Columnist.
"You know what people are missing as they hoard toilet paper and hand sanitizer? They are missing that our lives are gifts.
Typically, when you walk into a Catholic Church there is a font for holy water. It's a sacramental, sacred sign meant to remind us of baptism. But one recent weekday, I dipped my hand into a familiar font in a prominent church in our nation's capital before morning Mass, and encountered it empty. Caffeine-less, I was confused. It was only later, when the sign of peace was skipped during Mass that I realized: coronavirus!
Darcy Olsen's motivation in life is the babies in America crying not for the normal reasons that babies cry, but because they are born addicted to meth, inheriting that addiction from their mother.
He killed his grandmother. And he did so brutally, dumping her in the water before she was even dead, if the coroner is correct that her cause of death was drowning. He killed two others — all evil acts.
There were women weeping in a chapel here. One named Veronica was something like inconsolable. She was talking about the crucifixion of Christ as if it was happening right then and there. She was feeling it. She was overwhelmed by the love of a God who would save humanity from the misery of sin and finality of death by coming into the world as a baby and dying such a brutal death.
There's something about being in the bleak midwinter and having to think about suicide that seems especially unbearable. But just as many of us were in Washington protesting the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, activists were in New York's state capitol intensifying their efforts to legalize doctor-assisted suicide in the Empire State. It's the last thing anyone needs.
Everyone is made in the image and likeness of God. Every person has a purpose on this Earth. Do we believe this?
If I'm going to be completely honest, I cried a little as I listened to Donald Trump speak at the 47th March for Life, a massive annual pro-life rally in Washington, D.C.
Rachel weeps. That biblical mother weeping for her children is all I could think of when I heard that that a California woman named Michelle Reaves had died in childbirth.
You may have seen the Michelle Williams Golden Globes speech by now. The actress credited abortion for allowing her to achieve her professional successes. Pro-life and pro-choice people said what you would have expected in response, but what seemed to be largely missed was the misery.
It's a presidential election year, as you no doubt can't escape knowing. The anger and conviction during such tumultuous times can be quite overwhelming.
"This time, with freedom!" Sisters Mary Karen and Mary Gabriel implored.
It was a week before Christmas, and I found myself anxious and angry. I was paying more attention to minute-by-minute politics than I had on any other day of the year.
Impeachment is on the brain, and it would seem to the exclusion of everything else. But we had better make room for the Iraqi people. At the start of the month, Chaldean archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil visited New York and spoke at the United Nations Security Council about the situation in his native Iraq. Warda has been housing and caring for people, primarily Christians, who fled ISIS in Mosul in 2014. He's been working to secure some semblance of a future for them, including by establishing a Catholic university in his native country.
The 1989 Cher song "If I Could Turn Back Time" comes to mind when I think about the end of the Kamala Harris's campaign to be the Democratic candidate for president.
"Discouragement is a form of pride; sadness is often caused by our egotism." That sort of leaped off the page as I was recently doing a little reading of the work of the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, to mark the news that before the year is through, he will have made a big step toward being an official saint of the Catholic Church. The sentence was the linguistic equivalent of a five-alarm fire, to be perfectly honest, not just for our current culture but for my life.
I had an overwhelming 48 hours in Washington, D.C. recently – a couple days that flew in the face of the cynicism we tend to feel about the place.
Four-hundred forty-two thousand: That's roughly the number of children in foster care in America.
It was something like 12:30 in the morning on the first of November when I noticed the man across from me on a delayed flight from Florida to New York making the sign of the cross. He was a tough-looking fella, and while I was delighted to know I wasn't the only one praying in the turbulence, it also struck me as confirmation that this being tossed right and left and dipping and dropping in the air was not a good thing.
