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By Noelle Mering There are inevitable periods in the life of most any mother when she is no longer on top of her mothering game. Perhaps she is post-partum, or ill, or exhausted, or all of the above. I remember many times when, in the throws of small children, nursing a baby and watching my beloved toddler/5 year old/young child act like a not-so-adorable tyrant/whiner/stinker and wondering when the competent woman would arrive to mother this child.  Somewhere in the muck and mire of feeling desperate for a solution, I developed a method to right the ship when a child is slipping into a pattern of misbehavior. Let me preface this by saying this applies to the normal behavioral issues to which any kid might be prone. This isn’t for more severe dysfunctions. I’ve not invented these idea...

COMMENTARY: As a nation, as a culture, our roots are Christian, and none of what is happening makes any sense unless we understand that God is at the core of all of this. As Britain mourns our monarch, bus stops in London carry illuminated pictures of the Queen, with a tribute from Transport for London. Major railway stations also carry her portrait, as do many shops, banks and other institutions. In churches, there are pictures with candles, and many people come to pray and add candles of their own. And in lots of places, there are banks of flowers: at London’s main royal palaces, of course, but also at other designated sites. People keep arriving with more and more bouquets and posies. As I write this, there are news reports of volunteers stripping off the plastic wrapping that florists ...

The beatification of Pope John Paul I on Sunday was, like the raising of any Christian disciple to the altars, a recognition of God’s grace at work in the sanctification of a soul. Yet it is also true that Albino Luciani, however holy he may have been as a priest and bishop, would never have attracted sufficient attention for a beatification cause to be opened if he had not served as pope for 33 days in 1978. Thus the beatification of a pope — the fifth such in this still young century — invites a few considerations on papal causes for beatification and canonization. Popes are beatified on the same grounds as everyone else — personal holiness sufficiently manifest that it is widely recognized, both during life and after death. They undergo the same process as any other cause, albeit with g...

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Happy Friday friends, Yesterday brought the deeply sad news that Elizabeth II has gone to her reward. To the extent that it is ever wise to speculate on the disposition of a stranger’s soul, I feel as confident as I can that Herself can hope in the loving mercy of Christ. The sincerity of her Christian faith was all too evident in her words and works, and ever more explicitly so in her later years. The British sovereign, who is also head of the Church of England, is the last monarch to be crowned liturgically. Elizabeth’s coronation was famously the first to be broadcast on television, but, at her own insistence, she was screened from the assembly and the cameras for her anointing, a moment she believed to be of deeply solemn and spiritual importance. The queen considered her role to be, i...

The British monarch had been on a summer break at her Scottish home since July, the BBC reported. As of Thursday afternoon, all the queen’s children were traveling to or had arrived at the castle.  Nichols noted that Elizabeth’s deep Christian faith — and her encouragement to others to practice their faith — made her a “shining light” in British history. “This faith, so often and so eloquently proclaimed in her public messages, has been an inspiration to me, and I am sure to many. The wisdom, stability and service which she consistently embodied, often in circumstances of extreme difficulty, are a shining legacy and testament to her faith. “Our prayer is that she is now received into the merciful presence of God, there to be reunited with her beloved Prince Philip. This is the promise...

No one under 70 can remember a time when she wasn’t here. No one can really — actually, in practical terms — imagine a Britain without her. The Queen was part of our landscape, part of the structure in which we live and operate. This has been a scorching summer: London parks brown and dusty, suburban lawns gray, fierce heat melting the road surfaces. And then, as September opened, the glorious rain came, and everything became green and fresh. This afternoon, Sept. 8, walking through the delicious freshness with water pelting down, I had a quiet, insistent sense of drama: The news hadn’t been confirmed, but somehow it was, in the very rain, the autumn feel of things — the Queen was passing; an era was ending. And before we say anything else, let us say: God save the King, for the monarchy r...

23rd Sunday in Ordinary TimeBy Fr. Victor Feltes The disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” The gospels show him explaining parables to his apostles in private, but the meanings of Jesus’ symbolic stories about the Kingdom of God were kept somewhat hidden from the crowds. Christ’s enemies and scoffers would dismiss these tales as nonsense but those with faith in him would keep them and contemplate them. The foes to his public ministry walked away with no additional ammunition to attack him with, but his faithful disciples would discover wisdom in his teachings. As Jesus says, “To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Sometimes the gospels explicitly tell us Jesus’ interpretation...

‘Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.’ (CCC 1817) Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope;To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve;To thee do we send up our sighs,Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears … On first appearance it might seem that hope is the least important of the theological virtues.  Love, it seems, is far greater. St Paul tells us that love is the greatest of virtues, and that those who “have not love” are nothing but “a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal”, and that those who “have a faith that can move mountains, but have not l...