Latest Articles
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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….
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Always “Doing God’s Will”
St. Paul told the Ephesians, Try to find what is pleasing to the Lord (Eph.5:9). When we are spiritually immature, we imagine that God has a detailed plan for what is pleasing to the Lord—for the earth, the United States, Tuscaloosa, my family, and especially, for me—right now, at every minute. Moderate reflection will…
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Changing hard hearts
The wedding was in Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding, though the hosts may not have anticipated how many disciples would come and empty their wine jars early in the celebration. Jesus seems not to have noticed what they had done, but…
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Nobody never gave me nothin’
Mulry Tetlow was the second of my three younger brothers. He had been a Jesuit and trained as a psychologist. Then he left and married. With three little daughters in tow, he moved the family to New Orleans and they lived not far from where we grew up. Dr. Tetlow was brought onto the staff…