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‘Wildcat’ sheds light on Flannery O’Connor’s faith and fiction and leaves audience searching for grace…..
Flannery O’Connor spent most of her life living on Andalusia farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, with her mother. From her imagination emerged some of the most unforgettable characters in 20th-century American literature: Hulga, the one-legged intellectual who fancies herself better than the country bumpkins that surround her; Ruby Turpin, a proud farmer’s wife who categorizes people by race and class; a one-armed drifter who marries a dimwitted girl and abandons her at a truck stop. O’Connor’s stories were often quite shocking, and many readers were repulsed by them. O’Connor knew she was writing for people who no longer believed in God, grace or the devil, and she longed to awaken them. Her aim was showing the outpouring of God’s grace that may be offered in terrible circumstances. T...
The AP offers an outsider’s view of the Catholic Church…
Sometimes when you are part of a subculture, it is really important to step out of it or to be shown what it looks like from the outside. In the United States, to be a Mass-attending Catholic is to be part of a religious subculture (please, spare me the discussion of whether Catholicism is the ‘real’ culture and thus America is the subculture). American Catholics were given the chance to see themselves from another point of view — a secular one — this week with an article in the Associated Press by Tim Sullivan. There has been no shortage of quibbling over some of the language in the piece, particularly the terms liberal, conservative, traditionalist, right and left, and how they are applied in specific circumstances or to specific groups in the Church. Overall, I think that Sullivan has d...
‘Renew and Deepen … Reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus,’ Says Pope Francis on 350th Anniversary of St. Margaret Mary Apparitions…
Meeting with participants in a conference organized in Rome on the occasion of the Jubilee celebrations of the apparitions and subsequent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pope Francis calls for a rediscovery of this Christian practice of reparation. By Lisa Zengarini The meaning of reparation in the Church is the focus of an international conference organized in Rome to mark the 350th anniversary of the Apparitions of the Heart of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary of Alacoque in Paray-le-Monial, a small town in the Bourgogne region of eastern France. St. Margaret Mary is known for introducing this devotion in the late 17th century which was later formally recognized and approved by Pope Clement XIII. Repairing the wounds of abuse in the Church Gathered in Rome from 1-5 May around the ...
Why does God try to kill Moses in Exodus 4?
By Clement Harrold May 3, 2024 Chapter 4 of the Book of Exodus contains one of the strangest passages in all of Sacred Scripture. Verses 18-26 describe how Moses, living in exile in the land of Midian, goes to his father-in-law Jethro to request permission to return to his own people back in Egypt. Jethro consents, and so Moses sets off together with his wife, Zipporah, and their sons. Then comes the weird part. We are told that, “At a lodging place on the way the Lord met him and sought to kill him” (v. 24). In a bizarre display of quick thinking, Zipporah responds by hastily circumcising her son, and holding the foreskin to his feet. Stranger still is the fact that this unorthodox tactic actually works! God allows the family to continue on their way. How are we supposed to understand thi...
Have you ever heard of this Navy tradition? Babies are baptized in the ship’s bell…..
Today I learned that the US Navy traditionally allows the infant children of crew members to be baptized in the upturned ship’s bell. A 2021 Navy press release about such a baptism onboard the USS Kearsarge says that this tradition was borrowed from the Royal Navy which permitted the such rites in foreign ports either in or under the bell. A webpage created the National Bell Festival, a non-profit organization that supports the restoration of historic bells, says that the practice is also followed by the US Coast Guard, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Navy. [embedded content] This video from 2017 shows a baptism performed in the bell of the USS Gerald R. Ford. Photo: US Naval Institute Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs...
Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa: Peace in the Holy Land Is Built on Dialogue, Action…
The cardinal stressed that the Israel-Hamas conflict is not just an issue for the local Church but also an issue for the universal Church. “What I tend to say is that conflict is not a temporary and secondary issue in the life of our Church,” the cardinal continued; rather, he said, it “is now an integral and constitutive part of our identity as a Church.” Pizzaballa underlined that “talking about peace, therefore, is not talking about an abstract topic but of a deep wound in the life of the Christian that causes suffering and tiredness, a lot of tiredness, and deeply touches the human and spiritual life of all of us.” Stressing the universality of the conflict, he added it “involves the life of everyone in our diocese and is therefore an integral part of the life of the Church, of i...
