On April 20, Mother Angelica will celebrate her 90th birthday. She was born defeated. That is, the child of an unhappy marriage. When she was still a child her father left her mother. The latter helpless and distraught was incapable of coping with this tragic situation. She and her small daughter lived in utter poverty. How devastating for an alert little girl to realize at an early age, that she was the fruit of a marriage that should not have taken place. Her...
As each generation fails to draw from the well of Christian wisdom, they experience more difficulty in finding the right person for marriage. Indeed, you will be surprised how shortsighted materialism and sensuality can make us. The result is that attraction is often confused with love.
Below are seven tips that may help you find that right person. You may find that some of these basic principles may seem like unrealistic ideals or attainable goals. But remember, with God everything is...
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“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson
A recent video by Fr. Robert Barron, “Gay Marriage and the Breakdown of Moral Argument,” called to mind just how right Jefferson was.
In his commentary, Fr. Barron said:
“In his great text, After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre laments not so much the bad state of morals in the west, though that’s true enough, but he laments something deeper, and more fundamental;...
Marriage, most fundamentally, is gift. Or, perhaps more clearly, marriage is a series of gifts, connected and intertwined with one another.
Marriage is the gift of a husband to a wife. And the gift of a wife to a husband. Marriage is a gift from God – an opportunity to form a family, a community of love. Marriage is the place where the gift of life begins. And marriage is a gift to every community, every culture, every people – marriage is the gift of stability, of civility and of love....
Last week’s essay described how the Benedictine monks began to rebuild continental Europe after the barbaric invasions. After the sack of Rome in 410, the Church dealt with the barbarians, guided them from doing further carnage, and converted many.
This week, we advance to the Carolingian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries and to convent schools. Rose Kennedy, matriarch of a famous American family, recounts some experiences there as a young woman.
The Carolingian Renaissance...
I had a column almost written on an entirely different topic this week – and then my son texted me to turn on the news because there’d been explosions at the Boston Marathon.
I tuned in for about a minute to get the gist of the story, but quickly turned it off again. I’ve grown almost allergic to the kind of reporting that accompanies this kind of event. It’s all heat, no light.
Experience has shown repeatedly that the first reports from the scene are almost always false in...
I wish all of you and your families Easter blessings! This was a joyful Easter for me and I was touched to see so many of you at our services at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. In some cases, we had “standing room only,” which is a beautiful sign of your devotion to Jesus Christ.
For all of us, this was also the first Easter celebrated with our new Pope Francis. In my prayers during this time, I have been trying to accompany Pope Francis as he begins his ministry as the Vicar...
In his classic text After Virtue, the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre lamented, not so much the immorality that runs rampant in our contemporary society, but something more fundamental and in the long run more dangerous; namely, that we are no longer even capable of having a real argument about moral matters. The assumptions that once undergirded any coherent conversation about ethics, he said, are no longer taken for granted or universally shared. The result is that, in regard to questions...
My seventh-grade son is covering the Constitution and government structure in History class. While driving to school the other day, we were reviewing the division of powers between federal and state levels. Federal powers are “delegated,” that is, carefully circumscribed and limited to those defined in the Constitution. To underscore this point, we kept going over the Tenth Amendment, the key to understanding the balance: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the...
Man’s greatest strength is his greatest weakness. He can relentlessly pursue a goal with a tunnel-like vision regardless of the hazards. For instance, discovering the New World in the 1400s and 1500s and flying to the moon in 1969 were great enterprises conceived and carried out by men. The loss of lives was a distinct possibility in each venture but the ambition of the explorers and astronauts remained.
But what can be used to achieve noble ends can also be leveraged against man’s...
