“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”[i] “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on...
The Liturgies of Advent, including the music, ring with the theme of staying awaking and watchful, ever ready to respond to the voice of the Bridegroom who is coming. In 1731, Bach wrote this cantata for the Mass for the 27th Sunday after Trinity. The cantata has...
Come Lord and help your people, bought with the price of your own blood, and bring us with your saints to glory everlasting.[i] In our last post, we wrote about the importance of recovering the capacity to see. With the philosopher Josef Pieper we considered the...
“Because this coming lies between the other two, it is like a road on which we travel from the first coming to the last…” We glean this line from the Office of Readings for Wednesday from the first week of Advent. Saint Bernard speaks about the “three comings of...
As human beings, all knowledge is received through our senses. These may be our external senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) or internal senses (imagination, memory, estimative power, or common sense, which “coordinates” the information).[i] We “know”...
Titles of the Blessed Virgin Mary include such exalted words as Gate of Heaven, Ark of the Covenant, Seat of Wisdom, and others. Why use such titles to describe Mary? This is simply because she is the fairest of our human race, preserved from the first instant of...
“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.”[i] Are you among those who think that things are bad and are only getting worse? Does it just seem that there is no good news to be had? ...
As Religious Sisters of Mercy, our Sisters profess a fourth vow of service to the poor, sick and ignorant in addition to the three vows professed by all Religious: poverty, chastity and obedience. As an expression of this fourth vow of service, some of our Sister...
In what kind of world did Venerable Catherine McAuley live? It is an important question to reflect on because we are living two hundred years later in a world born from that one. The turmoil and societal struggles of both centuries are remarkably similar. Mother...
In preparing for this blog post, I reviewed an article on how to help people remember the difference between quarantine and isolation. Quarantine starts with the letter “Q” as does the word question. If you have symptoms or have been exposed to COVID-19 and “question”...