We all undergo difficult moments in our lives. These are moments when, practically, we do not know where to go. The road becomes misty. The fog of uncertainty starts mushrooming from different ways and manners. We cry out to the Lord for help. Our...
In the readings for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, we meet two people, worlds apart: a very successful king and a 14-year-old Jewish girl from the obscure hamlet of Nazareth. There had been significant ups and downs in King David’s past, yet, all...
About seventy years ago there was a boy named Eugene Orowitz—a skinny, unimposing 100 pound high school student who seemingly had nothing going for him. One day in gym class the track instructor taught the boys how to throw a javelin, which is...
When we undergo trials, we fight the battle of fear. Fear of the current situation, fear of the future, fear of what will happen to us, our loved ones, our family, marriage, relationships, job, children, friends and, well, you get the picture. At...
Many years ago I read a novel—I don’t remember the name—which related Satan’s greatest and most dangerous and intense plot ever to conduct spiritual warfare against God’s people. Set in the present day, the story described how a series of apparently...
The recent liturgical memorial of St Clare was a great blessing for me. Besides the holy life this great follower of St Francis’ ideal lived, an ideal which still inspires and appeals to us today after eight centuries, this liturgical memorial was...
Over a hundred years ago, in the days of vaudeville, there was a husband-and-wife team named “Boris and Olga” who performed a knife-throwing act. Olga would stand next to a wooden wall on stage, while Boris, from twenty feet away, threw knives all...
In my 50 years of ministerial priesthood, I found myself confronted by situations that elicited in me spontaneous, irrepressible pity. As a priest, of course, I know, and I preach about the value of suffering in union with Christ. I maintain...