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Now, more than ever, Catholic physicians and nurses need the patronage of Sts. Cosmas and Damian. They’ve become an optional memorial in the current Roman Calendar, displaced from their traditional feast day on Sept. 27 because the Church decided that St. Vincent de Paul is more significant to Catholics of our times. But Sts. Cosmas and Damian are always mentioned in the First Eucharistic Prayer and, since the Roman Canon was the Eucharistic Prayer for centuries, the fact these two brothers are included every time it is prayed suggests we learn something about them. They were doctors. They were born in Arabia. They seemed to have practiced their medical profession somewhere on the southern coast of Turkey. They were said to have taken no fee for their services, earning them the name anargy...

(Redux) Earlier this week, Cardinal Dolan of New York published a column in which he reflected on the results of the listening sessions in the archdiocese related to liturgy. In particular, he wrote about the complaint that Masses are “too long:” Could they be on to something? A liturgical scholar observed to me recently, “The greatest advance of liturgical renewal after the council was the restoration of the prominence and solemnity of the Easter Vigil. But the greatest negative of these last decades has been that every Sunday Mass is now as long as Holy Saturday!” The dismal stories the people shared with me reached litany length. Now, they tell me, Mass starts with music rehearsal, then an obligatory “greeting” to those around you. By then, we’re five minutes past when Mass was supposed...

Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs said her husband Andrew asked her after Mass, “Did you see the guy with Jesus hair?” She did see him and had wanted to run after him, but she hesitated, and now she regrets it. He would have made a great model. It was one leap she didn’t take, but only one. Four years ago, she and her husband took a chance, and now she supports the family full-time with their home business, Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs Sacred Art. She mostly paints commissions and also teaches painting in person. As a working mother and breadwinner, she’s something of an oddity in her community. “In my parish, many of the mothers stay home full time, and the husband works. I try to explain to people we chose to have this small business of making sacred art because it allows us to live the liturgical year...

Finding Peace in the Storm By Dan Burke Sophia Institute Press, 2023 144 pages, $17.95 To order: SophiaInstitute.com Over the past few years, some Catholic publishers have reintroduced classic spiritual writings to a new generation. That is a tremendous gift. Today, when so many of us Catholics seem inordinately focused on temporal affairs like politics, there is a need to refocus on the Last Things — and this can be well accomplished through spiritual reading.  Dan Burke’s Finding Peace in the Storm is a welcome addition to this category. His book not only polishes an old gem by St. Alphonsus Liguori, born Sept. 27, 1696, titled Uniformity With God’s Will, but guides a modern audience along the way. To appreciate St. Alphonsus’ writing, it is helpful to understand his biography. ...

For medical providers, her imminent death seemed all but sealed — even in the eyes of Dr. C. Everett Koop, a surgeon involved in her care who would later become the U.S. Surgeon General under the Reagan administration. While Koop helped remove Calandra’s bladder to provide her comfort, he likewise advised her parents to make preparations for her funeral. However, that day did not come to pass — as told by Calandra herself when recounting the story to “EWTN News In Depth.” “[Koop] said, ‘You need … to come to terms with this now, you can’t hang on to this dying child,” Calandra recounted. “And my mother went home, and she didn’t accept it.” Calandra described how her mother, a devout Catholic, picked up a book someone had given to her about Padre Pio and heard an inner voice as she read the...

September boasts a good number of Marian feasts and memorials: Our Lady’s Nativity (Sept.8), the Holy Name of Mary (Sept.12), Our Lady of Sorrows (Sept.15), and Our Lady of La Salette (Sept.19). But have you heard of Our Lady of Ransom (changed to Our Lady of Mercy after Vatican II)? Not many Catholics in North America have, but in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, the feast is widely known, particularly in Barcelona as she is the city’s patroness. The feast of Our Lady of Ransom was officially added to the liturgical calendar in 1960 to be celebrated on Sept. 24. So what is the story behind this title of Our Lady? Saracens, or Moors, captured much of Spain in the 13th century. They forced Christians into slavery. In 1218, Our Lady appeared to three men at the same ti...

What Jesus teaches in this Sunday’s Gospel is one of those parables that rock our world and challenge our worldly way of thinking. Frankly, that is one of its purposes. We are tempted to side with the laborers who worked the longest, thinking that their being paid the same amount as those who worked only for an hour is unfair. Think very carefully before asking God to be “fair.” What we really should ask of God is that He be merciful, for if He were fair, we’d all be in Hell right now. We have no innate capacity to stand before God in pure justice; we simply cannot measure up. It is only grace and mercy that will win the day for us. So be very careful about challenging God’s fairness. In fact, when we see Him being merciful to someone else, we ought to rejoice, for it means that we might s...

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio – articles – email ) | Sep 18, 2023 In high levels of government, an elderly man dresses like a woman. He looks like a comical character out of Vaudeville or a Monty Python skit, but he’s unashamed. We also have young men who wear women’s swimsuits and easily win female swimming competitions. During the years of the Soviet empire and rigged Olympics, we laughed at comedian Yakov Smirnoff’s joke: “In Russia, if a male athlete loses, he becomes a female athlete.” Today, nobody laughs. Why not? Jesus says we should forgive one another seventy-seven times. But we need not lose our sense of irony and humor. Good humor helps us see the boundaries of healthy behavior and happily endure annoyances. We can trace the death of humor that laughs at foolish behav...

In the month of September, we mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien, and we celebrate this week both Hobbit Day and Tolkien Week. This week on Register Radio we talk to author and Tolkien expert Joseph Pearce about the legacy of the devoutly Catholic scholar and his masterwork, ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums

(OSV News) In our preparation for the Synod, here in the Archdiocese of New York, close to 7,000 people accepted our invitation to attend listening sessions or respond online to issues of concern in the life of the Church today. One question I always posed was, “How can we get people back to Sunday Mass? Why have so many of our folks stopped coming?” I was amazed at the high interest this generated. Apart from the predictable carping from both fringes — the far left claiming that the only way to increase Mass attendance was to drop all liturgical guidelines and go back to the “do-your-own-thing” hootenannies of the ’70’s, or the alt-right urging turning the altar around and getting the fiddlebacks out of mothballs — the largest majority replied that the top reasons people were no longer co...

Saturday, September 23, 2023, marks the start of a new season—but what exactly you should call that season depends on where in the world you are and whom you ask. In Great Britain, the third season of the year usually has only one name: autumn. But if you hop across the Atlantic, you’ll find that people use both fall and autumn interchangeably when referring to this time of year, making it the only season in the English language with two widely accepted names. So what is it about the season of Halloween pop-up stores, denim jackets, and pumpkin spice lattes that makes it so special? According to Dictionary.com, fall isn’t a modern nickname that followed the more traditional autumn. The two terms are actually first recorded within a few hundred years of each other. Before either word emerge...