“We are a ‘touchy’ people, Father… we like to touch.” Dear friends of St. Jude, I was invited for this past St. Jude feast by the devotees of St. Jude in Tucumán, Argentina, to come and give a novena with some of our relics of St. Jude, while Fr. James Moore, OP, my predecessor, was […]
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In my senior year of high school, I took over leading an optional lunchtime Rosary on Fridays in the school chapel. The usual attendees included a handful of students and one or two teachers who would join if they were not doing lunch-hour supervision. After one Rosary, as we left the school chapel, one of […]
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Last month on November 3, the Church celebrated the feast of Saint Martin de Porres, a Dominican brother who cared for the poor and the sick of Lima, Peru in the late 1500s. Renowned for his humility and charity, Saint Martin always sought to serve God and others, heeding the greatest commandments: “to love the […]
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In this moment between Thanksgiving and Christmas, while the carols are already playing, our liturgical calendar goes through its transition: the ending of Ordinary time and the beginning of Advent. My childhood memories from being raised in a non-denominational Christian home are sadly chased away as purple is put up instead of green, celebrating this […]
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Assiduous study ranks as one of the most salient features of the Order of Preachers. When one thinks of the Dominican friar, thoughts of great luminaries such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Albert the Great are surely not far behind. Those learned in the history of philosophy and theology might know lesser known figures […]
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On Wednesday, the 21st of November, we celebrate the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ancient traditions in the church, as attested in such works as the Protoevangelium of James, hold that when the Blessed Virgin was only 3 years old, she was offered by her parents Joachim and Anna to God […]
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On November 15th, we celebrate the Feast of a Dominican saint who deserves to be better known in modern times: St. Albert of Cologne (d. 1280), also known as St. Albert the Great. Today, St. Albert is most known as the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose theology and philosophy would eventually eclipse his teacher’s […]
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Our society likes to forget about death. A common motivation for doing so is to avoid the pain of having to deal with the limitedness of our own existence. Nevertheless, just as a student who has a paper due will have to face the deadline no matter how hard he tries to forget it, at […]
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Whether it is in a silly commercial or a John Lennon song, I keep coming across this notion of forgetting Heaven, or of focusing on building Heaven on earth. The thought claims to free people to think about the here and now, enjoying what they have and trying to make the best of it rather […]
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We’ve all heard the allegation: Halloween is a pagan rite dating back to some pre-Christian festival among the Celtic Druids that escaped church suppression. Even today modern pagans and witches continue to celebrate this ancient festival. If you let your kids go trick-or-treating, they will be worshiping the devil and pagan gods. Nothing could be further from […]
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