Today's liturgical feast day gives rise to the Christmas riddle (which you will now readily be able to answer): Name a famous Christmas Carol which never mentions anything whatsoever about Christmas, Jesus, or the Blessed Mother? Yes, thanks to good King Wenceslaus looking out on the Feast of Stephen we get to pose a riddle today. St. Stephen is regarded as the proto-martyr of the...
Though it may not be on the Top 40 list of Christmas carols, one that means so much to me goes like this:
Of the Father's love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore!
The text dates back to the 10th century and has...
The next section of Pope Francis' exhortation speaks of the human weakness that each of us brings to the task of evangelization. We are hampered in our efforts to communicate the richness of God's love by a number of factors that can all be lumped under the notion of human weakness.
The first of these weaknesses is that of language. Our human language is simply not broad enough to...
In the six paragraphs under the section entitled "From the heart of the Gospel," Pope Francis attempts to explain the content of his dream. He has called us to be a missionary church, to go beyond our brick and mortar worship spaces into the world preaching the Gospel. He cautions that our preaching can be misunderstood by the media which usually tries to focus on "hot button issues." Most...