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Sometimes I decide what I’m going to write about. And sometimes God does. I just came back from the FOCUS conference in Phoenix. It was awesome, incidentally, and I highly recommend that you all look into it for next year. Yes, it is sponsored by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. And yes, there are a lot of college kids there. But there is also a marvelous adult track, with wonderful speakers and fabulous activities.  But I digress. The very first speaker was Father Mike Schmitz, and the theme of his talk was that Jesus is not “optional.” It was a wonderful talk and gave me so much spiritual food for thought. I wrote “Jesus is not optional” in my little column ideas list. Then I came home and went to a movie. The movie, A Hidden Life, was about Franz Jagerstatter, the Au...

ROME – Canadian Jesuit Michael Czerny, made a cardinal by Pope Francis last October, became the titular pastor of a parish in the outskirts of Rome on Sunday. During his homily, he spoke to the thousands gathered – many of whom were migrants – about his own family fleeing war and finding refuge in North America. “My family of four fled from post-war Czechoslovakia,” Czerny said. “We arrived in Canada by ship in the year 1948. This life experience of ours was immortalized in advance in the Flight into Egypt painted on glass by my maternal grandmother, Anna Hayek Löw.” Long after his grandmother created that work of art, the life experience has continued to shape Czerny’s ministry and work, to the point that his new coat of arms depicts a boat with a family of four. This image, he said, repr...

You’ve seen them at the airport, at the beach or in a restaurant. A child is thrashing or kicking or on the ground while a desperate parent hovers nearby, trying to ignore angry glances from passersby. I know because I’ve been that anguished parent. On display are “cognitive disabilities,” invisible handicaps related to how children’s brains work. For many kids with cognitive disabilities or developmental disorders, a car can be a prison, a plane or a new hotel room can be sheer terror. In the past, families were stuck, barely venturing outside the county, certainly not on an overnight trip. Travel meant potential trauma minefields, and unfortunately, we live in a world where bystanders are more apt to call the police or Child Protective Services than offer help to the parents. “You’re in ...

“The Fairness for All Act essentially creates all the problems that The Equality Act creates, and then exempts a handful of people from those problems, and then they call that a victory for religious liberty,” said Greg Baylor,  “The Fairness for All Act essentially creates all the problems that The Equality Act creates, and then exempts a handful of people from those problems, and then they call that a victory for religious liberty,” said Greg Baylor, senior counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom. “I would say it’s a victory for religious liberty not to create the problems in the first place.” Baylor is a previous guest on Respect Life Radio, where he discussed The Equality Act , which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in May ...

Richmond, Va., Jan 17, 2020 / 11:30 am (CNA).- The Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia will no longer hold a bishops’s consecration at a Catholic parish in Williamsburg, after an internet petition objecting to the event drew national attention.  “It is with great sadness that I have received a letter from Bishop-Elect Susan Haynes stating that, due to the controversy of the proposed use of St. Bede Catholic Church for her consecration of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia, she has decided to find another location for the ceremony to take place,” Bishop Barry Knestout of the Catholic Richmond diocese said in a Jan. 17 statement. St. Bede Catholic Church is located within the Diocese of Richmond.  A statement from the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia said tha...

ROME – While in the abstract it may seem the case for religious freedom and protecting vulnerable religious minorities ought to be based on virtue and morality, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom believes something else is bringing governments around today: Cold, hard cash. “If you want to grow an economy and build something,” Sam Brownback told Crux, promoting religious freedom is essential. “Money is a chicken, it won’t go where there’s a conflict,” he said. “You’ve just ruled yourself out of a whole bunch of investment if you’ve given in to this monochromatic view of religion, that it has to be this [way] and everybody else we punish. You’ve just really frozen yourself out of the global economy and you’re not going to grow.” “You’re seeing a lot more govern...

The United Methodist Church is considering a proposal for traditional Methodist communities to leave the church and enter a new denomination. Could some choose the Catholic Church via the Ordinariate? Ten years ago, Benedict XVI issued a new decree that would create three new Catholic dioceses with English Christian patrimony called personal ordinariates and they would also receive Anglican, Methodist, Episcopal and AME congregations, clergy and individuals into the Catholic Church with the richness of their traditions. Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus began the Ordinariates, which received the first wave of Episcopal and Anglican congregations and clergy in North America, the United Kingdom and Oceania. And these new dioceses have also seen Catholics w...

Image copyright ESA/Hubble/NASA/Janaína Ávila Image caption Some of the pre-solar grains in the Murchison meteorite (inset) could have come from evolved stars similar to the Egg Nebula (pictured) Scientists analysing a meteorite have discovered the oldest material known to exist on Earth. They found dust grains within the space rock – which fell to Earth in the 1960s – that are as much as 7.5 billion years old. The oldest of the dust grains were formed in stars that roared to life long before our Solar System was born. A team of researchers has described the result in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When stars die, particles formed within them are flung out into space. These “pre-solar grains” then get incorporated into new stars, planet...

ROME – Next week, Pope Francis will lead the first celebration of the Sunday of the Word of God, which he instituted as a yearly occasion to celebrate and study the Bible. Francis wants to “stimulate all Christians not to place the Bible on the shelf as one of many books, perhaps filled with dust, but as an instrument that awakens our faith,” said Italian Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella on Friday. “It is an evangelization initiative that can help Christian communities and also priests not to improvise when it comes to communicating the word of God,” Fisichella said at a press conference in Rome. “The people of God have a right to listen to the word of God and to receive an explanation from the priest [in his homily] that is coherent with the word of God and not a free interpretation of it....

> Italiano> English> Español> Français > All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English * In the beginning of the year speech to the diplomatic corps, Pope Francis found words on everything, from Burkina Faso to northern Macedonia. But not on China. This silence was not a surprise, given the fear of the Vatican authorities that any word of theirs in this regard could only irritate the Asian giant, already rather hostile toward “foreign” religions, including the Catholic Christian. Just before, however, the pope gave his speech, a magazine that reflects his thoughts very closely and is printed after review by him and by the secretariat of state, “La Civiltà Cattolica” directed by the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, had come out with a thirteen-page article that spoke of China in spades...

Ponce, Puerto Rico, Jan 16, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Precariously resting on the edge of an altar leaning forward from the impact of the earthquake that struck Puerto Rico, a tabernacle was retrieved intact from a church in Puerto Rico and brought to safety. In the early hours of Jan. 7, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the island, the last of a series of quakes that began Dec. 28. The earthquake left one dead, various people injured, serious damage to the infrastructure, and a power outage on the island. A state of emergency was declared. Previo a otros temblores durante la mañana, fieles rescatan el Sagrario junto al párroco. Esto en la Parroquia Inmaculada Con emoción de Guayanilla que quedó destruida tras el fuerte temblor registrado en el sur de Puerto Rico esta madrugada. pic.twitter...

I’ve been out of action for the better part of a week with a nasty case of flu, but have used the time to get through most of George Weigel’s new book The Irony of Modern Catholic History I’ll be reviewing it later over at Imaginative Conservative, but the book has reminded me how much God is always elsewhere. Weigel’s book charts the Catholic Church’s centuries long wrestling match with modernity, and reminds us that controversy, quarrels, confusion and seeming chaos have always been part of church life. You could even say one of the marks of the authenticity of the Catholic Church is that her members are engaged in an eternal internal tug of war. We see this as alarming and upsetting. We want everything to be happy and peaceful and calm, but that ain’t reality. The fact is, the...