Homilies
May 30, 2019
Truth is a writer’s first responsibility. To conquer the lie, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said.
May 22, 2019
Maggie Whitfield interviews Melanie Newman of the Salem Red Sox…
April 22, 2019
It is hard to describe the loss of Notre Dame. When the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived in Paris, each evening on his way home, he stopped as he crossed the Siene on the Île de la Cité to watch the sun set over Notre Dame. The darkening ancient towers silent against the new, awakening, electric […]
December 1, 2019
To listen to this homily click here. It was only at the end, in jail awaiting execution, that it became clear to him, the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s famous novel, The Power and the Glory.
December 8, 2019
To listen to this homily click here. Yves Congar, the great twentieth century Dominican theologian, in a book he wrote a little more than a decade before the Second Vatican Council (a book which by the way influenced the future Pope John XXIII), said in rather a matter of fact way, but mystically nonetheless, that “Prophecy […]
December 9, 2019
It’s beautiful, really. The Church seems to say that if you know anything about parental love, then you know about grace. If either you’re a parent yourself, or if you have been blessed by the genuine love of your mother or father; then, the Church suggests, you already know a great deal about the grace of […]
December 22, 2019
It should be required reading, I think, for members of the clergy: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, that masterpiece of American literature and of the American psyche.
December 28, 2019
He likely knew it was a dumb idea from the beginning. At the end of his life, it looks like he changed his mind, became more practical. Or maybe it was Socrates who was the foolish idealist; maybe it’s the mature Plato we discover in his later writings, certainly a more sensible Plato.
January 1, 2020
Innumerable things are said of her. But for us, at this moment, let us remember simply that Mary is the first.