Sean Sullivan

This Dec. 1, I was witness to a peculiar ritual no doubt occurring in many of your own hometowns around this time of year. Much of the town gathered around a large pine tree, moving around to keep themselves warm in moist, cold New England…

Although it is popular parlance to describe certain events or places as heaven on earth, I find this to be a hard sell. After all, the world can be a cruel and unforgiving place, populated with many who detest the very idea of heaven, life…

These days we are used to our confessions being entirely private matters between only ourselves and our priests. Any penance we perform we usually keep to ourselves. Seldom do we directly tell others about the sins we needed to have…

For this feast day of St. Dominic, Catholic Digest reached out to both a Dominican friar and Franciscan friar to ask them both about a unique tradition. Each year, on the feast days of the respective saints of their orders (St. Dominic on…

At its core, Christianity is a religion which revolves around suffering. From the beginning of the Scriptures we see how man’s own folly has condemned us to lives filled with suffering, and the long breadth of human history easily…

It is not just Star Wars which works well in trilogies (depending on the trilogy, at least). Dante, not one to leave his readers waiting in purgatory, completes the Divine Comedy with an expedition through heaven. Having seen the damned…

While Inferno remains the most famous part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the poems’ two subsequent parts, Purgatorio and Paradiso are necessary for understanding Inferno in its entirety. Much like understanding only one part of the…

In the northern part of the United States this is the season when mortality is on the mind. Leaves fall, the harvest is gathered, and nature retreats in anticipation of the deathly stillness of winter. With the Church’s annual…

On April 9 this year, around the world all of Christendom will be united in spirit in celebration of the Resurrection of Our Lord. We reach beyond frontiers both natural and man-made in common jubilee. Here in America, I’ll be attending the…

Let’s face it, there are plenty of us who could stand to go to confession more often. And we have a duty to receive the sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. According to the Church’s command, “after having attained the age of…