Latest Articles
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When They Make Me Pope
The first thing I’ll do when they make me pope is write a brief letter recommending—strongly—that pastors replace the “beautiful crucifix” over the altar with an image of the Risen Christ, which may be pretty or not but represents the truly beautiful historical reality. That’s the trouble: the crucifixes above altars not only in the United States…
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Choose Your Classroom
When I was teaching at the old Jesuit High School in what is now downtown Dallas, my mother was teaching kindergarten in what is still Holy Name of Jesus school on the campus of Loyola University of New Orleans. My mother and I corresponded (well, she wrote a lot more and much better letters than…
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Complete Joy
It seems odd to me that the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth alive today feel that He wants us to mortify ourselves and suffer. We have plenty stories about how He was asked to pull men and women out of their suffering and how promptly He did it. Among the most striking is the story…
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The Errors of Finding in the Temple
We all know the story about Jesus when He was twelve years old, remaining in the Temple when both of His parents spent a whole day on the way home to Nazareth. That was a longa walk – maybe ninety miles—and the first day would have been tiring. The men and the women who had…
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Just ‘The Presentation’
Luke’s Gospel tells us this: When the time came for the purification rites required by the Law of Moses, Joseph and Mary took him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (Lk.2: 22). So the overlap of Purification and Presentation began very early. The purification rites were for the Lady Mary. During the 40…
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No Mass on Sundays
LorSomething or maybe my Guardian Angel nudged me as I knelt down to say my night prayers. We used to make a novena to Christ the King for freedom of religion in tough countries. We don’t do novenas any more like our grandparents, who also said the “Morning Offering” and “Bless us O Lord” before…
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Snow Angels and Purgatory
Evaristo Mapruanga SJ, a Jesuit brother from Zimbabwe, had never seen snow. So when he came in 1989 to my program in Texas for his final Jesuit training, I found this out and The Cheerful Charlie Jesuit Annual Hiking Corps (at that time me and Donald Gelpi SJ, R.I.P.) felt we could correct that. Evaristo…
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Passionate Indifference
When St. Ignatius tells us (in the Principle and Foundation) to live “indifferent to all created things.” it might sound like an insult to our passionately loving Creator, who made the sun and the moon and all the peoples, for his great love endures forever (Ps.136:5). Anyhow, “indifference” is the way too many people actually…
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Where Are My Flowers
WHERE ARE MY FLOWERS It might have been May when the Day Lilies were flourishing up in Audubon Park. I might have been eleven, which would make Charlie nine, Mulry eight, and John L. seven. It was a Saturday towards the end of the school year, when all of us were in Our Lady of…
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I Brought You Here
St. Ignatius Hall in Black Jack (well, across the street from Florissant) Missouri, holds about sixty elderly or infirm Jesuits and a healthy Jesuit staff, and this is where I will live and depart when the Lord calls. After a few months here a year and a half ago, I sat praying early in the…