Faith in Focus

In the summer of 1975, I met Paul Dent, S.J. I was passing through Chicago and stopped to visit a friend who was spending the summer at Loyola University. He invited me to stay for dinner, and we decided to go to a late afternoon Mass before we ate. The Mass was held in the basement of a Jesuit resi

Last week, over our Wednesday morning cup of coffee, a conservative Christian friend smiled as she told me I am the most conservative liberal she has ever met! There was a time when this would have brought anything but a smile to my face. But that day, I laughed out loud. I thanked her for recognizing in me a hard-fought battle that has landed me smack dab in the middle of the road.

On Nov. 11, 1841, a 63-year-old woman named Catherine McAuley was dying of tuberculosis in a commodious house on Baggot Street in southeast Dublin. Some years earlier, after she had come into a considerable fortune, she had had this building constructed for what she called “works of mercy.”

For someone who came onto the world stage over 26 years ago as a vibrant and active runner, swimmer and skier, Pope John Paul II’s suffering throughout his almost 85 years of life is especially memorable. Many of us, at difficult times in our lives, identified with him. His intense suffering i

In the catholic understanding, a saint is somebody who is all-out for God, full of faith, hope and love. Such a person, decidedly, was the Chilean Jesuit Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga. Hurtado, born in 1901, was four years old when his father died, leaving his mother saddled with heavy debts and forced t

A woman is born with all of her eggs. Unlike male sperm, which are produced continually and by the millions throughout a man’s life, a woman’s immature eggs are contained in follicles in her newborn ovaries. Over the course of her reproductive years, 300 to 500 eggs will mature. Each mon

After I spent 30 years raising children full time, an unexpected change in our family’s circumstances made it necessary for me to obtain employment so that my family of seven could be provided with health insurance. In spite of my college degree, I quickly learned that I was undesirable for em

Fifteen minutes after landing in Haiti, I was having serious doubts as to whether or not this trip was a good idea. I had come to Haiti accompanying another Catholic college group at the request of my own school, to see about the possibility of setting up a joint yearly immersion trip. Our guide, a