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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct — the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project. The Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit recently learned of their tally from last fall’s apple sleuthing from expert botanists at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification. The apples positively identified as previously “lost” were among hundreds of fruits collected in October and November from 140-year-old orchards tucked into small canyons or hidden in forests that have since grown up around...

“Praise to you, God the only-begotten Son. You humbled yourself to share in our humanity and you heal our infirmities.” It had been a long four weeks in which nearly any slight stress made me feel overwhelmed. A respiratory illness had been going through our family, and two of my daughters and myself were still having difficulty breathing. Though because we, thankfully, were not sick enough to get tested for COVID-19 in our state, we had the added pressure of not knowing if we had the disease or not. We missed going to Mass the last weekend it had been available in our diocese because of our illness. I was long overdue for the Sacrament of Confession, but there was no way for me to receive it since I still had symptoms. I bore with the lack of sacraments and placed my faith in God’s grace ...

Vatican City, Apr 9, 2020 / 08:00 am (CNA).- China’s first canonized saint was martyred by suffocation on a cross in Wuhan, the epicenter of today’s coronavirus pandemic. St. Jean-Gabriel Perboyre, a Vincentian missionary priest from France, was betrayed by one of his catechumens for money, bound in chains, tortured, tied to a wooden cross and strangled to death in Wuhan in 1840. Dr. Anthony Clark, a professor of Chinese history, spent time in Wuhan researching the life of Perboyre and St. Francis Regis Clet, another 19th-century Vincentian priest martyred in Wuhan. Clark told CNA that Wuhan’s martyr saints are particularly suitable intercessors for those suffering from COVID-19 today. “Sts. Perboyre and Clet were both killed by strangulation; they died because they could not breathe,” he ...

[embedded content] On Easter Sunday (April 12, 2020), by invitation of the City of Milan and of the Duomo cathedral of Milan, Italian global music icon Andrea Bocelli gave a solo performance representing a message of Christian hope to Italy and the world. (Download the hymn sheet here.)

These 5 maxims can be summed up with Padre Pio’s oft-repeated saying: ‘Pray, hope, and don’t worry’ Earlier this year, I was looking to do some reading in Spanish to improve language skills and thought it might be nice to read an inspirational biography at the same time. Little did I know how providential this little project would be for this year, particularly since the volume I picked up was one about Saint Pio of Pietrelcina. Padre Pio is not only a saint who bore the stigmata, and exhibited miraculous gifts in both hearing confessions and beyond, but he also lived through the Spanish Flu, a devastating pandemic during the early 20th century. It is comforting in this present time to have saints who have lived through times of disease to turn to for intercession, inspiring words, and the...

Dear Friends, On Easter morning, we, together with the holy women who faithfully stood by Our Lord in His Passion and at His Death, find ourselves before His empty tomb. The tomb recalls the profound anguish of the death and burial of Christ, God the Son Incarnate, Who desired to suffer the cruelest of passions and to undergo the most ignominious execution known at the time, in order to free us forever from sin and from its most poisonous fruit, eternal death. But the empty tomb is full of light and within it is the Easter Angel. It is no longer the tomb but the Holy Sepulcher, the witness of a mystery, of the mystery of all mysteries: the mystery of the Divine Love which is our salvation. The tomb is empty not because someone has taken away the body of the Savior. The Easter Angel announc...

Where does my joy come from? One of the reasons our quarantine is so haunting is because we’re left alone to face the shadows of ourselves.  But this day, Easter Sunday, is not a day for shadows. Gone are the somber trappings of Lent! Gone are melancholic melodies! Gone are the forty days of penance! Easter, especially this Easter is, and must be, a great feast of joy! In an apostolic letter written just a few years ago, Pope Francis said to the Church, “The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus. Those who accept his offer of salvation are set free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ joy is constantly born anew.” This Easter Sunday is the day when that joy can be renewed. As everything was taken from us during the quarantine,...

By Tom Hoopes, April 9, 2020 Before Easter, the apostles hid their faith away like it was a virus. When they emerged from their self-quarantine to discover that Jesus Christ had risen, they found the strength to boldly confront the world with their faith. Today, we have the worrying and hiding part down pat. Now, on Easter Sunday, Year A, Jesus Christ himself is expecting each of us to do the next part and proclaim our faith. The readings give different approaches to Easter, each of them valuable. The Gospel reading is a very personal account of what it was like to experience a miracle. The apostles hear Mary Magdalene say, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him,” That is enough to send Peter and John racing to the tomb, where John looks into the...

By Tom Hoopes, April 9, 2020 Before Easter, the apostles hid their faith away like it was a virus. When they emerged from their self-quarantine to discover that Jesus Christ had risen, they found the strength to boldly confront the world with their faith. Today, we have the worrying and hiding part down pat. Now, on Easter Sunday, Year A, Jesus Christ himself is expecting each of us to do the next part and proclaim our faith. The readings give different approaches to Easter, each of them valuable. The Gospel reading is a very personal account of what it was like to experience a miracle. The apostles hear Mary Magdalene say, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him,” That is enough to send Peter and John racing to the tomb, where John looks into the...

Welcome to Groundhog Day, Coronavirus Christian style 2020. It’s Holy Saturday, which every year for me is the oddest day of the year. If a church door is open, Jesus seems so far. He is not in the tabernacle. Because He has died. He has died for us. Every year, I feel as though this knowledge will drive me wild. I killed Jesus because of my sins. Lousy, miserable, ungrateful sins. And now He’s gone. Except I know the whole story. And I remember that just a few weeks ago, during this Coronavirus agony, we marked the feast of the Annunciation. (He is on His way.) That’s the patronal feast day of the Sisters of Life, who I consider New York’s Greatest. And they are, in a way, the living patrons of our time. Think about it, we are fearing death. But we are fearing sickness and death at the sa...

Welcome to Groundhog Day, Coronavirus Christian style 2020. It’s Holy Saturday, which every year for me is the oddest day of the year. If a church door is open, Jesus seems so far. He is not in the tabernacle. Because He has died. He has died for us. Every year, I feel as though this knowledge will drive me wild. I killed Jesus because of my sins. Lousy, miserable, ungrateful sins. And now He’s gone. Except I know the whole story. And I remember that just a few weeks ago, during this Coronavirus agony, we marked the feast of the Annunciation. (He is on His way.) That’s the patronal feast day of the Sisters of Life, who I consider New York’s Greatest. And they are, in a way, the living patrons of our time. Think about it, we are fearing death. But we are fearing sickness and death at the sa...

ROME — On the Sunday before Easter, the priest’s phone rang. The Rev. Claudio Del Monte carried the phone, given to him by staff in the Bergamo hospital, along with a small cross and some homemade sanitizer. Instead of his usual cleric’s collar, he wore disposable scrubs, a surgical mask covered with another mask, protective eyewear and a cap over his head. On his chest he had drawn a black cross with a felt pen. He excused himself from two coronavirus patients he was visiting in the hospital and answered the call. But he already knew what it meant. Minutes later, he arrived at the bedside of an older man he had met days earlier. An oxygen mask now obscured the man’s face, and intensive care staff huddled around his bed. “I blessed him and absolved him from sins, he squeezed my hand tightl...