No matter what one may think of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, one thing seems uncontested. It has caused quite a stir. Has any movie ever generated such debate, even among atheists, over the real meaning of Jesus’ life and ministry? Initially, the film was considered too much o
Members of the assembly always seem to pay greater attention to some elements of the liturgical celebration than to others. Conventional wisdom among parish leaders has long held that Sunday worshipers go home talking mainly about two aspects of the Sunday liturgythe homily and the music.The importa
The paintings on the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence show Masaccio (1401-28) at his artistic and spiritual best—not least in the way he links Adam and Eve with Christ. Driven from the Garden of Eden, our first parents are in despair. Weeping and weighed down with terrible pain and lo
Two thousand years ago, three young men—a revolutionary and two thieves—were executed by the governing civil authority of the Roman province of Palestine. One of those three condemned convicts turned out to be the Son of God, much to everyone’s embarrassment. Naturally, we would al
This is a difficult time for Roman Catholics in the United States. Our church, which stood so tall and proud after the Second World War and the election of the first Catholic as president, has been dealt some grievous blows in recent times. There seems no end to the tide of stories about the sexual
Why? That is a question I have been asked frequently lately. Why did Mike O’Grady, S.J., a member of our Claver Jesuit Community in Cincinnati, climb over the front gate at Fort Benning on Nov. 23, 2003, knowing that he would be arrested? People know that Mike was performing an act of civil di
Pilgrimage has rarely been easy. Storms and shipwrecks, robbery and kidnaping, wars and illness were endured, not to mention the self-imposed disciplines: walking barefoot, fasting, begging for hospitality or passage. In his day, after enduring three and a half months of storm-tossed travel while re