You never know how long you’ll wait in line for the sacrament of confession. Sometimes you’ll find a line of six or seven people ahead of you, but you’re in...
Sacraments
For our Sounding Board column, U.S. Catholic asks authors to argue one side of a many-sided issue of importance to Catholics around the country. We also...
When I decided to convert to Catholicism in 1995, entering the church was tougher than I imagined. In the fundamentalist Protestant culture in which I’d been...
I recently became a godmother for the second time in my life, which made me quite nervous. I wasn’t concerned with the part about “being a spiritual mentor”: I...
If I hurt someone I care about, I should admit what I have done and apologize and usually shouldn’t need anybody else there as a mediator. So why do Catholics...
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, only 42 percent of the population surveyed in a Pew Research Center poll responded that being part of a Catholic...
My father was seriously ill several times in his last years of life. He could have received the sacrament of the anointing of the sick when facing surgery for...
The evil of clericalism, explains Pope Francis in a December 2016 sermon, happens whenever clerics distance themselves from laypeople, especially those who are...
The associations many Catholics have with baptism are warm, familial ones. Parents, grandparents, and new godparents gather around with other relatives...
Catholic tradition likes the number seven. There are seven deadly sins, seven seals in the Book of Revelation, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, seven days of...
