2018

Cooking for any holiday is work. Just ask any host who prepares Christmas dinner. All good feasts worth their salt require hours, if not days, in the kitchen peeling, chopping, stirring, roasting. They also require weeks of planning, shopping, cleaning, setting the table, and decking the halls. If that’s true today (and trust me, it is), when fancy gas ovens, KitchenAid mixers, and Breville food processors do half the work for us, imagine what Easter breakfast required in a world without electricity!

Bacon-Jalapeño Macaroni and Cheese
Prep Time: 45 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes
Serves: 12

Statistical and anecdotal evidence demonstrates that parents are the number one influence on the faith lives of young people. More specifically, study after study finds that the role of the father in particular is critical in handing on an active spiritual life to his children. Without a strong spiritual head to guide them, children can so easily be lost to our culture that deprives them of the meaning, purpose, and hope that only Jesus Christ can provide, in and through His Church.

Why is it so difficult for men and women to embrace the Church’s teaching on marital love? Our society often rejects these teachings as old fashioned and out of date. Others are frightened by the vulnerability they call for. In these days, after all, can we trust God and our spouse enough truly to love without thought of ourselves?

Christ executed His first miracle because someone requested it. But this someone is not just anyone—it is His mother. It is precisely because Mary is Christ’s mother, the source of His presence in the world, that she has the authority to request a miracle that would lead her Son to His Passion.

If you’re searching the Church calendar for the greatest feasts and greatest fasts, you’ll usually find them cozied up next to each other, with the fasts preparing us for the feasts to come, and the feasts helping us better understand the fasts just passed (see CCC 2043). In the balance, though, Christians who plan their meals according to the liturgical calendar will find themselves doing a great deal more feasting than fasting.

The best way to discern whether you are called to religious life is to prepare for religious life. In the same way that an athlete prepares for a competition, or a student for university study, you can begin readying yourself now for religious life.

In their wedding vows, a man and woman make a gift of themselves to each other. They promise fidelity and the whole of who they are as persons. This mutual gift then becomes the basis of the whole of their life together—their communion of love. This gift is remembered and expressed in a unique way in the bodily language spoken in sexual intercourse.

The account of the Jesus’ calling of Matthew never ceases to encourage me deeply in my own vocation. Our Lord, by choosing and calling him, showed to this sinful tax collector great mercy—this truly “kind” demonstration of love is the motto, in fact, of our Holy Father, Pope Francis: miserando atque eligeno (1 Cor 13:4).