This Sunday marks the World Day of Migrants and Refugees.Pope Francis delivered his message for 2018’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees back last summer. I didn’t notice the announcement; the news cycles were filled with other pressing stories, many of them frightening enough to claim all my attention. And I honestly didn’t realize that the Church has been observing this day since 1914.Most of the time, in the face of all the needs in the world today, I feel overwhelmed....

We all make them. “This year I’m going to lose weight… get a new job… save some money… be kinder…” And sometimes those resolutions actually take off. You join the gym. You open the savings account. But we all know what happens next: the pressure of adding so many obligations onto our already-overscheduled lives makes breaking those resolutions the first and easiest thing to do in January.Instead of making and breaking resolutions this year, here&rsqu...

“Everything is a grace.” St Therese of the Child Jesus“In all things, God works everything out for the good.” St PaulI can't keep myself from thinking over the past twelve months since Thanksgiving last. There is much to be grateful for. Too much it seems. But there is also the cousin that so many family and friends rallied around as she checked off her bucket list in the last months of her life. A brave, strong and dear woman who held the fragility of her life w...

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...

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...

An English folk verse says, “Remember, remember, the fifth of November,” commemorating the failure of the Gunpowder Plot and ushering in the celebration of Guy Fawkes’ Day. Here in the United States, we too have a “remember, remember” moment, though ours doesn’t celebrate: it mourns. For us, the digits 9/11 are enough to call to mind terror and grief and a nation—and world—stunned by unconceivable violence.It was one of those moments that people wi...

 To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. (William Blake) In C.S. Lewis’ wonderful Chronicles of Narnia, one of the characters, arriving in heaven, says, “This is the land I’ve been looking for all of my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason we loved the old Narnia is because it looked a little like this.”On our best days, when we’re feeling closest to God, we ...

How much do you really know?It’s not an idle question, and it’s one that I ask myself all the time. There are so many things in life that we think we know, but when we come down to it, we really don’t. Or we find that what we know is erroneous.I’ll give you an example. Many Americans “know” that when writing, they need to place two spaces between sentences. Unfortunately, that’s not true. For a plethora of reasons, while it was once the case, it no longe...