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...

The night can be a scary time. As kids we might have been afraid of monsters under our bed or of sleeping in our own room. Even now as adults the “dark night”—whether it slips into our life as depression, breaks our heart with unexpected ruptures of relationships and futures, or quietly takes from us what we had most cherished—still holds hands with its sister anxiety. Just as individuals live through darkness, cultures and periods of history also can be overshadowed by fear and chaos and de...

 Wish us a happy birth-year. This June the Daughters of St. Paul will celebrate a hundred years of participating in the mission of the Church, becoming the Good News of Jesus, and communicating him through the media within the world’s cultures. Our story would not be the same without one woman who was indispensable to its first fifty years—Thecla Merlo, well on her way now to being declared “Blessed.” Our centenary appropriately begins this year and ends next year with her anniversary—Febru...

In these days each morning at Mass I have been moved by the readings from the Letter to the Hebrews. Jesus our High Priest is the centerpiece of this masterful work from the New Testament. The writer tells us that Jesus learned “obedience from what he suffered” for us. He purchased our souls for God, and because of what Jesus did we have hope.In our coastal New England area it is easy to visualize an anchor holding a ship fast, despite the strength of the wind or waves. Jesus is the anchor tha...

Merry Christmas! (Christmas is not over!) A Blessed New Year! (For us Catholics New Year's Day is the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God!) Each day of the octave of Christmas we celebrate Christmas again. The glory, the wonder, the awe of the good news that heaven has bent down to earth to do for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves: rescue ourselves from the sin that plagues us and from which none of us could extricate ourselves on our own. We needed One who was the Righteousness of God in our f...