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COMMENTARY: The Good Thief is our companion this Holy Week, giving hope to every sinner who worries that it might be too late. Happy feast of the Good Thief! (More or less.) There are no feast days observed during Holy Week. When March 25 falls during Holy Week, as it does this year, the great feast of the Annunciation is delayed to the Monday after Divine Mercy Sunday. Holy Week and the Easter Octave take precedence over all. Yet there is a lesson to be learned when March 25 falls during Holy Week, because in the long Christian tradition, March 25 is more about Holy Week than the Annunciation. Indeed, March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation because the first Good Friday was on March 25. The Good Thief, we might say, had his feast day “stolen” from him. How do we know the original date o...

The attributes bestowed by God upon man are quite beautiful if you take the time to admire God’s work in every human being. There is nothing that does not involve an act of Divine intimacy in how God made both man and woman. From the moment we receive the ability to breathe and encounter the world outside of our mother’s womb, we are initiated into a created order established by God to love Him and other human beings as he loves us. Part of this Divine vision involves his method of speaking to us in a way we can understand. This specific action is about God as a Divine Pedagogue or the way he chooses to communicate with us. Part of God’s divine approach to speaking with us involves the institution of laws or commands more specifically the Ten Commandments. One might say that referenc...

The attributes bestowed by God upon man are quite beautiful if you take the time to admire God’s work in every human being. There is nothing that does not involve an act of Divine intimacy in how God made both man and woman. From the moment we receive the ability to breathe and encounter the world outside of our mother’s womb, we are initiated into a created order established by God to love Him and other human beings as he loves us. Part of this Divine vision involves his method of speaking to us in a way we can understand. This specific action is about God as a Divine Pedagogue or the way he chooses to communicate with us. Part of God’s divine approach to speaking with us involves the institution of laws or commands more specifically the Ten Commandments. One might say that referenc...

Holy Week is tremendously important in the Christian year. What is it? Where did it come from? And what happens in it? Here are 9 things to know and share. 1) What is Holy Week? Holy Week is the week preceding Easter Sunday. According to the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar, “The Sixth Sunday [of Lent], on which Holy Week begins, is called, ‘Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord’” (No. 30). Holy Week thus begins on the Sixth Sunday of Lent, and the period is characterized by a variety of liturgical celebrations. These have changed over time, but the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church states: The various traditional rites of the week, of which each day has its own, probably began to develop at Jerusalem in the 4th cent., when pilgrimages became easily possible,...

A perfect week, ironic invites, and the social network Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Happy Friday friends, I took a day off this week, which I rarely ever do. My wife was out of town for a family event over the weekend, so, for a whole glorious couple of days, my daughter and I got to spend some true quality time together. Her current favorite movie is the 1995 classic “Babe,” which is a perfect film by any clear-eyed assessment. For weeks now, she has been cheerfully bottle-feeding her stuffed pig, and her every word and fascination is barnyard animals, much to my delight. So, while we had the chance for a day trip, I took her to a farm upstate which occasioned several of those moments of pure parental joy when a toddler realizes ...

The liturgy, most especially the Mass, is the central act of the Church. Vatican II reminds us that “the liturgy, ‘through which the work of our redemption is accomplished, most of all in the divine sacrifice of the Eucharist, is the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the Church” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 2). Everything the Church does should lead us to the worship of God, most preeminently in the Mass. When most Catholics think of the Mass, they think of their experience each Sunday. On our way to Easter, however, Catholics experience several liturgies — especially during Holy Week — that contain elements unique to those days. Sometimes, those liturgies seem to be “Mass with add-ons,” like on ...

UPDATED ‘Anyone who doesn’t know how to define what a woman is, should not be employed’ at the school A group of Saint Mary’s College affiliates want to take back their school from the administration who they say have betrayed the Catholic faith. A letter, sent on March 19 to the administration, comes after the Catholic college in South Bend, Indiana announced and then retracted its new policy to admit males who falsely claim to be female. The group identified five areas for improvement after discussions with students, alumni, and parents. One is a simple hiring test – define what a woman is. Since President Kate Conboy thinks men can become women, that would eliminate her from being hired. The letter states: Universally the survey participants said anyone who doesn’t know how to defi...

Petrusek said that one pillar of Word on Fire that’s “especially important” for this initiative is “looking for the ‘seeds of the word’ in the culture.”  “Now, this is something that goes back to the very beginning of the Church,” he said. “It’s speaking in ways that are intelligible to people wherever they are, across the different dimensions of the culture.” “The culture,” he noted, is an “umbrella term” that includes entertainment, politics, art, architecture, literature, and technology. “We want our students to be able to speak to individuals in all those different niches of contemporary culture,” he said but noted that Word on Fire is not looking to “accommodate secular culture.”  More in US “We’re looking at points of contact where we can get a foothold in, to have conversa...

Twenty-four years ago this week, I was in Jerusalem to cover Pope John Paul II’s epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land for NBC. After going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray at the 11th and 12th stations, I went to dinner with a graduate school classmate, Father Michael McGarry, then the director of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute. We drove through East Jerusalem to “Philadelphia,” a Palestinian restaurant Father McGarry recommended, where we had a fine meal of local specialties, prepared and served by friendly people who were evidently grateful for our trade (much of East Jerusalem being as dead as a doornail that night). The one discordant note was struck when, on the way out of the restaurant, I noticed a large color poster featuring a photo-shopped picture of John Paul II and PLO ...

In the past 25 years, few duos in the U.S. Catholic Church have been more dynamic and adept at identifying its problems and tackling its big challenges than Archbishop Charles Chaput and Francis X. Maier, his longtime senior adviser.  The pair’s collaborations included launching dynamic lay apostolates, primarily during their time together in the Archdiocese of Denver; digging out the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from a deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars; and managing the fallout from the clergy-abuse crisis in both Denver and Philadelphia. Archbishop Chaput, who went so far as to tell the Register in 2020 that “without Fran there’s no me,” says the key to their successful working relationship is their willingness to see things as they really are and proceed accordingly. “The r...

5th Sunday of LentBy Fr. Victor Feltes “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me.” Jesus says, “Where I am, there also will my servant be.” His statement is descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive. He describes what is the case, he prescribes how we should act, and he predicts what will be. His servants can be found where Jesus has been before. They should serve him where Jesus is now on earth. And one day his servants shall be where Jesus is in heaven. So where has Jesus been? Next Sunday is Palm Sunday when we will remember the way of his sorrowful Passion; how he mentally agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane, how he faced religious and secular trials, criticism and mockery, how he carried and painfully end...