It has often been said that prayer should be as easy as having a conversation with a loved one. However, our personal experience tells us that this is often not the case. Perhaps it would help us to remember that even the people who lived and walked with Jesus needed help with their prayer life as we read in the Gospel for this day’s liturgy: He was praying in a certain...
Today is the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary. According to Dominican tradition, in 1214, St. Dominic was in Prouille, France attempting to convert the Albigensians back to the Catholic faith. The young priest had little success until one day he received a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who gave him the Rosary as a tool against heretics. While Mary's giving the rosary to St. Dominic...
St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians will be proclaimed at our Eucharistic Liturgy for the coming week and a half. Galatia was an area rather than a city or community. It was located in Turkey and was populated by Gentile or pagan people who may have been descendants of the Celts who emigrated to the area in the third century before Christ. Paul had preached to them in his...
The reading from Isaiah and the parable of St. Matthew’s Gospel from today’s liturgy present us with a little bit of a problem. Isaiah is clearly being critical of Israel (which is identified as God’s vineyard), and St. Matthew is clearly condemning the chief priests and elders of Israel (who are identified as the tenant farmers) for their failure to produce a rich harvest of grapes...
October 3, the day before the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, marks the day on which the saint passed from the world to eternal life. He bade his brothers to lay him naked on the ground so that he would depart this world as he came into it. They were to leave his lifeless body on the ground for as long as it takes “to walk a leisurely mile.”
Tonight the entire Franciscan Family...