Karen’s Voice Union with Christ did not turn Catherine inward forever. It sent her toward a Church in trouble. For most of her life the popes did not live in Rome. They lived in Avignon, on the Rhône. Warren Carroll calls that chapter “Popes Away From Rome.” The see of Peter was not sitting by…
A word with younger adults while early voting is still open If you are raising small children in these years, you already know the bill that came due before you could vote on the terms. Housing costs more than it did when your parents were your age. Formation is thinner. Public speech is often a…
Christ’s words in Luke are unsettling. He comes to set the earth on fire, and he speaks of division within households: father against son, mother against daughter, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law.¹ It is easy to move from that Gospel to a familiar catalogue of concerns about the young: confusion, despair, broken families, an uncertain future. The…
Karen’s Voice We have met the woman. We have seen that she was not a cloistered nun. Now we have to face the part that makes a modern listener flinch. Raymond of Capua records practices that startle us: a hair shirt, later an iron chain, little sleep, deliberate bodily penances. That is his book. We…
Registration, if it was going to be done in Texas, had its last ordinary day on October 5. The next question is not theoretical. Early voting opens Monday, October 19, and it runs through Friday, October 30.¹ After that the line is the Election Day line, with its own hours and its own weather. The…
I was thinking about the Eucharist. Then I was thinking about ChatGPT. That is the whole problem, stated before the theory. I was working on “What Gift Can I Give Him?”, a Eucharistic Sacred Heart reflection. There was an established working rule: no Pope Francis quotations. It was not a new instruction. It was old…