On the first Sunday of Lent I attended Mass at the local Carmelite monastery rather than at my parish church, so this past Sunday was the first time I had seen my parish church transformed for Lent. As I looked about the sanctuary, I sighed.
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal states:
During Lent it is forbidden for the...
If you are not prepared for this Sunday’s first reading (Gen 15:5-12, 17-18), you will probably have a difficult time making sense of it. Your homilist might not discuss it, so I hope this brief explanation will be helpful. It is not a lengthy reading, so we will go all the way through it, splitting it into two parts but hopefully not slaughtering it.
The reading begins straightforward enough:
The Lord God took Abram outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count...
Instead of spewing insults and getting into heated arguments, I'd like to propose a better solution to the debate over same-sex marriage. Let's start from positions bothsides of the debate agree on. Then let's see whose particular view of marriage best explains this agreement.
There appear to be two different views of marriage that drive the same-sex marriage debate. The conjugal view defines marriage as “the lifelong union of man and woman ordered toward their good and the...
Around the time Pope Benedict XVI released Summorum Pontificum, which expanded the use of the extraordinary form of the Roman rite of the Mass, I attended a Catholic conference at the Old St. Ferdinand Shrine in Florissant, Missouri. The shrine boasted a lovely pre-Vatican II altar that inspired a...
Recently I was contacted by someone who just had a relative die.
The family will be getting together this Friday and, as most of the family is not Catholic, they do not observe abstinence from meat during Lent.
Furthermore, this person knew for a fact that a meat dish was being prepared for the family gathering.
What are this person's options?
Option 1: Don't eat the dish
There are several variants here:
...
"Over their food and over their drink they render God thanks."
