In an interview with Newsday Hugh McGowan described his daughter Anne Marie Murphy fifty-two the married mother of four children as ldquo witty rdquo and ldquo hardworking rdquo an artistic and fun-loving painter The world would know nothing of this special education teacher were it not

He saw a world suffused with goodness he loved it unreservedly and he called forth the best in us Though he came to live among us his was a foreign provenance He came unto his own and they knew him not And of course he walked the whole way mdash as he would often say mdash ldquo first th

nbsp As children we pass a good portion of each year waiting for Christmas nbsp As adults we spend most of our lives remembering Christmases long lost nbsp When I ponder Christmases past I can rsquo t help but to wonder how my parents did it nbsp They both worked forty hours a week in a gr

nbsp No theologian should have the temerity to rewrite revelation It can rsquo t be edited for two reasons First because we confess that revelation is divine in origin The creature cannot correct the creator Secondly revelation can rsquo t be redrafted because revelation is more than a text

No one who preached this Sunday could ignore the tragedy at Newtown Here is a revision of my homily for Gaudete Sunday The original was posted on Thursday of last week They were a middle class family with middle-sized dreams and cares And of course their own holiday traditions One Christmas cu

They were a middle class family with middle-sized dreams and cares And of course their own holiday traditions One Christmas custom enjoyed by all six of the Martin daughters in their childhoods was leaving out their shoes to be filled with holiday treats The world has come to know the youngest

Last month on a cold November night in Times Square Police Officer Lawrence DePrimo who had been assigned there as part of a counter terrorism unit noticed an old man He was clearly homeless and even more obviously barefoot Officer DePrimo asked the man his shoe size He then went into a nearb

Flannery O rsquo Connor would have proudly owned the noun and the two adjectives most commonly associated with her name It rsquo s hard to imagine an ldquo author rdquo who could have been more ldquo Southern rdquo or more ldquo Catholic rdquo even though she lived at a time when those two a

My friend a pastor received an irate email from a parishioner a Eucharistic minister At one of the previous weekend rsquo s Masses one too many ministers had arrived at the altar to distribute Holy Communion As the last to ascend he had been asked to return to the pew Understandably the eve