
“
[Jesus] entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him. She had a sister named Mary [who] sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.’ The Lord said to her in reply, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her’” (Lk 10:38-42).
Read the rest

On this feast day of Sts. Joachim and Anne, being a wife and mother myself, I find it quite natural to feel myself being drawn to Saint Anne and the problems she must have encountered after the birth of her daughter, particularly following that world-changing event, the Annunciation (Lk 1:26-38).
Read the rest
by Fletcher DoyleI am a journalist and a convert. That sounds like an oxymoron.
Read the rest

by Brooke Paris Foley
When only seventeen, I experienced my period every other week. My greatly concerned mother took me to see her gynecologist who promptly prescribed the birth control pill. This, the doctor did, though she performed no tests to discover why the frequent menses.
Read the rest

By Cathy Ruse
Just when you thought the American Psychological Association couldn’t get any more psychologically unbalanced, along comes their next task force. It’s for what they call “consensual non-monogamy.”
Read the rest

Fresco in the Church of Saint Nicholas in Valencia, of Saint Maria Goretti (1890 - 1902)
If we could have traveled to a poor sharecropping farm in central Italy early in the 20th century, we would have seen a humble building – formerly a cheese factory – sheltering two families of tenant farmers.
Read the rest

Most of us have an ideal of what a good mother is and what a good mother does. Mary is the prefect mother, tending to all the details of our lives, as long as we are open to letting that relationship grow and we are open to her.
Read the rest

“
The heart that resembles that of Christ more than any other is without a doubt the Heart of Mary, His Immaculate Mother, and for this very reason the liturgy holds them up together for our veneration” (Pope Benedict XVI).
Read the rest

Perhaps he got it from his father—an Italian immigrant who managed with his wife to raise a large family on a barber’s salary during the toughest of economic times.
Read the rest

Saint Anthony of Padua (1195 – 1231), whose feast we celebrate on June 13th, enjoys popular renown, of course, as the patron saint of finding lost articles. Two lesser-known facts about him, however, are that he was Portuguese and not Italian by birth, and that he began his life in religion as an Augustinian, not as a Franciscan friar.
Read the rest