm across the street from the Twin Towers, that day crystalized for him his desire to help others and inspired his pivot to a future in medicine.
A Hidden Life tells the story of this brave man who held to his sacred principles even when much of the populace of Austria — including its clergy — capitulated in fear to the Nazi annexation of their country. Even his wife, mother, and parish priest initially wished he would somehow accommodate the call to fight.
Here’s a unique way to teach young children about Mary, the mother of Jesus: through her clothing. Our Lady’s Wardrobe takes the child through events in Mary’s life, particular mysteries of the rosary, and several of Mary’s more prominent apparitions around the world.
St. Thomas Aquinas never wrote a word about Marian consecration, but wrote amply about consecration to the religious life. Yet, as the authors of this slim volume point out, the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, lived radically by religious men and women, are to be lived in spirit by all baptized Christians.
The short answer to the title question is “No,” and the long answer is “Heck, no!” Or, as Pope Pius XI wrote in his 1931 social encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true Socialist.”
I was raised in a home with a mother who desired sainthood, but unless I was paying attention, I didn’t notice. I’m remembering now, for what it’s worth, that I don’t recall her ever purchasing an item of clothing for herself. She loved the Catholic Faith of her childhood, her priests, her family, and jigsaw puzzles; that’s about it.
In southern Poland, as World War II was beginning in early September 1939, a man named Franciszek brought his wife and two little daughters to the town of Kalwaria Zebrzydowska near Krakow where the Franciscans ran a Marian shrine.
At the close of Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), he begins his prayer to the Mother of God by saying, “O Mary, bright dawn of the new world, Mother of the living, to you do we entrust the cause of life.”
Saint Paul’s Letters to the Philippians and to the Romans can be of immense practical and spiritual assistance for us all, especially during this time of our world’s great need for the Word of God.
At the end of Mass, Catholics are sent forth: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” That is the duty of the laity because they “live in the midst of the world and its concerns, to exercise their apostolate in the world like leaven, with the ardor of the spirit of Christ” (Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam Actuositatem, Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, 2).
In these bewildering days when even the most devout are confounded by circumstances and sense that society – even the Church – is careening out of control, it is comforting to know what Our Lady said centuries ago specifically about these times.
Known as “The Third Apostle of Rome,” St. Philip Neri is among the great saints of the Counter Reformation, best known for founding the Congregation of the Oratory, a society of teaching priests.
As I write this column in early April, the COVID-19 pandemic looms front and center in all of our lives. While I cannot know what the state of affairs will be when this is published, I am compelled to begin here.