Learning to be Quick to Listen

In most of the United States, we celebrate Halloween on October 31. As you probably know, it is a time for children to dress as their favorite characters and walk their neighborhood going door to door for "treats." You may also know that this secular celebration springs from the roots of a very Catholic celebration known as All Saints Day and All Souls Day.  So how did we get to something that was meant to help Christians remember those they have lost and understand that all of the saints in Heaven are praying for them to this very secular event? Catholic Answers' Joseph Shaw has provided a very rich explanation in his post . He also reminds us that as one of the major feasts of the Church’s year, All Saints is a holy day of obligation and falls on Friday, November 1 this year.  All Saints’ Day celebrates the holy men and women in Heaven, those known and unknown by the Church, on November 1, whereas All Souls’ Day honors all of the faithful departed on November 2. In some...

Because the Holy Spirit specializes in love and unity, Catholic couples should pray regularly for the Spirit to be present in their marriage, Pope Francis said. "Where the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity for self-giving is reborn," the pope said, continuing a series of talks about the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church and its members.  While the pope explained the gifts the Holy Spirit gives to a couple through the sacrament of marriage, he repeatedly told visitors and pilgrims that the unity and love of parents are important for children's growth and happiness. "How beautiful it is to hear a mother say to her children, 'Your father and I...,' as Mary said to Jesus when they found him at the age of 12 in the temple, and to hear a father say, 'Your mother and I...,' as if they were one," Pope Francis said. "How much children need this unity -- dad and mom together -- this unity of parents, and how much they suffer when it i...

Music has an incredible power to move our souls and connect us to something greater than ourselves. When it's inspired by God and created for His worship, its impact can be even more profound. Sarah Kroger's song " Belovedness " is a perfect example of this. You may have seen Sarah as she led praise and worship sessions during the recent National Eucharistic Congress   celebration  in Indianapolis. Kroger's lyrics resonate deeply, highlighting our human tendency to focus on our flaws and insecurities. We often dwell on our failures, shame, and self-doubt , forgetting the truth of our identity as beloved children of God. The song reminds us that God sees us differently. He finds us beautiful, worthy of love, and cherished. This message is particularly important in today's world, where we are constantly bombarded with  negative messages  and unrealistic beauty standards. "Belovedness" offers a counter-narrative, reminding us of our inherent worth ...

Let's spend some time on the sacrament of Baptism , since it is foundational to the Catholic experience. Why is that you might ask. The Catholic Church has always held that the sacrament of baptism is the gateway to all of the other sacraments. We teach that it is necessary for salvation and is validly conferred only by a washing of true water with the proper form of words. It is through baptism that we are freed from sin , are reborn as children of God, and, configured to Christ by an indelible character. Parents, sponsors (we typically call them Godparents but that is not the official name), and the priest or deacon are responsible for making sure the name chosen for the baby is not foreign to Christian sensibility. The proper place for a baptism is a church or an oratory . An oratory is usually found at a seminary or private chapel for religious orders. For an adult to be baptized, the person must have demonstrated the intention to receive baptism, have been instructed sufficien...

The Church teaches that the Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian Faith. But how much do you know about this mystery? The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it this way: The Church expresses her Trinitarian faith by professing a belief in the oneness of God in whom there are three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three divine Persons are only one God because each of them equally possesses the fullness of the one and indivisible divine nature. They are really distinct from each other by reason of the relations which place them in correspondence to each other. The Father generates the Son; the Son is generated by the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  The Holy Family, and subsequently, our families are based on the Trinitarian model. The love generated between the Father and Son is expressed in the Holy Spirit. As Jesus was returning to His Father’s side in Heaven, the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles and...

Father Manuel Ruiz López and his seven companions, the brothers Francis, Mooti, and Raphael Massabki, Father Joseph Allamano, Sister Marie Leonie Paradis, and Sister Elena Guerra, canonized by Pope Francis on Sunday, each exemplified heroic virtue and bore witness to holiness within their unique vocations. As the Pope noted in his homily at the Canonization Mass in St. Peter’s Square on World Mission Sunday, “These new saints lived Jesus’ way: service.” “The faith and the apostolate they carried out did not feed their worldly desires and hunger for power but, on the contrary, they made themselves servants of their brothers and sisters, creative in doing the good, steadfast in difficulties and generous to the end,” he said. The Pope noted that their witness invites Christians to heed Jesus’ invitation to serve, not to seek glory. ‘Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?’  Taking his cue from the Gospel passage from Mark, he invited Christians to contemplate the profound questio...

This World Mission Sunday , Pope Francis will canonize 14 new saints in St. Peter’s Square, and he wants people to get familiar with them. World Mission Sunday is a popular day for the pope to declare new saints and honor men and women who spent their lives in mission territories. In anticipation of the event, the Pope has invited all Catholic church members to "learn about these new saints and ask for their intercession."  All 14 people had unique vocations and life stories as witnesses to holiness. Among the 14, two were married fathers, three were founders of generational religious orders, eight Franciscan friars and three marionettes who were martyred in Syria in 1860. “They are a clear testimony of the Holy Spirit’s action in the life of the Church,” the pope said. Pope Francis expressed his desire for the congregation to appreciate the heroics of the soon-to-be saints.  The biographies of the Blessed break down their spiritual legacies worldwide. One of the Fathers, Giu...

A national confraternity of Catholic priests and deacons has released an app that offers moral principles for Catholics to learn about and use before voting this November. The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy explained in a press release about the new app: “Although there are several important issues voters need to consider when electing political leaders, the fundamental right to life is the foundational issue.” On the app’s website, there is a page on the right to life, which emphasizes that abortion, euthanasia, genocide, terrorism, human cloning, and research on human embryos are all intrinsic evils. The other webpages on the site focus on the topics of religious liberty, economy, and immigration. As CatholicVote previously reported, the Catholic bishops of Colorado recently issued a list on what values need to be prioritized when voting. The bishops put the sanctity of life as the primary value. The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy’s new app can be downloaded onto smartphones, ta...

