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By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Jun 21, 2023 “Put out into the deep…” (Lk 5:4) That was the admonition that Jesus gave to his disciples: an admonition that Pope John Paul II repeated in the conclusion of his for the Great Jubilee, Novo Millennio Ineunte. It sounds so easy. But it takes courage. The oceans, with their unfathomed depths and their incalculable powers, can be dangerous—as today’s news headlines remind us. When we speak of the “oceans” of God’s mercy—even deeper, even stronger—we must speak with awe. St. Aloysius Gonzaga, whose feast we are celebrating, used that image in a letter to his mother, which appears in the Office of Readings today. He wrote: The divine goodness, most honoured lady, is a fathomless and shoreless ocean, and I confess that when I ...

[embedded content] It’s been said that familiarity breeds contempt. For Catholics, I think there’s a temptation for familiarity to breed complacency. We are all susceptible of taking for granted that which is closest to us, including the Mass. While Sacred Tradition is very important to understand the fullness of our faith, if we get too comfortable, our experience of Catholicism can be reduced to rituals alone, going through the motions week in and week out, disconnected from our ‘real lives’. I love the quote I heard recently that “true tradition isn’t the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.” Amen… Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums

Catholic summer camps are incorporating an outside-the-box approach. There is a new trend of Catholic summer camps that are moving away from a traditional model of a Vacation Bible School (VBS) program. Catholic summer camps for kids and teens are now placing elements such as outdoor wilderness activities and exploring nature at the forefront of their focus. These camps can be seen providing a combination of outdoor fun and spiritual nourishment.  Some examples of Catholic summer camps that demonstrate this essential combination include: Annunciation Heights, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Catholic Youth Summer Camp. Annunciation Heights Annunciation Heights is a youth and familycamp and retreat center located in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It focuses primarily on developing a love f...

The devil is back on the Big Screen in the 2023 film “The Pope’s Exorcist.” But he never really left the stage. He’s not a metaphor. He’s not a fairytale. And as awkward as it might seem to an urbane and modern world, we need to take his existence, and his role in human affairs, seriously. Leszek Kolakowski was one of the great minds of the last century. He was a leading Marxist philosopher in Poland until he began asking unpleasant questions about life in the Soviet Union under Stalin. That kind of indiscretion got him silenced. Then it got him exiled to the West. He went on to become one of the 20th century’s most productive men of letters. Kolakowski gave a very curious talk at Harvard in 1987 entitled “The Devil in History.” Many of the people in the audience knew Kolakowski’s work. Th...

But the project of liberal Catholicism rarely has anything to say about how teachings that conflict with current-era liberalism might be better defended or shored up. Instead, the tacit presupposition is always that Catholicism needs adaptation or replacement wherever it falls afoul of progressive moral consensus, with the focus on specific issues a strategic rather than substantive narrowing of those ambitions. Individual advocates are obviously committed to particular issues — priestly celibacy, women in holy orders, intercommunion with Protestants, and so on. But for liberal Catholicism as a whole, each issue can feel like just a target of opportunity, with another set of targets waiting if it falls, and then another after that — with the list defined by the shifting preoccupations of b...

Auschwitz was hell, a nightmare of agony, grief, and despair. Except in the maternity ward. There, as the lice bit and the patients shivered and the rats skittered, there was—astonishingly—peace. There were painless births and healthy babies and mothers holding their little ones as the midwife that they all called “Mother” prayed with them and sang to them and treated them like human beings. This peace never lasted long. The babies were taken or the mothers were sent back out to work, trying desperately to feed their babies as they and all those around them starved. But in the maternity ward there was peace. There were babies who lived and mothers who lived. And all because of Servant of God Stanisława Leszczyńska. Born to a Polish Catholic family during a time when her part of Poland was ...

A wildman, some quiet time, and the kids are alright Skip to content Happy Friday friends, And a happy feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist for tomorrow. Of all the figures in the New Testament (saving our Lord, obviously), I confess John is the one whom I find most fascinating, and the narrative of his life most compelling. I laugh a little every time I read the account of his naming, at how infuriated Zachariah must have been with the neighbors who “made signs to his father, inquiring what he wanted him to be called,” since he was struck dumb, not deaf, by the angel in the Temple.   I wonder about John’s upbringing, and what the child who lept in the womb to herald the presence of the unborn Christ would have been like as a child.  And I’m curious what his father the ...

The synodal process on synodality for a synodal Church took a big step in Rome this week, as the instrumentum laboris (working document) for the October synod was released. Yet it may well be that the real significant news about the synodality project took place recently in Kigali, Rwanda; Alexandria, Egypt; Orlando, Florida; Kochi, India; and Berlin. After an elephantine gestation of two years between the Holy Father’s announcement of the synodal process in May 2021, it may well be that the entire project is now headed for a stillbirth. From the beginning the elephant in the Vatican, so to speak, has been that “communion, mission, participation” — the synod theme chosen by the Holy Father — are in crisis precisely where synodality is practiced. Indeed, the Christian world is in one of the...

Editor’s note: This is part 26 of a series, “The Kingdom of Grace.” Part 25 can be found here. The primary cause of the growth of grace is the Eucharist, and receiving holy communion has many wonderful effects in us. It comes as a surprise to many people to hear that the Eucharist is a cause, but realizing this simple truth helps us to receive the effects or fruits of holy communion. Just as food nourishes a child and causes the child to grow strong in the bodily life, so holy communion nourishes our souls and causes us to grow strong in the spiritual life – the life of grace. Besides causing growth, food also has many other effects on our bodily life. Food serves to recover us from sickness, preserve us from becoming sick in the future, and energize us when we have grown sluggish. Holy co...

It’s not Thomas More’s fault. His fame is so widespread that he has put in the shade the only English bishop who had the guts to stand up to Henry VIII, and lost his head because of it. That bishop was St. John Fisher (1469-1535). Certainly, most if not all of the Register’s readers will recognize that name. But let’s face it, what Fisher needs is his own version of A Man for All Seasons — a big, gorgeously filmed, beautifully written, destined-to-be-a-classic film, with an all-English cast. So, until some Hollywood producer gives this concept the green light, here’s a very brief introduction to one of the glories of Catholic English. John Fisher grew up to be one of the “new men,” a sneering term the English aristocracy used for intelligent, clever, accomplished fellows who came from the ...

My dad wasn’t a ‘Fathers Knows Best’ kind of father, but he was the only father I had, and I loved him. I’m a big fan of superhero movies. There is something so compelling about a larger-than-life figure who can run at lightning speed, deflect bullets and save innocent people from the evil machinations of the villain.  When I was growing up, my father was my first glimpse of a hero. Instead of the dramatic garb of movie superheroes, however, he preferred Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved shirts to withstand the harrowing heat of Miami days. He couldn’t scale tall buildings or dodge bullets but was skilled at banishing the monsters that invaded our Miami home.  They weren’t the dragons kids read about in story books, but were instead tropical flying roaches, sometimes called palmet...