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23rd Sunday in Ordinary TimeBy Fr. Victor Feltes The disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” The gospels show him explaining parables to his apostles in private, but the meanings of Jesus’ symbolic stories about the Kingdom of God were kept somewhat hidden from the crowds. Christ’s enemies and scoffers would dismiss these tales as nonsense but those with faith in him would keep them and contemplate them. The foes to his public ministry walked away with no additional ammunition to attack him with, but his faithful disciples would discover wisdom in his teachings. As Jesus says, “To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Sometimes the gospels explicitly tell us Jesus’ interpretation...

‘Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.’ (CCC 1817) Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope;To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;To thee do we send up our sighs,Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears … On first appearance it might seem that hope is the least important of the theological virtues.  Love, it seems, is far greater. St Paul tells us that love is the greatest of virtues, and that those who “have not love” are nothing but “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal”, and that those who “have a faith that can move mountains, but have not l...

“The household is the association established by nature for the supply of man’s everyday wants.”Aristotle, Politics Experience shows that changes that happen slowly can go almost unnoticed, even when they have significant negative consequences. Perhaps the most striking instance of this in modern times—maybe ever—is the evisceration of our home life. Steadily, the human activities that by earlier accounts were ‘ordinary’ and pertained to everyday life, have either sunk into oblivion or been transformed and removed from what seemed their natural context. Home. Viewed as it often is through the lens of social sciences, this change in our lives—for that it surely is: a change that deeply affects each of us—is reckoned as empirical data, intertwined with other data of how ‘things are changing....

Writing obituaries about controversial — but to many people beloved — public figures is a difficult task that involves some complicated mathematics. The death of former Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee is a classic example and, here is the crucial point in this post, this was not a simple matter of “left” vs. “right.” That said, there is no question that for decades — during the papacies of St. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI — Weakland was a liberal Catholic superstar, with the word “liberal” in this case defined in political, cultural and doctrinal terms. But then there were revelations about his ethics and private life. Thus, it was not surprising to see a double-decker New York Times headline with this kind of content: Archbishop Rembert Weakland, Critic of Vat...

Children require a sense of protection, acceptance, and the reassurance that the child is loved by his parents or legal guardian. The virtue of love serves as the par excellence of virtues between parent and child because of God’s love for us, and second, it affirms the parents love for their own child as a gift from God    A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of parents serving as their child’s primary spiritual director. A central aspect of this charism is the responsibility of the parent as both an evangelist and catechist in their child’s religious development. However, the development of any child’s religious identity is predicated on the parent’s willingness to live as a child of God themselves. This means that any parent I argue should exhibit an authentic and gen...