On Wednesday night I waited forlornly for someone to come to my door trick-or-treating. I live in a cottage community that’s largely seasonal in nature, and by now nearly everyone’s left and gone “home,” but I hoped there were still some kids in the neighborhood who might stop by.No one came. I ate a lot of chocolate.I was wondering later why I felt so deflated, until I realized it had a lot to do with homesickness. I grew up in France, and I listen to a French radio stat...

We’re all called to sainthood—or to try for it, anyway! Scripture and the Church both make that clear: we’re all called to seek holiness and sainthood, whatever our state in life. The Church expresses this Universal Call to Holiness over and over again, most recently in Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate. The vocation, the calling, to holiness is universal; God is speaking to all Christians when he says, “Be holy because I [am] holy”...

It’s sometimes easy to believe that we’re not measuring up to what God wants of us. Oh, we try to live good lives, but we often fall short of even our own expectations. We snap at our children. We forget a commitment we made. We have unpleasant thoughts about our next-door neighbor.When that happens, a lot of us feel that we’re the only people who have ever fallen short of doing what we should. We think that people in the early Church somehow lived better lives, purer lives, ho...

There is little doubt that one of our newest books, Brigid and the Butter, is based on folklore about St. Brigid of Ireland rather than on fact. Does that make it any less compelling for children to read? Our tradition says no: Jesus himself used parables (stories) to illustrate what he was talking about, and folklore (stories) often tells us more about who we are than any law or date can ever do. The farther back in time we go, the less we tend to know about people. Sometimes no one writes...