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St. Michael’s Catholic Church stands like its namesake sentinel over a city that needs the church’s presence. For the faithful who cross the threshold, the doors of this neo-Gothic church open wide to reveal a pageant of color and light.  Around the Rochester, New York, sanctuary and upon the altar are the statues, which, despite the passage of decades, have been renewed in splendor by a local artist and longtime parishioner.  “I’ve been doing this for 18 years and really got into it by accident,” Arlene Miller told the Register. A number of beautiful statues were sold by another city parish, and rather than let them be carted off, a group from St. Michael’s bought them to adorn their cathedral-like parish, and Miller was asked to restore their beauty and help add richness to the...

Mastercard and Visa said they had prohibited the use of their cards on the adult website Pornhub, after the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that the platform included videos of child abuse and rape. Both companies had started investigations this week into their financial ties with MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub. Mastercard said in a statement on Thursday that the investigation “confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site,” which prompted the company to terminate the acceptance of its cards on the site. In a separate statement, Visa said, “We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network,” pending the completion of its investigation. Nearly seven millio...

By Fr. Victor Feltes This week, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception and the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of St. Joseph as patron of the Universal (that is, the entire) Church, Pope Francis declared this “The Year of St. Joseph” through December 8th, 2021. The Holy Father also published an apostolic letter about Jesus’ beloved foster-father entitled “Patris Corde” (or “With a Father’s Heart”). In it, Pope Francis writes about Christian devotion to this great saint and mentions how the phrase “Go to Joseph” has an Old Testament origin. These are five of my personal reflections on St. Joseph. Go to Joseph In the Book of Genesis, during a time of famine across the known world, the Egyptians begged their pharaoh for bread. He in turn replied, “Go to Joseph and do whatever he ...

After my wife, Renee, passed on from cancer in 1992—at the startlingly young age of 27—I did a lot of grieving. One of the things that helped me through that process was listening to the music of two Christian recording artists. I’ve mentioned them a few times on Catholic Answers Live when people call in who are dealing with personal losses, and I thought I’d blog about them in hopes that the information could be helpful to others. I’m not impressed by a lot of artists, but I am by these two. They’re both very talented musicians and songwriters—and not just about grieving. Their music deals with a lot of situations from life and is well worth listening to whether you’re grieving or not! Their names are Mark Heard and Billy Sprague. Both artists are Evangelicals (or, I should say, Mark Hear...

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CNA Staff, Dec 10, 2020 / 07:01 pm MT (CNA).- The doctrine committee of the US bishops’ conference (USCCB) earlier this year produced a guide to evaluating the lyrics of hymns on the basis of their doctrinal content, noting that Vatican II declared sacred music’s purpose to be “the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful.” “Christian tradition, both Eastern and Western, has from antiquity been acutely aware that hymns and other songs are among the most significant forces in shaping – or misshaping – the religious and theological sensibility of the faithful,” the committee wrote in “Catholic Hymnody at the Service of the Church,” which is dated September 2020. “It is all the more important, then, that hymnody selected for the liturgical life of the Church successfully draw out t...

By Tom Hoopes, December 10, 2020 This Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent, Year B, Gaudete Sunday, Jesus is still absent from Sunday’s Gospel, but nonetheless the Church says “rejoice.” The readings even give the key to rejoicing: humility. It’s a paradox we easily miss. We can’t be joyful without being humble — and we can’t be humble unless we are “humiliated” according to Mother Teresa and “despised” according to St. Gregory the Great. Only one person in the Gospel reading today is more humble than John the Baptist. John is placed before us again as a great example of humility in his life, message and self-understanding. He eats bugs in the desert dressed in a hide, repeats “Repent!” to his audiences, and endlessly proclaims “I am not the Christ.” “I am not the Christ” means “I am no...

Subway tile in Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent’s New York apartment Photo: Douglas Friedman If you’re doing your part and social distancing from inside your home, you may start to notice small details of your house or apartment you hadn’t thought about before—like why your older home doesn’t have a closet, or how white subway tile became so ubiquitous. You may also be wondering if there’s anything you can do—aside from the usual cleaning and disinfecting process—to help keep your home as virus-free as possible during the coronavirus outbreak. Whether you realize it or not, a number of the design features in our homes today originated, or were popularized, because of previous infectious disease outbreaks, like the 1918 flu pandemic, tuberculosis, and dysentery. There is a very long, very int...

Someone writes: What advice would you give to a priest that had trouble staying loyal to the liturgy of the hours–especially if they have trouble finding them fruitful or just a checklist thing to do? I’d have several pieces of advice: 1) We all go through periods of spiritual dryness in which particular activities do not seem fruitful to us and more like a checklist. Do not worry about this. Accomplishing our duties even when they do not seem personally rewarding actually increases the merit of doing them, as it is persevering in spite of difficulty. This represents the principle that God uses to bring good out of adversity, the supreme example of which is Christ’s redemption for the world from the Cross. However, the same principle is at work in our lives when we do what we should in spi...

And I smile to think How God’s completenessFlowed round my incompletenessRound my restlessnessHis Rest. – Walter’s Desired Epitaph When I was a junior in undergraduate, I went off to Oxford for a term abroad. It was early January and the August or September prior I had begun catechesis to enter the Catholic Church. Now, having travelled in the middle of it, I was keen to find a good priest to prepare me.  The day after I arrived, I happened to pass by the Oxford Oratory, where, as a small sign on its gates boasts, St John Henry Newman had preached, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a priest, and J.R.R. Tolkien a regular. Another sign listed Mass at 10.00a on Saturday, so I planned to go the next day. After that morning Mass, I looked around for a man in a collar and saw one talking...

In the first video below there is a scene, not exceedingly rare today, of a piano placed in an airport or shopping mall. A person approaches the piano and begins to play, meekly at first, but then displaying virtuoso talent. Soon a crowd assembles in appreciation of the remarkable gift before them, both the man and the music. Sadly, I have not noticed a similar appreciation expressed by Catholics at Sunday Mass, weddings, or other similar moments when virtuosity was displayed by the church organist. For example, a few years ago I was at a large Mass of the faithful at a large church in Washington, D.C. where very talented organists are known to play. For the postlude, the organist played the Symphonia from Cantata 29 by J.S. Bach, a phenomenal and difficult piece (see the second video also...

APOSTOLIC LETTER PATRIS CORDE OF THE HOLY FATHERFRANCIS ON THE 150th ANNIVERSARY OF THE PROCLAMATION OF SAINT JOSEPHAS PATRON OF THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH WITH A FATHER’S HEART: that is how Joseph loved Jesus, whom all four Gospels refer to as “the son of Joseph”.[1] Matthew and Luke, the two Evangelists who speak most of Joseph, tell us very little, yet enough for us to appreciate what sort of father he was, and the mission entrusted to him by God’s providence. We know that Joseph was a lowly carpenter (cf. Mt 13:55), betrothed to Mary (cf. Mt 1:18; Lk 1:27). He was a “just man” (Mt 1:19), ever ready to carry out God’s will as revealed to him in the Law (cf. Lk 2:22.27.39) and through four dreams (cf. Mt 1:20; 2:13.19.22). After a long and tiring journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, he beheld t...