Pope Francis asked the new members of the College of Cardinals to cultivate a sense of prayer and closeness with God’s people, so they remain at the service of the church and their flocks. In a letter addressed to the 21 new cardinals, who will receive their red hats at a consistory Dec. 7, Pope Francis asked that they “make every effort as a Cardinal to embody the three attitudes with which an Argentinean poet — Francisco Luis Bernárdez — once characterized Saint John of the Cross,” namely: “eyes raised, hands joined, feet bare.” The cardinals must raise their eyes because “your service will require you to lengthen your gaze and broaden your heart, in order to see farther and to love more expansively and with greater fervor,” the pope wrote in the letter dated Oct. 6, the day he announced the new cardinals, and made public by the Vatican Oct. 12. He asked the new cardinals to have their hands joined in prayer “to be able to shepherd well the flock of Christ.” “Prayer is the realm of d...

In his Angelus reflection on the Sunday Gospel, Pope Francis focused on two actions of the rich young man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. First, the Pope said, the young man runs to Jesus, but afterwards, he goes away. The Holy Father noted the unnamed man initially went “running” to Jesus, urged on, the Pope said, by dissatisfaction or restlessness, despite his wealth. “He is searching for a fuller life,” the Pope said, as is often the case with those who have many riches. Jesus, for His part, looks on the man with love, and invites him to sell everything he has, give it to the poor, and follow Him. “But at this point comes an unexpected conclusion,” the Pope noted: “The man becomes sad and goes away. How great and impetuous was his desire to meet Jesus; and how cold and swift his departure from Him!” Pope Francis said that we, too, are looking for a life of happiness and meaning, but that, like the rich young man, we too often imagine that material goods and ...

Martina Purdy writes, About four years ago, I received a telephone call from a priest who invited a friend and I to a meeting. The priest didn’t actually say what the meeting was about – he just wondered if we might be interested in learning about his mission. We travelled to the Donegal border, and the priest introduced us to a man who told a remarkable story. He was a life-long Catholic, a weekly-mass goer, who was married with a family and for years had appeared to be living a good life. But he had a dark secret, a silent addiction, which had enslaved him for a long time: he could not stop himself looking at pornography. He said he would go to confession and receive absolution but the compulsion always got the better of him. Eventually he went to a particular priest who warned him that he was on the road to hell. This frightened him and he turned to prayer. The priest’s comments were not unlike Pope Francis’ warning last month when the Pontiff called pornography a work of the devil...

In his meeting with his brother Jesuits in Belgium, Pope Francis call secularization a “complex phenomenon” and noted sometimes the Church must “confront forms of paganism.” Speaking to 150 Jesuits in Brussels on Sep. 28, the pontiff answered a question from a member living in Amsterdam, one of the most secularized cities in the world. In his reply, Francis noted he didn’t mean a paganism like the one in the ancient world. “We do not need a statue of a pagan god to talk about paganism: The very environment, the air we breathe is a gaseous pagan god! And we must preach to this culture in terms of witness, service and faith. And from within we must do it with prayer,” he said in his remarks, which were published in La Civiltà Cattolica on Tuesday. “There is no need to think of very sophisticated things. Think of St. Paul in Athens. It went badly for him because he went down a path that was not his own at that time. I look at it this way,” the pope continued. “We need to be open, to dialo...

Bishop Anthony Randazzo of Broken Bay, Australia –president of the Federation of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Oceania spoke at a press conference about his experiences with synodality in Oceania. He mentioned that synodality is a common experience for Oceania’s people, whom, he said, have practiced widespread consultative models of leadership for thousands of years, and he criticized that the “niche issues” of rich Western countries receive more attention than real issues, such as environmental problems in his region where rising sea levels threaten the very existence of many countries. Randazzo criticized the “obsession” of a minority of Catholics in the West with female ordination. “Those issues become all-consuming and focusing for people, to the point that they then become an imposition on people who sometimes struggle simply to feed their families, to survive the rising sea levels, or the dangerous journeys across wild oceans to resettle in new lands,” he said. He added that h...

"Rushing" to open the diaconate to women in the Catholic Church would short-circuit a necessary reflection on the relationship between ordained ministry and charismatic leadership, particularly as it impacts the participation of women in the church, said the head of the Vatican's doctrinal office. On the question of women deacons, "we know the public position of the pope , who does not consider the question mature," Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, told members of the Synod of Bishops Oct. 2. "The opportunity for a deepening remains open, but in the mind of the Holy Father, there are other issues still to be deepened and resolved before rushing to speak of a possible diaconate for some women," he said. "Otherwise, the diaconate becomes a kind of consolation for some women, and the most decisive question of the participation of women in the church remains unanswered."  After the first as...

Pope Francis announced after his Sunday Angelus that he would hold a Consistory for the creation of new Cardinals on 8 December 2024, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception , in the Vatican. The Consistory, set to take place with representatives from all over the world, will fall before the opening of the 2025 Jubilee of Hope and after the conclusion of the Second Session of the Synod on Synodality in the Vatican. Pope Francis' most recent consistory to create new Cardinals had taken place ahead of the First Session of the Synod on Synodality on September 30, 2023.The Holy Father pointed out that the Cardinal-elects hail from around the world. "Their origins," he said, "expresses the universality of the Church, which continues to proclaim God's merciful love to all people on earth. Their inclusion in the Diocese of Rome also manifests the inseparable bond between the See of Peter and the particular Churches spread throughout the world." Moreover, he asked t...