Jan. 12, 1995 is etched permanently in my memory. My father, suffering a fatal bout of bronchial pneumonia, died peacefully at approximately 8 o’clock in the evening, in the intensive-care unit of Kettering Memorial Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. I will forever remember the details leading up to an
Since the heinous attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has issued an unending stream of statements informing us that these barbarous crimes were committed by people who embrace a “perverted version of Islam” or by those
A few years ago the late Lou Bannan, S.J. was presiding at the noontime Mass on a first Friday of the month at Santa Clara University. In his homily he told us about ferrying a group of older retreatants to the San Jose airport and hearing them rave about a fellow Jesuit who’d wowed them with
A surprising number of studies suggest that the appeal of traditional devotions among younger Catholics is on the rise. Some posit that the phenomenon reflects a growing conservatism among Catholics under 40. Others wonder if younger Catholics, who may not have been forced to participate in devotion
We who live today in a notably hierarchical church do not always find it easy to appreciate the important role of lay people in the early church, especially of women, even though we have heard about it repeatedly in the readings at Mass on Sundays. How often do we recall Tabitha, whose life “w
My first memory of hearing the Angelus prayed was on a hillside in Mexico. We were in a country place not far from Puebla. American college students were wandering around to get a sense of the culture and to see the sights. I was not a Catholic then, and was only gradually learning how religion had
A mansion of 87 rooms, built on Long Island in the 1920’s, surrounded by spacious grounds—hardly the kind of setting in which you might expect to find a gathering of mostly middle-aged Hispanic men and women spending a weekend in prayerful silence. And yet there we were, a group of 14 ma