Dear Friends,   And the God who answers by fire, he is God. —1 Kings 18:24 T.S. Eliot, in his majestic Four Quartets, describes it like this: “The dove descending breaks the air/With flames of incandescent terror/Of which the tongues declare/The one discharge from sin and error./The only hope, or ...

Dear Friends,    When Pope Leo XIV stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on May 8, there was something calming about his presence. He wore the accoutrements of the occasion and addressed the crowd with such a humble and natural demeanor that you would think he had ...

Dear Friends,   Has the Lord ever placed on your heart a desire to serve Him in a particular way and then life seemed to complicate every effort you made to do so? St. Francis of Rome was a lay woman who, from a very young age, felt called to ...

Dear Friends, Every disciple of the Lord faces two basic doubts – filtered, however, through apparently endless permutations. The first is a doubt about God’s goodness; the second is a doubt about his power. To the first, we’re battered by whispers: “Can you really trust God? How can you be ...

Dear Friends in Christ,   The joy of Easter this year was tempered quickly by the death of Pope Francis the very next day. It seemed surreal to have watched him give his Easter blessing to the crowds in St. Peter’s Square and then to learn of his passing so ...

Dear Friends, A Movie Review of Sorts  “Living is a 2022 British historical drama film… [set] in 1953 London.”1 Until his diagnosis with a fatal illness, Mr. Williams had been the epitome of all that is good, and not so good, of the stereotypical bureaucrat – extremely dependable and proper, ...

Dear Friends,   It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun baked the stones as I stood in Ancient Magdala peering into an excavated complex. Jewish purification baths sat unused but impressively on display. This is one the first-century town’s many features that would attract an orthodox Jew to ...

Dear Friends,   Our whole lives are divided into time periods: minutes, hours, years, etc. We anticipate the moments we accomplish certain milestones, such as our graduation, marriage, promotion, and retirement from work. Few of us anticipate with the same eagerness the moment we will die. St. John references Jesus’ ...