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Like holidays or holy seasons, commemorative months such as Black History Month can fall into the trap of becoming purely symbolic, routine, and thus stripped of their power to transform us. We may even find ourselves a bit fatigued by the repetitive cycles of the calendar year.
A Franciscan friar and medical ethicist, Father Thomas Nairn helps us understand hot-button health care issues and how to address them.
In Lent, we find both the challenge and the opportunity to look inward, acknowledge our shortcomings, and ask for God’s pardon so that we may more fully embrace our loving Creator.
Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe’s been featured in Time magazine and on CNN for her humanitarian work, but her faith, not fame, is what fuels her efforts to rescue abducted girls in South Sudan and Uganda.
Do you remember when you were younger, and friends used to ask if you “liked ” someone? I mean “liked ” in the sense that you thought that person was cute and more than just a friend. At that stage, liking someone seemed to be the starting point from which loving relationships blossomed.
Then, at some point, the concept of liking someone quit being the go-to emotion anymore. Suddenly, it was all about love and all the warm, fuzzy feelings that entailed. Liking someone wasn’t enough. Love was what it was all about.
I was taught that prior to Christ’s dying and rising, people (in the Old Testament) could not enter heaven and see God. What about Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and the many holy women in the Old Testament?
You have identified a theological dilemma: how to speak about people who lived before Jesus as being saved without slighting the unique role of his passion, death, and resurrection. The concept of limbo was developed to cover this group of people, plus babies who die before Baptism and ultimately good adults who were never baptized.
A number of my Protestant friends who have studied Greek use grape juice at their communion service. Why does the Catholic Church use wine?
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches use wine because the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke indicate that Jesus used “the fruit of the vine ” at the Last Supper. That probably meant wine at least, that is how these Churches understood those texts for almost 1,500 years before the religious ancestors of your friends started to use grape juice.
I am gay. What can I do to stay in God’s grace and live a full, happy life as a gay man?
There is only one type of salvation: generously cooperating according to the circumstances of a person’s life with God’s unique gift of salvation through Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection.
Above all else, Francis de Sales had the heart of an apostle. True, he was intellectually gifted, he had an amiable and mild disposition that helped him make friends easily, and he was an effective writer and public speaker. But none of those advantages would have amounted to anything substantial in his mission had he not possessed a burning love for Christ and for his neighbor, a love that radiated and warmed those around him. This wellspring of charity (purely a gift of God’s grace) permeated all his actions and animated his every effort to spread the kingdom of Christ.
God wants to work through you, regardless of your circumstances—in your office, your home, your social circles, your parish—to search for and rescue those who have drifted or are starting to drift away from the Faith. You can reach people in your own daily life who have been put there by God’s mysterious providence. Though your own personal temperament, abilities, and circumstances are unique and differ from those of others, God wants to make you his coworker in the vast drama of salvation. He has a vital role for you.
