Day 1 Here. We gather in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. DAY TWO Be blessed, O most pure Virgin, for having vouchsafed to manifest yourself shining with light, sweetness and beauty, in the Grotto of Lourdes , saying to the child Saint Bernadette: “I am [...]
Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Day Two: Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes for Jon and the Other Victims
Posted in Family, tagged Novena Our Lady of Lourdes Jon Scharfenberger on October 12, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Day One: Novena to Our Lady of Lourdes for Jon and the Other Victims
Posted in Family, tagged Jon Scharfenberger Lourdes Novena on October 11, 2011 | 23 Comments »
As we gather for the next nine days in prayer, a note to our non-Catholic brothers and sisters. All faiths engage in intercessory prayer, asking our friends and family to storm Heaven with prayers in time of peril and need. Believing Saint Paul when he told us that we are surrounded by a cloud of [...]
An Abyss of Love
Posted in Family on October 9, 2011 | 10 Comments »
In the Jon Voight movie, Pope John Paul II, the young Karol Wojtyla announces to his friends in Nazi-occupied Poland that he has decided to become a priest. The friends of the young future pope respond with incredulity, demanding to know why. Karol replies: When faced with this abyss of evil, I can only respond [...]
Update on Elise
Posted in Family on September 22, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Good News! Today is Elise’s 16th birthday, and she is celebrating it with some slight but significant movements in her hip flexors and right thigh. She is also celebrating it in one of the premier spinal cord rehabs in the nation, Magee, in Philadelphia. After initially balking at Magee, Elise’s insurance company did the right [...]
Für Elise
Posted in Family on September 8, 2011 | 26 Comments »
Three days ago my fifteen year-old niece, Elise was involved in a horrendous car accident, being thrown from the vehicle and suffering a compression injury and fracture in her lower spine. She has had two surgeries, including a seven hour ordeal today to fuse three of her vertebra. Tonight, she is in I.C.U. in critical [...]
Father
Posted in Family on June 19, 2011 | 1 Comment »
This has been quite a week; something akin to a hurricane. In New York, we are one senator’s vote away from gay marriage, and it is my senator who is on the fence. Then, news on Friday lands like a bomb that Father Corapi is packing it in after just three months of fighting the [...]
False Gods, False Virtues (Part I)
Posted in Biomedical Ethics, Family, tagged Evil, Gay Marriage, political correctness on August 2, 2010 | 4 Comments »
“All evil begins with a lie. If we can identify the lie, we succeed in unmasking the evil” Great homiletic wisdom from the late Msgr. William Smith, moral theologian and priest of the Archdiocese of New York. Following on those words were these: “All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering.” In two sentences, Msgr. [...]
Peter, Paul and a New Evangelization
Posted in Biomedical Ethics, Euthanasia, Family, tagged Culture of Death, Euthanasia, Evangelization, Peter and Paul, Sacramental Marriage on June 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »
My article in today’s Headline Bistro. If there is one potential social-scientific study that cries out to be performed, it is the measure of the Culture of Death’s activities in a nation as a function of Christian belief and practice. In formulating a hypothesis for such a study, it would seem the anecdotal evidence suggests [...]
Pope Benedict XVI: Love & Truth
Posted in Bishops, Family, tagged Love, Pope Benedict XVI, Sentimentalism on May 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »
I must confess that I devour books by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. He has a style of writing that leaves me feeling as though I have just been on a weekend retreat. In recent comments to the Roman Rota (The Supreme Court of the Church), the Pope spoke of the role truth [...]
Women Respond to Fatherlessness
Posted in Dignity, Family, tagged Fatherlessness on May 15, 2010 | 6 Comments »
The comments on the Growing Fatherlessness post have been an occasion of deep, deep thought for me, and prayer for one commenter in particular, New Divorcee. I learned several years ago to simply shut up and listen, actively listen to women when they speak as they have here. This is a topic that deserves more [...]
Growing Fatherlessness
Posted in Family on May 11, 2010 | 19 Comments »
A recent Pew Research Center Report on the rise in children being born to single mothers is sobering, to put it mildly. From the report: Another notable change during this period was the rise in births to unmarried women. In 2008, a record 41% of births in the United States were to unmarried women, up [...]
To Pull the Plug?
Posted in Family on March 29, 2010 | 4 Comments »
I attended a bioethics conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio this past weekend. The theme centered on end of life decisions and care. Much was mentioned about when it is appropriate to discontinue food and water by removing the feeding tube. Dr. Patrick Lee, Director of the Institute for Bioethics at Franciscan assembled a [...]
How Boys and Girls Differ
Posted in Family on March 23, 2010 | 4 Comments »
It’s been a heavy weekend. The health care bill, Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scouts, the death of a close friend’s mother who was very dear to us. So, some lighter fare, compliments of my three children, ages 10,9,6. My son and daughters were discussing the differences between boys and girls, and decided to compile [...]
Strangers In the Night
Posted in Family, tagged Naomi Wolf, Pornography on March 22, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I came across this excellent article on pornography’s deadening effect on the male libido. I have never been a big fan of Naomi Wolf, and certainly she is still missing some of the pieces. But she gets it with porn, and the article is dead-on when she states the following: “The onslaught of porn is [...]
The Family: Crisis and Cure (I)
Posted in Family, tagged familiaris consortio, Pope John Paul II on March 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Pope John Paul II understood women, men, children and families with an almost supernatural degree of nuance. His writing is best savored slowly, so we’ll take our time going through his Apostolic Exhortation on the family as it is one of the definitive pro-life documents of the Church. APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION FAMILIARIS CONSORTIO OF POPE JOHN [...]
