I mean, it’s not like being Catholic is cool. Yet we hope that teenagers and young adults will stay with Christ and His Church (since the two are the same thing). It surely won’t be easy. For some it will mean sacrificing pleasures their peers call “natural.” Others will lose friends altogether because of Christ. So why would a young person even want to be a Christian?

I mentioned last Sunday my mother told me she and my father were “looking at the will” and that my sister and I would soon be filled in on the details etc. Since then I’ve been thinking about the word “inheritance” a lot. More specifically, how if the Kingdom of God is an inheritance that means the question “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” is silly, since there is nothing one can do to be included in an inheritance; it’s entirely up to the parent to will it.

On one occasion, the disciples of Jesus approached and asked Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’ (Lk 11:1)

It’s the same question we ask Him ourselves, even now. We hear about it all the time, but what is prayer? Why should I pray? And how do I pray?

His mother named him Peter John, after each of his grandfathers, PJ for short. But whenever he would cry his mother would give him to her father, Mr. Fulton, to walk him. The townspeople called him “Fulton’s child” so often that the name stuck. He later took it to himself: Fulton J. Sheen.

Generally speaking, Catholics who live in a conjugal relationship that the Church does not recognize as a valid marriage should refrain from receiving Holy Communion until their situation has been reconciled with the Church.

Certain events punctuate the present with an exclamation point. Others create new chapters altogether. But some are so jarring they draw to a close what we call “the past.” Those events demand that the resilience of humanity, in cooperation with God’s grace, begin a new volume.

“Ask Chat GPT” is quickly replacing the old advice to “Google it.” So, here’s something you might find helpful when asking Chat GPT, or Claude, or Grok, or Gemini, about our Catholic Faith.

In prayer we find peace. Moving from that prayer into our lives with that peace takes much practice, but one thing’s for sure: in prayer we find peace.