Left

Everything will be all right. That was true on the day of the crucifixion, and it is true today — from the COVID-19 floors of hospitals to the unemployment lines. Everyone somehow knows that everything will be all right. “Everything will be all right” — “andrà tutto bene” — is what Italians from their balconies proclaimed at night early on in the COVID-19 crisis. It is what New Yorkers scrawled on a rock on the banks of the Hudson River near Brooklyn Bridge.  An 86-year-old grandmother of 19 at St. Joseph’s Senior Home in Woodbridge, New Jersey, said it and lived. Many others remember it as the last words of the ones they have lost. They lit the Rio de Janeiro Christ the Redeemer with that message. Signs appearing from Atlanta, Georgia, to Chicago proclaim it. It was the message Sarah...

An Eastern Catholic bishop working at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States ignored the pleas of passersby on the street and helped a man who who had fallen in a fit of coughing. A week later, the bishop started showing symptoms of COVID-19. “I have no regrets whatsoever, even while I was suffering,” said Bishop Gregory J. Mansour, head of the Maronite Eparchy of St. Maron, based in Brooklyn, New York, April 29. Rather, he said the whole experience has given him a “better sense of communion with my priests and with the people.” “We’ve so many people going through this, suffering and some deaths,” Bishop Mansour told Currents, a news program on the Latin Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s NET TV. Mansour, who recently finished a term as chairman of Catholic Relief Services...

By Tom Hoopes, April 30, 2020 This is Good Shepherd Sunday (the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A) when we again review the ways Christ is like a shepherd. But it is also helpful to look at the ways he is nothing like a shepherd at all. Jesus Christ’s shepherd qualities are well known. He is our guide. He is our protector. He prods us back when we start to go astray. He leaves the 99 behind to search for us when we are lost. Sunday’s Gospel takes his “shepherdness” one step further. The Shepherd’s is the voice we recognize (think about that: Jesus is implying that we are so blind or distracted that he has to shout to keep us on track). He prevents imposter sheep from taking over. He even compares himself to the gate of the sheepfold. But let’s not forget in Easter the mystery that makes...

ROME – Last Wednesday Maria Teresa Baruffi, who lives in the northern Italian town of Caravaggio with her family, received a surprising phone call while standing in line at the supermarket: It was Pope Francis, asking to speak to her son, Andrea. Several days prior, Andrea, who is 18 and has autism, had sent a letter to Pope Francis to “correct” him because, during the time of the coronavirus, he invites those present inside the chapel for his daily livestreamed Masses to make the Sign of Peace, typically expressed with a handshake or a kiss. According to Francis, the youth told him, “You say, ‘Peace be with you,’ but you can’t say that because in the pandemic we can’t touch each other.” During his April 29 call to Baruffi, Francis explained that he wanted to give Andrea an answer. However...

On 27 April 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense officially released three unclassified videos, footage taken on Navy fighter jets. These videos, leaked to the public in 2007 and 2017, appear to show three unidentified flying objects moving in weird and unexpected ways. The Navy had already acknowledged the videos were real, but pointedly did not say what they show. Do these videos show alien spaceships? If you do a lazy search on Google for them, the results might give you the idea they do. A lot of electrons have been spilled claiming these show alien vehicles making impossible maneuvers, are surrounded by a glow indicating some sort of advanced tech like a “warp drive,” and are clearly beyond our own miserable human technology. But is any of this actually true? Yeah, no. I mean, sure, t...

This post originally appeared in the April 27, 2020 edition of The Move, a place for Eater’s editors to reveal their recommendations and pro dining tips — sometimes thoughtful, sometimes weird, but always someone’s go-to move. Subscribe now. Just after traffic but before the Kardashians, bagels are among the very worst things about Los Angeles. For the better part of my 20 years spent in this city, I’ve been forced to endure the thick, puffy, round, breadish items that pass themselves off as actual bagels. Thankfully this has begun to change — over the last few years, some smart LA bakers have started putting out actually pretty good bagels around town. But for a long time, the best way to sate my bagel cravings was to drive two hours east to Palm Springs, where a tiny bagel shop was perfo...

April 30, 2020 Exorcists all over the world are seeing “the same thing. Demons are acting the same way, people are getting into trouble in the same way. And people are being healed, and being pulled out of possession and obsession and oppression, in the same way,” said Charles D. Fraune, author of Slaying Dragons: What Exorcists See & What We Should Know. “We should not fear the devil at all. Actually, if we do fear the devil, he’s winning…” For more about Fraune and his book, go to TheSlayingDragonsBook.com.

Given that he was one of the principal planners and prominent leaders of last October’s special Synod on Amazonia, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, OFM, is understandably enthusiastic about the results of that exercise. Indeed, the enthusiasm of the emeritus archbishop of São Paulo and prefect emeritus of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy   seems virtually boundless: Cardinal Hummes recently claimed that “The Synod for the Amazon was historic; no previous synod was as synodal and reform-oriented as this one.” High praise indeed. But is such fulsome applause really warranted? How does the cardinal’s claim measure up against the historical record? Not very well, I fear. Which suggests the possibility that Cardinal Hummes is reimagining the recent Catholic past in order to make cert...

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on how easy it is to fool Catholic bashers: If there were a gullibility record, it was broken on April 27 by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). This Church-hating band of professional victims’ advocates—which the Catholic League played a key role in effectively destroying (it limbers on but few pay it any heed)—proved how easy it is to seduce when it bought, hook, line and sinker, a parody about Cardinal Timothy Dolan floated by Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter. On April 27, Winters wrote a critical piece about those bishops who were on a conference call on April 24 with the president, saving his licks for Cardinal Dolan. In what everyone with an IQ in double figures realized, what he said about Dol...

Our daily life, whether we realize it or not, is surrounded by the protecting presence of angels! As the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms, “From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. ‘Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.’ Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God” (CCC 336) Angels are here to help us and above all, guide us to eternal life. Many saints would send their guardian angels on various errands, such as praying at a church for them when they were physically unable to do so. This works because angels are spiritual beings and are able to move about our world with relative ease, going from one pla...

In his latest book “On the Road with St. Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts” (Brazos Press, $19), James K.A. Smith offers a multifaceted reflection that intertwines his own life and the life of the African bishop from Hippo to illuminate the human experience.  This book is “a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart. It’s a road trip with a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go.” Smith offers a fresh and compelling portrait of St. Augustine, centered on the “Confessions” but informed by his letters, preaching, and other works, perhaps especially “On Christian Teaching.”  Interspersed are references from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the novel “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, the memoir of Jay-Z...