The other evening, I was canvassing classmates for donations to the annual fund for the Jesuit high school I attended. A classmate I called said he would not make a contribution because he felt the Jesuits were too liberal. Whenever I hear something like that, I have a tendency to back off. We gradu

First Communion is a powerful church and family ritual; no one who has been present can miss its importance for the children taking part.

We knew it was coming. Months before the recent release of the report of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy, my fellow seminarians and I were forewarned on two separate occasions that the findings would be disturbing. We were told tha

"We are going to have a French teacher!" I grabbed Rui Yins arm excitedly and whispered as I sat down. It was her turn to wait and fight for the few precious library seats. She was sturdily built and could usually push through the crowd of students waiting for the library door to open at 7

The ministry of the reader at Mass is pivotal to the whole liturgical celebration.

Some of the priests identified as abusers, staring out from the pages of the local newspapers, are not strangers to me. I was on the faculty of the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, N.Y., from 1965 through 1979. I taught Scripture all those years and was rector for the last six. I