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In 1873, near the lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida, the Pittee sisters were riding in a construction cart down to the water. In a tragic turn of events, the cart flipped, trapping the poor girls underwater and causing their deaths. Since then, tourists claim to see apparitions of little girls playing hide-and-seek or wandering the property. In another ghostly tale, nightly visitors to the historic Fort Holmes on Mackinac Island in Michigan swear that they saw ghostly figures — three soldiers — conversing with each other. When they approached the soldiers, they seemingly vanished into the mist. Throughout the centuries, humanity has relished in ghostly accounts such as these. Some listeners instinctively dismiss these tales with logic: “They’re just elaborate pranks,” “It was just your ...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — As New Orleans church leaders braced for the fallout from publishing a list of predatory Catholic priests, they turned to an unlikely ally: the front office of the city’s NFL franchise. What followed was a monthslong, crisis-communications blitz orchestrated by the New Orleans Saints’ president and other top team officials, according to hundreds of internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. The records, which the Saints and church had long sought to keep out of public view, reveal team executives played a more extensive role than previously known in a public relations campaign to mitigate fallout from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The emails shed new light on the Saints’ foray into a fraught topic far from the gridiron, a behind-the-scenes effort driven by the t...

Are churches sanctuaries? Skip to content As the Trump administration aims at a deportation push across the U.S., the federal Department of Homeland Security rolled back this month guidelines that had previously aimed to prevent the apprehension of immigrants in several federally-defined “sensitive areas” — including churches. Justin Henry/Flickr. CC BY SA 2.0 The rollback has been controversial, with some Catholics — including the U.S. bishops’ conference — opposing the move. Amid the controversy, some have brought up the notion that churches are sanctuaries for people fleeing arrest, and should be respected as such. So what does it mean for a church to be a sanctuary? The Pillar explains. First, what exactly did the Trump administration announce? On President Donald Trump’s first day in ...

COMMENTARY: US leadership is sorely in need of the kind of statesmanship exhibited by Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee and Ronald Reagan. Browsing Footprints in Time, the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a tale from 80 years ago with a lesson for American public life today.  The idiosyncrasies of the British government being what they were in 1945, Colville, who had served Churchill as a private secretary throughout the Second World War, became one of Clement Attlee’s private secretaries when the Labor Party leader displaced Churchill as prime minister in July 1945 and inherited Churchill’s civil service staff at 10 Downing St. Churchill and Attlee had been both partisan rivals and colleagues in the war-winning coalition government; the...

There is nothing quite like the silence that comes over the room at the close of the final sentence. For a brief yet timeless stretch we are all there together, highly aware of one another but in wonderful solitude. Then, the conversation begins. The power of reading aloud in the home—whether just two spouses or friends, or with family or guests—is an astounding gift we can rediscover. Much more than just a nice pastime, it is a basic enactment of who we are and what we seek in our homelife. Especially today, it can stand up to the potent centrifugal forces pulling us away from the heart of life, in the center of our home. This is not simply a bedtime story for children, as wonderful as those are. This uniquely engages all of us, and as such is more an expression of who we are. Does this s...

[embedded content] What’s wrong with young people today? The mental health crisis is skyrocketing—depression, anxiety, confusion about identity… But maybe, just maybe, nothing’s wrong with them at all. Maybe they’re just the canary in the coal mine, revealing something toxic in our entire culture. Could it be that young people are simply more sensitive to the emptiness of a worldview stripped of God, objective truth, and the transcendent? What if the real problem is a spiritual one? On this episode of The Chris Stefanick Show, I sit down with one of my absolute favorite speakers, Monsignor James Shea… Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums

In his second Jubilee Audience on hope Pope Francis invites us to embrace conversion as a lifelong journey, highligting the figure of Mary Magdalene, the “Apostle of the Apostles” who in Jesus found a new direction and meaning in her life. By Lisa Zengarini At his second Jubilee Catechesis on Saturday, Pope Francis offered a reflection  on the meaning of conversion, hope and the transformative power of faith, encouraging the faithful to rethink their lives within the framework of “God’s dream”. Changing direction and perspective 11/01/2025 In his first Saturday Jubilee Audience, Pope Francis highlights the Jubilee as a time for a new beginning, rooted in the transformative power of God’s Kingdom, drawing on the … Conversion, he explained is a “change of direction,” t...

In a Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, the Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education highlight the potential and the challenges of artificial intelligence in the areas of education, the economy, labour, health, human and international relations, and war. By Salvatore Cernuzio The Pope’s warnings about Artificial Intelligence in recent years provide the outline for “Antiqua et Nova,” the “Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” that offers the results of a mutual reflection between the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. The new document is addressed especially to “those entrusted with transmitting the faith,” but also to “th...

It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position but I am delighted to be in the company of high-profile people, from the historian Tom Holland to Bishop Robert Barron and the authors Michael Frost and Nijay Gupta, who all recommend making Christianity “weird” again. For Catholics this means putting our way-laid ecclesial car into reverse and backing out of the correlationist ditch theologians—notably with Flemish surnames—got us into in the 1970s. “Correlationism” was the pastoral strategy of correlating the faith to the culture of modernity. In the 1970s it took such banal forms as festooning Catholic classrooms with posters featuring cute animals declaring “Jesus is cool.” More recently, I read a report of the homily given at the parish church attended by the British royal family this Ch...

In this episode, we find lifelong criminal Rocky Valentine escaping his latest heist. Confronted by police, Rocky opens fire and is shot dead. He awakes to find himself whole but confused. He meets Pip, who describes himself as Rocky’s guide and acts as a sort of afterlife assistant, providing anything and everything Rocky’s selfish heart desires: money, women, gambling, cars. Though initially skeptical of Pip’s intentions, he finally says to himself, “this must be heaven!” Anyone familiar with The Twilight Zone expects the other shoe to drop. I am going to jump right to the end and “spoil” this episode that has been out for over 50 years because that is not the point of the article and not the real value of the episode anyway. After getting bored with having every whim satisfied, he begs ...

Cardinal Cipriani denies abuse, confirms disciplinary measures Skip to content After Vatican restrictions emerged Saturday on a Peruvian cardinal’s ministry, the cardinal claimed they were lifted by Pope Francis, and that a 2018 allegation of sexual abuse against him was false. But the Vatican said Sunday that that Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani remains subject to binding written restrictions on his ministry, with only a few exceptions given in limited circumstances. Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne. Arzogen via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). The disagreement is likely to spur debate about the Vatican’s current and historical approach to sexual abuse allegations made against prominent bishops in the Church. Leave a comment —Cipriani, the Archbishop of Lima from 1999 until 2019, said in a Jan. 25...

Every week or every day, we attend Mass or Divine Liturgy, and it is largely the same. The Eucharistic prayer is just one of a few options, a lot of other prayers like the introductory and Communion rite are always the same. Eastern Divine Liturgy (CC0 Pixabay) I generally like change and difference: I like a podcast that keeps a consistent format, but I don’t like listening to an episode again. One podcast I listen to has a few episodes that are basically the best segments from recent months. Those are the only regular episodes of that podcast I intentionally skip. I personally don’t listen to the same music on repeat much preferring podcasts and audiobooks while exercising, driving or cleaning the house. Yet something about the consistency of the Liturgy is calming and reassuring. The re...