nbsp Cambridge MA Last night I was reading the International Herald Tribune how nostalgic on a flight back from Germany University of Paderborn to Boston Having missed out of much of the news during my busy week in Paderborn and before that in the ldquo other rdquo Cambridge UK for a w

Almost two years after its Advent 2011 introduction the new Missal is still generating unhappiness among U S Catholic priests according to a new survey which found quot widespread skepticism quot about the litrugy revisions According to the study 59 percent of the 1 500 priests surveyed quot

Orvieto is an hour rsquo s train ride north of Rome about half-way to Florence Once you arrive at the Stazione Termine you rsquo ll need to take a funicular up to the city which sits on a high fortified butte overlooking the Umbrian plain It rsquo s worth the trip Life on earth doesn rsquo t

When I was a Maryknoll seminarian in the 1950s we all had to read a biography of Blessed now Saint Theophane Venard a priest of the Soci t des Missions trang res de Paris MEP who was martyred in Tonkin now a part of present-day Vietnam in 1861 Published as Modern Martyr the story had

We have a pope … concept. Amid all our talk about how the problems have weighed on Benedict and embarrassed so many church leaders and aside from the speculation about front-runners to replace the pontiff emeritus, the discussion also turns to the kind of papacy that is needed next. Commonweal’s new issue has some perspective and some concepts. Peter Steinfels, former editor of the magazine and former religion writer for the New York Times writes that Benedict has saved the church from a “prolonged period of disarray” and humanized the papacy with his resignation. His successor -- Pope Novus, Steinfels dubs him – should administer shock therapy to the church, setting a term on the papacy, reforming the process of choosing a successor, embarking on a huge fund-raising program to enable the work of the church, and, most of all, preaching the paschal mystery, the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Had he made the wrong choice of schools His courses were demanding quot We have tremendous long and hard lessons to get through in both French and Algebra quot The discipline was dogged quot They give a man one of these black marks for almost nothing If he gets two hundred a year they dismis

In a recently released letter sent last Advent, Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, vice president of the Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei,” advised members of the Society of St. Pius X “to abandon the harsh and counterproductive rhetoric that has emerged over the past years.&rdquo

Experiencing New York made me reexamine my prejudices against urban life.

God inflames the human heart with a deep desire for unity.