Reflection on the Feast of St. Cecilia

In the evening of her wedding day, with the music of the marriage hymn ringing in her ears, Cecilia, a rich, beautiful, and noble Roman maiden, renewed the vow by which she had consecrated her virginity to God. “Pure be my heart and undefiled my flesh; for I have a spouse you know not of—an…

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All Saints Day Reflection

November 1—ALL SAINTS The Church pays, day by day, a special veneration to some of the holy men and women who have helped to establish the Church by their blood, develop it by their labors, or edify it by their virtues. But, in addition to those whom the Church honors by special designation, or has…

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Saint John Paul II and the Gift and Duty of Our Talents

As a biographer of Saint John Paul II, whose feast day is October 22, I’m often asked if I have a favorite statement of the great pope whose pontificate ran from October 1978 through April 2005. That is not an easy choice. I came into the Catholic Church in large part because of John Paul…

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Reflection on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

Reflection—“My God and my all,” St. Francis’ constant prayer, explains both his poverty and his wealth. St. Francis, the son of a merchant of Assisi, was born in that city in 1182. Chosen by God to be a living manifestation to the world of Christ’s poor and suffering life on earth, he was early inspired…

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The Story of a Soul

Chapter 1: Early Childhood My dearest Mother, it is to you, to you who are in fact a mother twice over to me, that I now confide the Story of my Soul. The day you asked me to do it, I thought it might be a distraction to me, but afterwards, Jesus made me realize…

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St. Peter Claver: Slave of the Slaves

There is a movement afoot that claims that the Roman Catholic Church was long insensitive to the plight of black slaves or to the institution of slavery in general. The movement is growing more vocal and more hostile and levies some extraordinarily uncharitable and unfounded claims. This is not the place to lay out those…

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Inspiration from St. Stephen of Hungary and His Crown

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with Pope Francis by phone on Friday and thanked him for his prayers. The phone call came the day after the funeral at St. Peter’s Basilica for Cardinal Jozef Tomko, who at age 98 had been the Catholic Church’s oldest living cardinal, and the last of the great Cold War…

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Freedom as a Divine Gift and Duty

Freedom is indisputably one of the paradigmatic and quintessential values of our Western culture, so much so that we may be led to conclude that it is a value which springs out of our human nature itself. To a certain extent, this is true. But if we examine the history of humanity in its broadest…

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Man Your Post: Learning to Lead Like St. Joseph

From the Preface… Carrie  Wiping his shoes as he shuffled through the door, he glanced in my direction. I could tell he was pondering something deeper than the lawn he had just mowed.  “I’ve been thinking,” he began.   I smiled from the other side of the cluttered counter,  where I stood arranging the dirty dishes…

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A Man Cleansed by God: A Novel Based on the Life of St. Patrick

From the Epilogue… With few words, Bishop Patrick dismissed his work in Ireland.  “It would be tedious,” he wrote, “to give a detailed account of all my labors or even a part of them.” His labors did not interest him; the labors were not his labors, and the achievements were not his achievements.  “Who was…

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St. Gemma’s Gift of Supernatural Prayer

By means of prayer, the soul is enabled to lift itself near to God and thus live a spiritual life – that of Christian perfection.  This spiritual life has various degrees, and the soul that is enabled to pass through all of them will assuredly come to a full union with God. The first degrees…

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Our First Vocation is to Be Holy

It is well documented that many of the parents of the saints desired to dedicate their lives completely to God as priests and religious. But God had other plans that were more glorious than they could have imagined. Plans that may have first baffled these parents. Since God is all-knowing, He can look into the…

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Inspiration from the Ukrainian Martyrs

The current battle playing out in the public eye between a Russian authoritarian leader and the people of the Ukraine is unfortunately nothing new. This is a rivalry that goes way back. And the worst times was the period when Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union and its atheistic and (indeed) genuinely evil…

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Solitude and the Parents of St. Faustina

In February of 1935, a nun, obscure at the time, named Sr. Maria Faustina Kowalska of the Most Blessed Sacrament was being summoned to visit her severely ill mother, Marianna, who was battling acute liver pain. Thirteen years had passed since Faustina had last been home, and it had been seven years since she saw…

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The Holy Eucharist and the Parents of St. Thérèse

Zélie was so in love with the Holy Eucharist that, five weeks before her death, weakened by cancer, she still attended Mass. Throughout their lives, Louis and Zélie were ardent devotees of the First Friday Devotions. Only two centuries earlier, Our Lord had communicated to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque His great desire that the First…

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The Appeal of Reading the Saints to Children

“Like St. Augustine before her, our Martina, when she was still quite little, said once on All Saints’ Day, ‘As I think of it, mother, if all those people could do it, why not we?’” -Maria von Trapp Saint Thomas Aquinas was once asked what one did to become a saint. He responded, “Will it.”…

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