This week we will solemnize the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday. Yes, a time for greater prayer and fasting.At first, we may think that it is time to cut down on food and one of our favorite treats. Yes, this or any other sacrifice that is close to your heart would be a good choice. We pray and fast in order to prove to Jesus how much we love him and to make reparation for our sins and the sins of the world.However, there are many ways a person can fast. I have my thoughts, words, actions a...

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.  Luke 23:34We may have previously shared with you the words every Pauline religious sees daily surrounding the tabernacle in the community chapel. These words—Do not be afraid. I am with you. From here I want to enlighten. Be sorry for sin—were revealed to our founder, Blessed James Alberione, in what he called a “dream.”If we think of the last of those words, “Be sorry for sin,” we find ourselves grapp...

And so the Church year turns again to Lent.It’s a tricky season to navigate. As Catholics, we’re called to penance as we contemplate the journey of Our Lord through betrayal by his friends all the way to his torture and death. But let’s face it: 40 days is a long time to keep doing anything, especially something that you don’t like to do.Catholics traditionally “give up” something for Lent. We return to meatless Fridays. We deprive ourselves of something that ...

Anything that has been steeped in prayer takes on an aspect that wasn’t there before. Churches, for example, are just buildings… until the liturgy, music, prayer and people inhabit the space—and sanctify it. Rosary beads are pretty things until they have been blessed and have slipped through the fingers of the person praying them.Objects, we might say, are transformed through prayer.And not just objects. Everyone’s been transported through beautiful music, but even the m...

My grandmother told me she would have given birth to a dozen children, if she could have. When I asked her why, she responded that twelve seemed like a nice number. In contrast, my mother deliberately chose to have two children, spaced eight years apart, so that she could raise them as “two only children.” My grandmother remarked ruefully, “I never understood your mother.”Nowadays, families of more than two children are as rare as ice cream in the sun. Typical family size...

Humanity has been trying to learn how to pray from the earliest times. In fact, almost every single book in the Bible mentions the word prayer or expresses a prayer, making close to 1,200 distinct references to praying. Our most important prayer, the Our Father, was given to us by Jesus himself in response to the disciples’ plea for help praying. And St. Paul exhorts us to devote ourselves to prayer and to pray without ceasing.We are in a difficult position, it would seem. We yearn to reac...

Let’s face it: we’ve always loved reading other people’s letters.Perhaps it’s a bit of voyeurism, this glimpse into someone else’s life; but more often than not, reading the correspondence of others—particularly of people we hold in esteem—leaves us with a humble understanding of how they lived in a day-to-day manner, how they expressed themselves to each other, and finally how they came to be the people we admire and strive to emulate.And when the corre...

I have a confession to make. When I was 16 years old, I was already in the convent, working in the department of our publishing house where we typed new manuscripts (on old really large machines...we're talking the 70s before the desktop computer). I typed and proofread Saint John Paul II's General Wednesday audience talks which eventually were published as one book titled The Theology of the Body. Yet, even though I can say I read them (almost 30 years ago now), and a understood them (a...

I put down my colored pencils, blue and orange and green. There, I said to myself. Finished. A sense of contentment spread over me as I looked at the picture I had just finished coloring. Each page I took my colored pencils to, each image that prayerfully came to life under my hands, was another link bringing me closer to my mom almost 500 miles away. I tapped on the camera app on my phone, snapped a photo of my “masterpiece,” and emailed it to her.My mom and I are coloring the same ...

There’s always been a special place in the Catholic Church for the keeping of spiritual journals. Some of our most beloved saints, including St. Therese of Lisieux (her journal was published as The Story of a Soul) and St. Ignatius Loyola (whose journal became the Spiritual Exercises), kept spiritual journals.Closer to our own time, Pope John XXIII kept a personal journal from when he was a teenager until he died, and Pope John Paul II’s personal notes are also soon to be published i...