Recently I heard a talk by Julie and Greg Alexander of The Alexander House which helps parishes strengthen their marriage ministry or to help build a foundation to create one. Greg says that the turning point for their marriage when it was in crisis was a priest who asked them to consider God’s plan for ...read more

Last time, I was imagining a world without Christmas. That would mean no Christmas music and no Christmas movies.  But a world without Jesus would mean much more to our popular culture. After watching the screen adaptation of Les Miserables two years ago,  I couldn’t help but thinking that this novel would be very different had Jesus not ...read more

So far we’ve looked at the Vocation to the Single Life, the Vocation to the Religious Life and the Vocation to the Ordained Life part 1, part 2 and part 3. Let’s look at the other Vocation that is also a Sacrament: Marriage. The majority of people are called to married life. Remember that for Catholics, ...read more

I could not speak about the Ordained life without speaking about the two questions that most people have about the priesthood: The ordination of women and celibacy. Some people will ask why women are not qualified to be priests. The reality is that it’s not about qualifications. No one is really qualified to be a ...read more

Last week we looked at the Vocation to the Ordained Life and the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The tradition of the priesthood is not specific to Christianity and our tradition dates back to the early days of Judaism. God’s chosen people, the people of Israel, was considered a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”, but ...read more

One main difference between the Vocations to the Single and Religious life and the Vocations to the Ordained and the Married Lives is that Ordination and Marriage, in the Catholic Church, are Sacraments. Let’s look at the Vocation to the Ordained Life and the Sacrament of Ordination. It is very common to hear about the ...read more

Deacon-structing Vocations: The Religious Life. ...read more

If there is anything that we learn from reading Scripture is that God calls people. Consistently, every story in the bible, involves a call: Abraham, Moses, Noah, Gideon, Jonah, Samuel, Ruth, Esther, Mary, Paul. Everyone gets called. God may not ‘call’ us the way He called Moses or St. Paul, or the specific way that ...read more

Below you will find the English language translation of the Holy Father’s address in Italian, delivered this morning at the Colloquium on the complementarity of Man and Woman at the Vatican. Dear sisters and brothers, I warmly greet you. I thank Cardinal Muller for his words with which he introduced our meeting. I would like ...read more

Last week we looked at what Vocation is and what it means to “be called.” Everyone is called to one of four vocations and so at some point in our life, if we want to respond to God’s call, we have to think about where God wants to take us. Figuring this out may not ...read more