Latest Articles
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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…
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Wake Up Dead
When I was growing up before the Second Vatican Council, one of the prayers I heard regularly in church was the prayer “For a Good Death.” I remember saying it, myself, when I was in grade school. That seems a century ago. Now, the prayer I say regularly is this: “Lord, grant that I may sleep peacefully…
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From Sunday Mass to Daily Prayer
We hear a lot about how Sunday Mass attendance was strong before The Second Vatican Council. Now it’s easy to be discouraged about the Church because so many do not go to Sunday Mass. But instead of fretting about that, I have found it encouraging to reflect on people doing spiritual exercises and praying every…
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Three: The Nativity
Herod the Great had died some years before Joseph took Mary into his home. There had been uprisings back then, and the Roman legion had taken Sepphoris, the city in Galilee nearly as large as Jerusalem, burned it to the ground, destroyed stone buildings, and sold all the people into slavery. Then Herod had died…
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Second: The Visitation
The two women were having a conversation unique in human history. They were talking about experiences with the Archangel Gabriel and about what had happened to them—and what was to happen to the history of humankind. The Lady Mary had walked from Nazareth south into the hills of Judea, carrying in her womb the man…
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First: The Annunciation
The Big Bang theory proposes that our whole universe began from a little hot dot. That magnificent mathematical suggestion was made by Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian priest who had first been taught mathematics by Jesuits. He proposed and proved what he called the “hypothesis of the primeval atom,” which expanded in an…
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Salve Regina / Hail, Holy Queen
Salve Regina /Hail, Holy Queen was sung by crusaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. St. Bernard (d. 1153) loved the hymn and spread it all over Europe. The Salve figured largely in the evening devotions of the confraternities and guilds that were part of life from the 1100s and into the 1200s. Dominicans have been…
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God Makes a Lot of Choices
I was born on the first anniversary of the 1929 crash. My father was still in college and my mother, until I was born, was a school teacher. Catholic school. We lived with my grandparents and three uncles and three aunts. All of us on my mail-carrier gramps’ salary. We were hungry, all the time….