Saturday, June 18, 20220122Being a father requires a man to acknowledge his mortality. From a purely biological perspective, the sexual drive is a program for reproduction that presumes the death of the one generating new life. Leon Kass, a brilliant physician and philosopher, asserts this truth in a stark manner: “Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals,...
Thursday, May 5, 20220169Mary is never named in the Gospel of John. In the only scenes featuring her, the beloved disciple refers to her simply as “the mother of Jesus.” Those two episodes act as bookends to John’s presentation of Jesus’ ministry, and highlight the role of Mary as mother both of the Church and of every individual Christian.
Thursday, April 7, 20220125The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, declared in a book of prose that “the Scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics, and atheists.” For Milosz, whose life was scarred by the Nazi and Communist takeovers of his native land, the moral authority and literary beauty of the...
Sunday, March 13, 20220469A curious pattern of exile is evident in the endings of several Old Testament books. After God promises Abram the land of Canaan, the patriarch must immediately flee to Egypt because of a famine (Genesis 12); his descendants, the sons of Jacob, repeat the expedition for the same reason (Genesis 42-47).
Tuesday, February 15, 20220302St. Benedict concludes the Prologue of his Rule for monks with an uplifting exhortation: “Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts...
Sunday, January 16, 20220273
By Father Thomas Esposito
Special to The Texas Catholic
Near the end of March 2020, the peoples of virtually all nations were enduring the first of many months of enforced isolation and the specter of sickness caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At that precise moment, Pope Francis organized a worldwide hour of adoration, and...
Tuesday, November 30, 20210186Greek philosophers centuries before Christ acknowledged the immense mystery of our being human. Man, they said, is a microcosm, a condensed universe, containing in himself the vast expanse of height and depth, glory and misery, perceived in the intricacies and infinities of the created order. An extension of this idea is the beautiful...
Thursday, October 28, 20210149“On the seventh day, God completed the work He had been doing; He rested on the seventh day from all the work He had undertaken. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work He had done in creation” (Genesis 2:2-3).
Sunday, October 3, 20210184By Father Thomas Esposito
Special to The Texas Catholic
Near the end of his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul includes a greeting from his fellow disciple Epaphras, “a slave of Christ Jesus, always fighting for you in his prayers so that you may be perfect and fully assured in all the will of God” (Colossians 4:12). Paul’s...
Thursday, September 16, 20210707Pope Francis recently made a much-discussed decision to restrict the celebration of “the Latin Mass,” also known as the Extraordinary Form of the Roman rite. As the bishop of Rome, he has the power to give bishops the authority to allow the celebration of the Tridentine rite in their dioceses. But his judgment, expressed in a motu...
