Thursday, May 5, 20220154Mary 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.
Monday, April 25, 2022020Our world needs Christian faith. A book that proved this to me regarding the medical field is Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality by Charles C. Camosy.
Thursday, April 7, 20220120The 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...
Monday, March 28, 202205This Lent I’m studying the “wilderness” or “desert” in Scripture, and especially in the journey of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. The dangerous wild is a powerful image for the spiritual life, and it plays a large part in the lives of figures like Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, John the Baptist and Jesus. What about in...
Sunday, March 13, 20220417A 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).
Thursday, February 24, 2022035One of the shibboleths of our times is the word diversity. Our use of the word can easily signal our social, political and philosophical sympathies. It is ubiquitous in our culture, advertising and corporate life, and it is frequently portrayed as a moral value, one of the few claimed by our ostensibly secular society.
Tuesday, February 15, 20220294St. 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...
Saturday, February 5, 20220134Catholic Schools Week (Jan. 30 to Feb. 5 this year) is a time to reflect on the gift of Catholic education and to support the many men and women who work so hard to offer that education to children throughout the world.
Sunday, January 16, 20220271
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, 20210183Greek 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...