Daddy, what bead are we on?
“Daddy, what bead are we on?” is a question I am asked frequently by my two oldest sons during our nighttime rosary. It is a question that at first perturbed me, but the more they asked the question, the more I fell in love with them asking the question. Their little souls are so precious. They seek to love God in their own way, and in their time. Although they lose their place on the rosary and the question will be asked again, it’s become something I long for every night when we pray together. When my wife and I discussed having children, we knew we wanted to teach them the Holy Rosary early in their lives. It was a prayer that my wife prayed each morning with her family growing up. To this day, it is still a prominent prayer for my wife’s family. As for me, it played a role in my newfou...
Thank You, Bill Maher, But Your Critique of Hollywood’s Depravity Didn’t Go Far Enough…
Editor’s Note: Read with care as comments made by TV host Bill Maher are graphic and offensive to some. If you haven’t seen talk show host Bill Maher’s recent monologue calling out the pedophilia problem in Hollywood, you really should take the eight and a half minutes to do so. I’m glad someone finally said the sexual exploitation of children is wrong, and that Hollywood’s complicity and hypocrisy are appalling. However, the problem is deeper than Maher thinks. In my opinion, pedophilia is baked into the core principles of the sexual revolution. The potential for full-on acceptance of pedophilia has been latent from the very beginning of this ideology. Here is what I mean. Sexual revolutionaries basically tell people they can do whatever they want sexually, without any negative resu...
The Return of the Canonized Popes…
For centuries after Pope St. Pius V, who died in 1572 and whose feast day was April 30, Catholics may well have thought that he was the last of a dwindling tribe, the canonized pope. That has changed dramatically in recent decades. Indeed, April 27 marked the 10th anniversary of the twin papal canonizations of St. John XXIII and St. John Paul II. The canonizations have returned because the age of persecution has returned. Pope Francis marked another anniversary recently that underscored that fact, two centuries since the death of Pope Pius VII. In the first Christian centuries it was the norm for the pope to be canonized. Nearly all of the first 50 were, because martyrdom was the customary end to a pontificate in the age of persecution. Then papal martyrdoms — and canonizations — dropped o...
What changed when parents gave their 10-year-old her first iPad?
I continue to work my way through the much-discussed book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness” by Jonathan Haidt. It’s slow work, in part because I am taking lots of notes. I don’t know about you folks, but I am a slow, careful reader when dealing with subjects that I believe are unusually important. A night or two ago, I hit a passage that — in my page annotations for the interview I hope to do with Haidt — I have nominated as a crucial chunk of summary material linked to the book’s Big Idea. Here it is: Once we had a new generation hooked on smartphones (and other screens) BEFORE the start of puberty, there was little space left in the stream of information entering their eyes and ears for guidance from mentors in their re...
Priest Shot Dead in South Africa; Catholic Bishops There Decry ‘Pandemic’ of Murder…
“Father Tatu worked for several years as the SACBC media and communications officer with dedication; we are saddened by his tragic death. We extend our condolences to the Stigmatine congregation, to which he belonged, and to his family,” bishops from Botswana, Eswatini, and South Africa said in the one-page statement signed by SACBC president Bishop Sithembele Sipuka. “It must be noted that the death of Father Paul Tatu is not an isolated incident but rather a distressing example of the deteriorating state of security and morality in South Africa,” the Church leaders added. The murder of Tatu and that of Banda, SACBC members lamented, “occurs amid growing concerns about the increasing disregard for the value of life, where people are wantonly killed.” Father Paul Tatu Mothobi was fou...
Shows like ‘Ghost Hunters’ are silly. For centuries, the world’s expert in paranormal investigations has been the Catholic Church…..
These days, there are numerous ghost hunting and paranormal TV shows. A few examples include Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Kindred Spirits, Paranormal Lockdown, and Help! My House Is Haunted. Frankly, these shows are silly. Shows like this are not taken seriously by competent paranormal investigators. However, what is a Catholic to make of the subject of paranormal investigations itself? What Does Paranormal Mean? The term paranormal is a new one. It was coined around 1905, and it indicates something that is beyond the normal. In Greek, para means things like “beyond,” “beside,” and “alongside,” so paranormal experiences are those that go beyond or are beside normal experiences. This only raises another question: What counts as “normal”? The answer—for purposes of this term—is those exp...
