By Fr. EvansOver the past century or so we’ve seen significant changes in the way saints’ life stories are offered to the reading public. It’s not been too surprising to find emphasis placed on what made saints extraordinary while they were on earth—and thus different from most other people. So, many saints are portrayed as exhibiting some or all of these attributes: signs of God’s favor at birth, precocious holiness in childhood, early and consistent renunciation o...

Most world religions are about humanity reaching for God; Christianity is about God reaching for humanity, and doing it through his Son.by Jeannette de BeauvoirI had been living in the United States for a few months and was dreadfully unhappy, terribly homesick for France. I was attending college, and in a fit of what can only be called pique I decided to spend my spring break away from everyone. I rented a tent and went off to a campground in New Hampshire that was, at that time of year, virtua...

If you’re like many families, in October you feel like you’re still recovering from the mania of getting your kids back to school: re-establishing schedules (“no, you can’t stay up until eleven o’clock”), sorting activities (“how am I ever going to get Jamie to ballet class and Alyssa to her trumpet lesson at the same time?”), and policing homework (“if you’ve really finished, show it to me.”). Halloween is a blip on the calendar,...

Many parents and educators don’t look at comic books and graphic novels as “real” literature. There’s a reluctance to see anything as a real book when it contains fewer words and more pictures. But there are a lot of good reasons for your children and students to read them—and those reasons can hold true for adults, as well!The best way to think about a graphic novel is that it is a format, not a genre, with a far longer and richer history in countries like Japan (m...

For the Daughters of St. Paul, founded only two years before the Fátima apparitions, the answer to that question is profound. Our Lady of Fátima appeared to three obscure Portuguese children at an important, even crucial, time in world affairs. World War I was going on, of course; but sadly there’s rarely a time when there’s a war not going on somewhere. Fátima's Distinctive Context: the Media ExplosionNo; what’s particularly distinctive to us is t...

Fear is one of the most powerful of all emotions. Fear has started wars, ended lives, and destroyed belief. Fear is possibly the most dominant weapon in the Devil’s arsenal, and he uses it well. So it stands to reason that one of our primary defenses against evil is to fight fear. And that can only happen through faith.One person who understood fear was Pope John Paul II. He was elected pope after the upheaval of Vatican II and saw fear everywhere he looked: in the politics and turmoil of ...

He didn’t do very well in school. Called—he thought—to the priesthood, he failed several of his seminary classes and was then in fact told to leave. His fifth-grade teacher urged him to persevere, and he went on to finally graduate from Mount St. Mary’s and follow his vocation.Still, it doesn’t sound like an auspicious beginning, does it? But soon after he was ordained, Father Stanley Rother answered Pope John XXIII’s call for missionaries to the struggling Ch...

One of the New Testament’s best pieces of advice, written by Saint Paul to help the small community in Thessalonika, was to “pray without ceasing.”Through the centuries since that letter was written, the Church has taken the advice very much to heart, and the result was what we might call the Church’s prayer schedule, sometimes referred to as the daily office (from the Latin officium divinum or divine service), the opus dei (work of God), the liturgy of the hours, or the ...

A farmer once attended a conference on Christian life. The group was asked to consider a moment in life when they had an experience of self-transcendence. The farmer became very interested when he recounted that during the harvest he would stand in a field of wheat and hold a grain of new wheat in his hand. This experience was overwhelming and moved him to tears; but he never told anyone as he didn’t think they would understand. As the farmer continued, he came to realize that up until now...

Often people attempt to launch into prayer without any preparation. Getting ready to pray is like an artist preparing a canvas, stretching and priming it to receive the inspired work of art. God is the artist who stretches and primes our hearts to receive His Word in prayer. Prayer is first of all God’s work in us and secondarily our work of cooperating with his gift. We begin our preparation by examining our attitude toward prayer. Have you ever held your breath under water until you had ...