Faith in Focus

It is Saturday morning, and I am standing in front of the open refrigerator, surveying the contents, while my mind hurtles into a familiar routine. I had fried fish for lunch yesterday, I reflect, and a sundae after dinner. The conclusion is swift and ruthless. Instead of French toast or a bagel wit

My late husband and I often caught the tail end of a popular television talk show while we were waiting for the news to begin. One evening Tao, a guest of one of the hostesses, got into an animated dialogue over the definition of love. A beautiful actress, whose name escapes me, painted that virtue

It was an unexceptional Catholic childhood in the Rochester, N.Y., of the 1950’s: St. Boniface parochial school, the family rosary (for the conversion of Communist Russia), pennies placed in our cardboard collection boxes to save pagan babies and serving as an altar boy. Although we had neighb

“Stop! Don’t Shop on Sunday.” That was the advice of a large poster hanging on a wall of our Catholic Labor Alliance office in Chicago during the 1950’s. We drummed home the same message in our monthly publication, called Work, and in a pamphlet I wrote for Ave Maria Press. I

For me, that January day in 1999 ended as it had begun, pushing my way through crowds to the subway platform and onto the Metro car, closing my eyes, waiting for my stop. As I ascended the escalator into the winter twilight of Washington’s Dupont Circle, I set eyes on a “Missing” f

Is he your father? The woman smiled benevolently as I coaxed Father Don to take another spoonful of puréed meatloaf. With his huge bony frame randomly folded and tucked into the wheelchair and his head supported by a neck pillow, Father gave no indication he had either heard or understood the quest

‘We’re the original hippies!” Father Bernard broke into a mischievous grin, white teeth flashing in the spring afternoon sun. We were talking about the Trappist lifestyle: four hours of manual labor six days a week to earn enough to support the community; the rest of the time spent

November is the month for remembering the dead, and with cold weather rendering the lives of homeless people even more difficult, my own remembrance of the dead focuses on a Catholic Worker named Michael Kirwan. The third anniversary of his death from cancer was Nov. 12.   I met Michael two dec

Just after I leave the church and step into the sparkling sunlight on the way to my car, a woman I hadn’t noticed before comes up to me. A recent widow, she speaks, at first hesitantly, about her faith not helping her when she needs it most. It has been a year since her husband died, and she f

I drove to a retreat house in Wilmington, Del., wondering how I had come to this point in my life. Up until two months earlier, I felt only animosity for the Catholic religion and disdain for its teachings. But now I had driven an hour away from my home, to be with people I didn’t know, on a r