Feelings are raw with regard to the sex abuse crisis, and I am in no mood to fast for it. I will anyway. This week, as the U.S. bishops gather for their annual fall meeting, many Catholics are following Pope Francis’s suggestion for fasting…

This year it will be a quarter of a century since my wife and I brought our first child to Mass for the first time. Every Sunday Mass since, with the exception of a business trip, retreat or getaway here and there, we have knelt, stood, and…

It’s perfect that St. Joseph’s Day comes just seven days before Passion Sunday this year. This Sunday we will hear how Jesus died in obedience to his Father, in heaven. This Monday we learn that it wasn’t just his heavenly Father he was…

In the past, on autumn afternoons after Sunday Mass, you could always go over to my in-laws’ house, sit down, and watch the NFL with them. Not anymore. “We were deeply offended by the position that a number of NFL players took at the…

People imitate what they see. That is my guiding principle when choosing movies for children and teens (and adults, too, truth be told). So I don’t show them what I don’t want them to imitate, and I try to go out of my way to find stories…

I have one bedrock principle that guides my viewing choices for my children: Kids imitate what they watch. Always. No matter what. After Star Wars, they play Star Wars; after a Nazi movie, they play Nazis. This is the principle which caused…

Here it is. Oct. 13, the big finale, the moment we’ve been waiting for: The 100th anniversary of the climactic end of the Fatima apparitions, the Miracle of the Sun. It is also an opportunity to bask in the bright glow of a much sunnier…

By Sept. 13, 1917, St. Francisco, St. Jacinta and their cousin Lucia could hardly get to the Cova da Iria, where Our Lady of Fatima, Portugal, appeared to them each month. More than 25,000 people had come to see them that day. We have no…

My wife and I begin our Confirmation class for St. Benedict’s Parish in Atchison, Kansas, by giving the students an overview of salvation history using a drawing. “And here,” I said last fall, pointing to the pit of flames on the white…

I spent a year reading Pope Francis, and it was the hardest year of my life. It wasn’t that Pope Francis is hard to read — he’s not. It is just that he was really hard to read in 2015–2016, if you knew you had to write a book…