Read & Reflect
Articles, reflections, news, and homilies — thoughtful Catholic content for the faithful, published regularly.
Spirituality
Spirituality
How to Achieve Whole-Person Holiness, Part 3
In Part 1 of this article, I laid out a general framework for achieving whole-person holiness. In Part 2 of this article, I began listing and explaining some practical steps we can take to achieve whole-person holiness. In the final part of this article, I will continue explaining practical steps we...
Spirituality
Catholic Teaching Is Valid for Everyone
College Commencement Day is a time for great expectations. Graduates have completed their course work and are prepared to go into the world and make their unique contributions. But it is also a day that is clouded by the fact that each graduate will go his or her own separate way, dissolving the bon...
Spirituality
The Triumph of the Chaldean Catholic Church
It has been said that the Catholic Church is a community of communities. It is a collection of various groups that share a common communion, but have different traditions, rites, and ecclesiastical focuses. This is one of the strengths of Catholicism: so many different groups can be held together wi...
Spirituality
Padre Pio and the Popes: A Dance of Love and Hate
During the wild 1920s, the pope at the time, Pope Pius XI, had been influenced by his best friend, Fr. Agostino Gemelli, to regard Padre Pio as a malevolent villain. Gemelli was a medical doctor and a psychologist who claimed that Pio did not have the genuine stigmata and that the carmine piercings...
Spirituality
The World Still Needs Confession
I just finished a novel set in Poland in 1942-1943. Nazi Germany had invaded, and Warsaw was turned into a living hell, full of rubble and ashes, starvation and disease. The main character, Pawel, has endured a living hell for most of his life. He’s a man in his thirties, a loner, someone the worl...
Spirituality
When Feeding Becomes Medicine: Artificial Nutrition, Proportionate Care, and the Dignity of the Dying
In the first part of this reflection, we considered why the Church gives a strong presumption in favor of providing food and water, even by artificial means, when they truly nourish and hydrate the patient. This presumption is rooted not in the absolute value of a medical tube, but in the inviolable...
Spirituality
Wonder: Receiving God’s Goodness Through Creation
For the last couple of weeks, I have been sitting on the new deck my husband built, watching hummingbirds finally discover the feeders I put out for them this summer. They are beginning their migration south, so I get new birds every week or two. The males seem to have departed, while the females fi...
Spirituality
Fulton Sheen’s Holy Hour: The Art of Learning to Abide
Among the many spiritual practices promoted by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, none was more central to his life than the daily Holy Hour. Before Fulton Sheen became a priest, bishop, author, broadcaster, and one of the most recognizable religious voices of the twentieth century, he first became a man o...
Spirituality
Words Alone Can’t Fulfill the Father’s Will: 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus shocks the Jewish chief priests by telling them something about themselves that no one else would have dared to say. What was it? Gospel (Read Mt 21:28-32) Our reading is in a portion of St. Matthew’s Gospel that reports on the tangles Jesus had with the religious lea...
Spirituality
Padre Pio and the Power of Guardian Angels
“Send me your angel,” was a common direction St. Pio of Pietrelcina would give his spiritual children and the penitents who sought his guidance. For Padre Pio, this was not merely a vague, sentimental idea. He believed in and relied on angels throughout his ministry and had the gift of communicating...
Spirituality
The Devil Wants You to Move
I am online looking at a house for sale at 45 Wetzel Road, just outside the old town of Macungie, Pennsylvania. The house sits chockablock on a little-used tertiary road and is a remarkable historic stone home set on approximately 6.7 acres. It has “exposed stone, massive timbers, wide-plank floors...
Spirituality
The Shema and the Sign of the Cross
The Trinity is the greatest mystery ever revealed to humanity. Even the great St. Augustine devoted years to studying and writing On the Trinity (De Trinitate), one of the most influential theological works in Christian history. Yet despite his brilliant intellect, Augustine recognized that the huma...