The Narthex

The funds and perseverance required to promote the causes of holy ones are commonly supplied by religious Orders, who promote their own members, especially their founders and foundresses. But what about married people? Two theologians at the University of Notre Dame gave their opinion on the occasion of the 2001…

I have suffered heart arrhythmia most of my adult life. It has afflicted my parents, siblings, and their offspring. Two have had their heart valves replaced. I have many maternal cousins with hip and knee replacements. The husband of my maternal aunt contracted a brain cancer that killed him and…

As stated in Part VI of this blog series, during the 40 years from 1978 to October 2018, there have been 1,419 individuals canonized. Of these, 170 were non-martyrs. For anyone who thinks there are large numbers of people being canonized, and indeed the numbers are exponentially greater than before…

A not-so-funny thing is happening as I age in (minimal) wisdom and (gratuitous) grace. I noticed it reading the Catholic Worker, as I’ve done since high school. The obituaries started to be the best part of the paper. How so? Because they tell a good part of the truth about…

I often visited a retirement complex to see my friend, Della. She would serve me cinnamon tea while we talked about religion and current events. An oil painting of a yellow canary hung on her living room wall. As I admired several other works, she said, “I painted them all.…

The Statistical Yearbook of the Church states that there are 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide. These numbers are baptized, not practicing, Catholics. France, for example, reports 44 million Catholics among its 59 million residents, but the French church claims about four million practicing Catholics. In Poland, weekly attendance, according to local…

In order to have more lay models for the witnessing of the Faith, and to inspire lay vocations and holiness among the laity, I argue that the Church needs to increase the ratio of canonized laity to canonized priests/religious. This is not about “diversity” or “justice.” I’m not concerned with…

You may ask why we bother canonizing anyone. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “By canonizing some of the faithful, i.e., by solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace, the Church recognizes the power of the Spirit of holiness within her and…

What if I happened to meet an old crone in the local park who could read my mind, flash heal my heart disease, and predict future events? Would I then accuse her of witchcraft? Strict Puritans would have done so in the year 1692, for that’s what spawned the Salem…

Engagement in the "culture wars," or striving to maintain the good name of Western and Christian civilization, runs the risk of pushing us over a line, forgetting our primary purpose and losing the plot. Someone once defined a fanatic as a person who, having once forgotten his original purpose, redoubles…

I would say the grace to cry out “Abba” to the Father, and the grace to recognize Jesus as Lord, is the same type of grace that fills bishops when they recognize that the men they will ordain are sufficiently holy and will grow in holiness, and the same type…

The homeless count in Los Angeles keeps going up. We’re now north of 60,000. About a week ago the Los Angeles Times (Oct. 18) ran a heartbreaking piece on “Suzanna,” a woman who was disoriented, often naked, and sometimes crawled across our famous Sunset Boulevard. Agonizing as the story was,…

Grace from God is needed for us to recognize holiness in another. I am not speaking about recognizing the holiness of a deceased person whom the Universal Church declares a saint, but the holiness of a deceased person before the Church recognizes it. I respectfully suggest that it is akin…

Grace and holiness abound in the Body of Christ. Yet it seems that we – laity, bishops, priests, religious sisters and brothers – either do not know what holiness in laity looks like or do not know how to describe it to each other. Only two laypeople, who were holy…

A recent convert to Catholicism and I met to discuss my personal experience with monks, celibacy, and community life, as I have lived in monasteries, health resorts, and communes. Jim opened his Bible to Acts 2: 44-45: "All the believers were together and had everything in common.…