Enjoy this Easter music video featuring James Martin, S.J., and Terre Roche of the Roches, based on “A New Serenity Prayer.”

He asked Christ to help the international community “to make haste to surmount our conflicts and divisions, to open our hearts to those in greatest need” and “to pursue paths of peace and fraternity.”

This is what the Pasch of the Lord accomplishes: it motivates us to move forward, to leave behind our sense of defeat, to roll away the stone of the tombs in which we often imprison our hope, and to look with confidence to the future.

In these Lenten and Easter days in which the church celebrates a man whose divinity was revealed in his willingness to sacrifice everything for love, consider "Sweeney Todd" to be that story’s dark, demonic twin.

If irony is the opposite of what one might expect, then nothing is more ironic than God.

Many young Catholics I know were compelled to be confirmed by family members who felt the sacrament was important. My situation was the opposite—I was confirmed of my own volition.