Why do we need ministers of Communion? Why not just pass the eucharistic bread and wine and let people take it themselves?

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

Vatican Asks Bishops to Focus on Wider IssuesTop Vatican officials are urging U.S. bishops to move beyond the sexual abuse crisis and restore their focus to the wider range of pastoral and international issues. That is the main message emerging from a series of encounters in late March between heads

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

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

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

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

Lawrence S Cunningham rsquo s small study of St Francis demonstrates the value of sound critical judgment and solid theology for grounding healthy devotion to the saints and deepening the faith in the Christian realities to which they dedicated themselves In A Modest Foreword Cunningham sets out

Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world This sentence in Fr Andrew Greeley rsquo s review of The First Five Years of Priesthood by Dean R Hoge lifted me out of my chair when I read it in these pages Am 9 30 02 I sent him an e-mail message You rsquo re right I