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This is awesome! Fr. Dan Beeman of the Diocese of Richmond, Va. revealed an amazing confession story on Twitter. The pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Newport News, Va. said he ordered Chinese food from Uber Eats, only to end the drop-off with sacramental confession. As of this writing, the tweet generated 1,000 likes and almost 11,000 retweets. Here’s his full story below: @inthelineofmel, Twitter The full tweet reads, “Uber eats drops off food. I close door. Driver knocks again one minute later. I think he must have given me the wrong order. / “Are you a priest? A Catholic priest?” – Yeah, this is the rectory.  / “Well can I go to confession before you eat?”/ #UberConfess.” Fr. Beeman later elaborated on the story in a Fox News interview. “It was an incredible thing. One ...

Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, Italy, on Saturday, April 18, published on Twitter an image accompanied by a comment that is very brief and simple, but sufficiently moving and powerful for it to stand out on hundreds of news sites around the world: “The church in the Bergamo cemetery is empty. At last.” Bergamo is one of the Italian cities that was most brutally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The church in the local cemetery went through several very sorrowful weeks, receiving an endless stream of coffins that awaited burial or, most often, cremation: the funeral homes in the city were overloaded to the point where 40 coffins had accumulated inside the church, where they waited for an average of five days for the bodies of the victims to be able to be cremated. Cremation had become...

Grand Magistry Announces Death of H.M.E.H. Grand Master Fra’ Giacomo Dalla Torre del Tempio di Sanguinetto – Order of Malta This website uses technical and assimilated cookies as well as user-profiling third party cookies in a grouped format to simplify online navigation and to protect the use of services. To find out more or to refuse consent to the use of one or any of the cookies, click here. Closing this banner, browsing this page or clicking on anything will be taken as consent to the use of cookies. Close

ROME – Since Pope Francis began livestreaming his daily Mass from the Vatican’s Santa Marta residence, many people around the world have been grateful for the opportunity to hear the pope’s words and to participate, albeit virtually, in his liturgy, helping to break the isolation of the coronavirus quarantine. Tuesday morning, however, probably no one was more grateful than Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. Conte got a badly needed favor, as the pontiff essentially hit the off switch on mounting Catholic resistance to the PM’s program for recovery by calling for “prudence and obedience.” What remains to be seen is whether, in addition to pastoral conviction, the utterance was also a clever political tactic, in effect putting the Italian leader in the pope’s debt and creating capital I...

There is an engaging image of the Church contained in a passage from last week’s Office of Readings. It is instructive because it speaks not only of themselves but of the power that makes them. It is appropriate that we should receive the body of Christ in the form of bread, because, as there are many grains of wheat in the flour from which bread is made by mixing it with water and baking it with fire, so also we know that many members make up the one body of Christ which is brought to maturity by the fire of the Holy Spirit …. Similarly, the wine of Christ’s blood, drawn from the many grapes of the vineyard that he had planted, is extracted in the wine-press of the cross. When men receive it with believing hearts, like capacious wineskins, it ferments within them by its own power(From a s...

Under social distancing, we’re all doing our best to stay sane, and one of the best ways to maintain sanity is to go out for some nice fresh air. But venturing outside can be stressful if you’re worried that the very air is full of virus particles just waiting to infect you. So, how worried should you be that any time you go outside, you’ll contract coronavirus from a fellow pedestrian, runner, or cyclist who happens to exhale as they pass by? The answer is, you probably don’t need to freak out about it. As long as you’re maintaining at least 6 feet of distance from other people and you’re not in a high-risk group, you’re engaged in a very low-risk activity, particularly if you and others are wearing masks. Earlier this month, Belgian and Dutch engineers publicized some findings that went ...

By Tom Hoopes, April 23, 2020 We are all the disciples on the way to Emmaus this Third Sunday of Easter, Year A. The Scriptures continue to speak to our times so specifically that it seems as if God planned it that way. Which of course he did. The disciples in Luke’s Gospel were anxious and afraid. The bright future they had a few months ago was gone. We do not know much about these disciples, and that is helpful; they stand for each of us. They are going to “Emmaus” but we don’t know where that was, and that is also helpful; it turns the focus to where they were leaving, Jerusalem, the place Jesus has been journeying to throughout Luke’s Gospel. Their friends were hiding behind locked doors. Local authorities were treating them like a threat to the public. Their religious leaders wer...

N.B. There is a video version of this homily below In today’s Gospel we encounter two discouraged and broken men making their way to Emmaus. The text describes them as “downcast.” That is to say, their eyes are cast on the ground, their heads are hung low. Their Lord and Messiah has been killed, the one they had thought would finally liberate Israel. Some women had claimed that He was alive, but these disciples have discredited those reports and are now leaving Jerusalem. It is late in the afternoon and the sun is sinking low. They are also moving in the wrong direction, West, away from Jerusalem, away form the resurrection. They have their backs to the Lord, rising in the East. The men cannot see or understand God’s plan. They cannot “see” that He must be alive, just as they were told. Th...

The clergy have been playing a pivotal role during the pandemic by offering continued spiritual support and prayers to those in need. There are priests who’ve ignored potential risks to their own lives to ensure the hospitalized faithful receive the sacraments — leading to more than 100 deaths of priests in Italy alone. There are creative clergy who’ve come up with innovative ways to bring the sacraments and continue giving spiritual support while normal church services are suspended. And there are priests willing to be incarcerated to make sure those in prison can still receive spiritual guidance. In an effort to offer our worthy priests a boost, Vocation Ministry — an international organization aimed at equipping dioceses and parishes to promote vocations, based in Houston, Texas — ...

A 19th century stained glass window in Carlow Cathedral, Ireland, showing how the Rosary was given to St. Dominic in an apparition by the Blessed Virgin Mary in the year 1214. (Wikimedia Commons) Pope Francis Invites Faithful to Recite the Rosary To Help Overcome This Time of Trial In letter to the faithful, the Holy Father urges praying the Rosary and two other prayers at home during this pandemic and the Marian month of May in order to “make us more united as a spiritual family.” As the coronavirus pandemic has led to many families praying together more, Pope Francis has invited the faithful to rediscover the beauty of praying the Rosary at home during May, the month of special devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary.    In the letter to the faithful, the Holy Father has also...

In the video below we are shown many acts of bravery, heroism, courage and overcoming. In times like these we need to be reminded of  that part of the human spirit that is unrelenting in meeting challenges and will not simply cower in fear or depression. Individuals will sometimes fall and give way to defeat, but collectively there is a powerful human capacity that God has given us to discover who we are in adversity. We learn new strengths and ways to adapt. To all doomsayers, I say, watch this video and remember that God has called us to victory, even if in sometimes paradoxical ways: [embedded content]

5 Minute Read “At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.” (The...