For three days every year Mexicans and Mexican Americans gather for Día de los Muertos. In cemeteries and homes people come together to remember their deceased...
Religion
Essays explaining our faith, including stories about church teaching, Vatican documents, canon law, liturgical theology, and other Catholic topics.
Alphonsus Rodriguez must have thought he had it made. Yes, there had been a few bumps in the road. His education had been cut short when his father died and...
In the late 1980s, when Robert Orsi had just begun his work studying devotion to St. Jude, he had dinner with a prominent liturgist who had spent years...
For his book, Thank You, St. Jude, Robert Orsi researched devotion to St. Jude, patron of difficult or hopeless causes, which has been fostered by the...
Because of the cultural situation of the time, women wrote little and wielded power even less, so it’s hard to speak of “Church Mothers” in the same way we do...
Of the four wedding invitations currently posted on my refrigerator, only one is for a ceremony to be held in a church. The others? All will be outdoors: in a...
Both actions are very ancient and began as practical necessities, but eventually the necessities disappeared and were even forgotten. Later when Christians...
Some families and households hold hands to say grace before meals. Maybe this practice migrated to church, as the Our Father is the final “grace” that we say...
It’s in there. At Mass Catholics pray to God to “look with favor on your church’s offering and see the victim whose death has reconciled us...
“Why do I have to go through this?” The question sums up many other questions people have about annulments, the way the Catholic Church says a marriage is...
