My mother, father, little sister and I were living with my widowed grandmother, Frieda Hambleton, in her house in a poor neighborhood of Wichita Falls, Tex. We were crowded, but it was what I had always known, and I was happy. Then she built a house on Grant Street, in the developing part of the cit
Efforts to improve church management are often sidetracked by three mindsets. First, we can misunderstand the truth that the church is timeless. Of course, Jesus Christ is timeless, some teachings are timeless and much of our worship is timelessbut many other behaviors of the church are time-bound.
In his encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, published in 2003, Pope John Paul II repeated St. Paul’s admonition to the early church: “[I]t is ‘unworthy’ of a Christian community to partake of the Lord’s Supper amid division and indifference towards the
The Catholic Worker is just around the corner from my rectory, and ever since I moved to that neighborhood on the Lower East Side, I have felt blessed by the proximity. I should really say Catholic Workers, with an s, because there are actually two Worker communities a stone’s throw from each
Lack of Progress
Reading the obituary of the esteemed, recently deceased John F. Long, S.J., (Signs of the Times, 10/10) and the tribute to him in a recent address by Brian E. Daley, S.J., reported in America (Signs of the Times, 11/7), I began to wonder what the results
Representative John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, is a decorated veteran, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime hawk on defense matters. So Washington had a rude awakening when he declared on Nov. 17 that the time had come for the United States to withdraw its troops from
We are pilgrim people, marching through time but anchored in eternity. We are waiting for a new life to unfold as we celebrate a life that we already own. This is our Christian existence. The gift of hope keeps our eyes on the future; that same hope secures our existence here and now. Hope has an im