2020

The Church venerates Mary under the title Theotokos, the Mother of God. This devotion to Mary has always been rooted in devotion to Jesus himself. If Jesus was truly man and truly God in one person, and Mary was the mother of that person, then it is absolutely right to say that Mary is the Mother of God.  

Death is a birth into eternal life, but not everyone will have the same destination. There will be a day of reckoning, the particular judgment, for each and every person at the time of death. Those who are “found in Christ” will enjoy a heavenly existence. Yet there is another possibility, to which Saint Francis alludes in his poem-prayer: “Woe to those who die in mortal sin!”  

The way of the Cross is the inevitable way of a Christian’s heart. Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the Church without the devotion that goes by that name. It goes by other names, too: “The Stations of the Cross,” “Via Crucis,” “Via Dolorosa”—or just “the stations.” The practice has settled, for several centuries now, into brief meditations on fourteen scenes from the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

St. Joseph probably spent more time with Jesus than any other human being in history. That is quite a thought. Think of all those hours they labored together in the workshop, honing their craft, much of the time in silence.

Today we celebrate the special feast of my patron St. Patrick. As we reflect today on the many blessings in our lives, I’m especially grateful for my Irish heritage.

When I think about Lent, I think of the first two readings we use on the First Sunday and the Second Sunday of Lent. 

If you asked me a few years ago about spiritual desolation I would not have had much of an answer for you. We all have struggles in our lives, and I’ve had my share of professional and personal difficulties, but I entered an all-time low—a period of spiritual desolation—when the bank where I worked collapsed a few years ago.

One of my earliest memories is of a time my father took me to the hardware store. I was young—maybe seven years old. I don’t know what we were getting or why we were there, but the memory has never left me. After my father purchased whatever it was he was buying, we left the store. As we walked to the car, he counted his change. Suddenly, he turned around.

There is today a great deal of curiosity about the earliest years of Christianity. We see it whenever a bestselling novel proposes an alternative story line (or bloodline) for the Church’s origins. We see it whenever an archaeologist turns up a previously unknown apocryphal gospel—and the news media say that it calls everything into question.

It’s something of a miracle that we know anything about St. Perpetua. She died very young, at the age of 22, and lived most of her years in Carthage, North Africa, far away from the great cultural centers of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.