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31st Sunday of Ordinary TimeBy Fr. Victor Feltes The Jews in Jericho looked down on Zacchaeus (and not just because he was short). He was a tax collector regarded as a sinner. When Zacchaeus chose his occupation he knew his neighbors would despise him. Even if he had never extorted or cheated anybody, he still would be resented for serving the unpopular political powers ruling over Israel. It’s easy to imagine him being insulted and shunned by the Jews in his territory. He needed a thick skin to do his job, caring little about what others thought of him. He was not only a tax collector but a chief tax collector, and this made him a very wealthy man. Yet his riches did not fulfill him. He was searching for something more than money and this led him to Jesus. “[Zacchaeus] was seeking to see ...

> Italiano> English> Español> Français > All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English If you want to receive (or go back to receiving) a notification for every new article, click HERE and subscribe to the Newsletter from Settimo Cielo! * Incredible but true. Just now now when in a few decades it has lost a good half of its forces, the Society of Jesus has surged to the heights of command of the Catholic Church as never before. Francis’s story is well known. He is the first Jesuit pope in history: he who notwithstanding had more adversaries than friends in the Society and took care not to set foot in its general curia whenever he came to Rome as a cardinal. But the innovation is that in this last phase of his pontificate – declining in age but not in ambitions – Francis ...

Hey everybody, Today is the great, good, and glorious feast of all saints, one of the most beautiful days on the Church’s calendar. I am genuinely excited for this feast, in which we thank God for the “great cloud of witnesses” with which we are surrounded. Of course, if today is All Saints, that means yesterday was Halloween. That means that in the portion of the day when I’m usually writing my newsletter, I was taking the Flynn children trick-or-treating instead. So if The Tuesday Pillar Post is a bit short today, well, the Flynn children took my newsletter writing time. Take it up with them. The news Seven months ago, Fr. David Morrier, TOR, once chaplain of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, pled guilty to one count of sexual battery, in a plea bargain that came after he was ac...

SCRIPTURES & ART: Zacchaeus’ eyes are all for Jesus Christ Last week, Jesus taught us the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. As a result of how they prayed, the latter left the Temple justified, the former not. In last week’s essay, I suggested that while the publican’s prayer for mercy opened the way for a change of his life, we don’t know what happened. From the facial expression of the man on Fabritius’ painting, which we studied, it looked as if he was a man peacefully reflecting on what needed to change in his life. I even asked whether the justified tax-collector might be St. Matthew or Zacchaeus. Well, the story of Zacchaeus follows in this week’s Gospel. (In Luke 18 itself, when Jesus concludes the parable of the Pharisee and publican, he once again predicts his impendin...

GlobeNewswire Photobook and Album Market to Hit USD 4.42 Billion by 2029 | Industry to Generate 3.75% CAGR during (2022-2029) Companies covered in Photobook and Album Market are Utopia Deals (U.S.), Grund America (S.), Dunroven House (S.), Orahome (S), Iris Hantverk (Sweden), The DMC Corporation (France), MATTEO (U.S.), ELSATEX Ltd. (K.), Red Land Cotton (S.), Danica Studio (Canada), and more players profiled.Pune, India, Nov. 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — According to Fortune Business Insights™, the global photobook and album market size was valued at USD 3.36 billion in 2021 and USD 3.41 billion in 2022. The market is Join Our Telegram Group : Salvation & Prosperity  

Recently I was talking to a group of young adult Catholics and mentioned a gospel passage that they said they had never heard. It is the Gospel of the Temple Tax and how Jesus told Peter to go catch a fish and, in its mouth will be a coin that will pay the Temple Tax for Jesus and Peter. In a certain sense it is one of the more charming gospel passages and kind of “cool.” It shows Jesus’ sovereignty over creation and the rather interesting twist of finding money in the mouth of a certain fish from a large large of likely millions of fish. In the Holy Land today, when you have a meal near the Sea of Galilee, many of the restaurants serve “Peter’s Fish” that is served with a coin in its mouth. The bible study students before me, mostly in their early thirties, were perplexed that they had ne...

COLUSA — A Catholic church was vandalized this week in Colusa County. Police are calling the act a hate crime.    The tight-knit Catholic community in Colusa says seeing their place of worship completely desecrated has left them shaken up after 67-year-old James Stoltenberg allegedly vandalized the Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. Stoltenberg is suspected to have broken into the church on Oct. 25 and caused $10,000 worth of damage. He was arrested two days later as church security video captured the incident. James Stoltenberg   Solano County Sheriff’s Office Images from the incident show the baptismal font desecrated, the tabernacle thrown, Eucharist strewn across the floor, and obscenities carved onto the altar. Deacon Dr. Julian Delgado says many of the items de...

There is a house down the street from us that becomes an object of annual interest to my children as the days grow short and the nights cold. When we go for evening walks, they pause before it with wide eyes. Skeletons carrying coffins march across the lawn. A spectral bride’s veil stirs in the breeze. Grinning zombies lurk in the bushes, prisoners gnash their teeth in crow cages, and monstrous spiders crawl up the porch rails. Tombstones, jack-o-lanterns, and skulls complete the macabre yet playful neighborhood spectacle that my kids behold in wonder every October. As we took it in this year, remarking on a couple of new cadaverous additions, my son scratched his scruffy 10-year-old head and said, “Dad, what does Halloween celebrate?” The further our culture falls away from the celebratio...

By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 28, 2022 Last week in this space, I expressed my dismay at the news that Pope Francis had appointed a pro-abortion scholar to the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL)— and Archbishop Vincenzio Paglia, the president of the PAL, had compounded the problem by adopting the rhetoric of the abortion lobby and insisting that his new colleague was not “pro-abortion” but merely “pro-choice.” Then we learned that another newly appointed member of the PAL had indulged in pro-abortion sloganeering, saying that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, “undermines basic requirements of tolerance toward the pluralism of moral perspectives within society.” So there were two avowed proponents of legal abortion among the 14 ne...

Northern Ireland’s predominantly Protestant identity has been its foundational premise ever since its creation a century ago — until now. “We are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant State,” the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, confidently asserted before the legislature of the nascent state in 1921. His successor, Basil Brooke, went further and admonished a group of Protestant farmers: “Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. … If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms, we are traitors to Ulster,” he said. Both men typified the founding narrative of Northern Ireland. Created in 1921 in the six northeastern counties of Ireland, it was to remain part of the United Kingdom when the 26 southern counties won inde...

The Holy See announced on Saturday a two-year renewal of its “provisional” agreement with the government of China, which was first signed in 2018, and renewed again two years ago. The agreement aims to normalize the appointment of bishops in China, and ensure unity of the Catholic Church – with some six to 12 million members – in the country. For his part, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, argued Saturday that the deal is “essential to the daily life of the Church” in China — repeating a frequent theme in his defense of the bilateral agreement. But while the cardinal insists the deal is a pragmatic necessity, questions about its effectiveness are stacking up. And human rights advocates argue that engagement with the Chinese Communist Party is sapping the ...

Hey everybody, Twenty-one years ago today, on October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP, and with it the last iconic Windows wallpaper, which has since become – probably – the most viewed photograph in all of history. You know the one I’m talking about. This hill: “Bliss,” Charles O’Rear. If you’re curious, the hill is in Sonoma, California, and is today covered in the grape-growing rows of a vineyard. A photographer named Charles O’Rear used to drive past the hill every week, when he made the trek to visit his girlfriend in Marin County each Friday. O’Rear snapped the photo some Friday in January 1996, and uploaded it to a stock photo agency’s website. The photographer didn’t think much about the picture again, until some designer a few years later at Microsoft decided i...