This gospel passage (Mark 10:46-52) is the setting in which the promise made by God through the prophet Jeremiah (31:7-9) unfolds. Jericho is an oasis with an abundance of vegetation and water. In it, life goes on easy, without major challenges...
A wise old priest was visited by a worried man, who said, “Father, I raised my children Catholic, but my oldest son left the Church after being influenced by some of his Fundamentalist and Evangelical friends. They filled his head with all sorts of...
At first glance it almost seems Jesus was being a bit harsh or unsympathetic to the man who said to Him, “Let me go first and bury my father.” What the Gospel doesn’t tell us, however, is that the man’s father probably wasn’t anywhere close to...
The Society of Jesus, the religious order known as the Jesuits, was founded in the 16th century by St. Ignatius of Loyola. After St. Ignatius himself, probably the best-known Jesuit was St. Francis Xavier, one of the greatest missionaries of all...
In the Gospel of Luke (13:6-9), Jesus provides us with the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree: There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none, he said to the gardener, ‘For...
We are so short of people, that is, in the Catholic Church. We all know that we do not have enough priests today and the looming vacancies keep growing. We ordained a young man a deacon last Friday who was a late life vocation after a tragic family...
The new millennium began with the devastating and psychologically damaging attacks on 9/11, followed by a decade of lost and confusing wars on terror, amidst the general decline of American cultural life. This has given many cause to revisit our...
At the time of Jesus officials wrote on very fragile materials like papyrus and vellum. Poor people among whom Jesus moved and who were His disciples didn’t have access to those materials. This caused Jesus to teach using very hard and cutting-edge...
