“The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age …” are also those of the church.  Known also by its first two nouns in Latin—Gaudium et Spes, this fourth and final constitution, or main document, of the council is the only major document to originate from the floor of the council.

On Sept. 23 we celebrated the memorial of Padre Pio.  I understand he had the stigmata?  What is that?

What’s in an image? An image can imprint itself indelibly into our consciousness so that we cannot not picture a thing except in a certain way.

Bishop Robert E. Tracy wrote in his book, “American Bishop at Vatican II,”  that when fathers of the council received the original schema on the church, which had been prepared by the Vatican Theological Commission under Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, they found it to be “another carbon copy of a theological textbook, calculated to freeze and harden forever the positions at Trent (1565) and Vatican I (1870)

Since we cannot at this time receive the blood of Christ at Mass, am I missing out on any graces by only receiving the consecrated host at holy Communion?

A wise old Augustinian priest once shared this in class. “There are days in my life when everything from the pressures of my work, to tiredness, to depression, to distraction, to flat-out laziness make it difficult for me to pray. But, no matter what, I always try to pray at least one sincere, focused Our Father every day.”

Bishop Robert E. Tracy was on target with his judgment the liturgy schema had been a good document for the Second Vatican Council to tackle first. 

Are all of the truths, all that we need to believe in, found in the Scriptures?

At the end of the day, all of us, believers and non-believers, pious and impious, share one common humanity and all end up on the same road. This has many implications.

The Diocese of Baton Rouge has a historical cathedral in St. Joseph Cathedral. Its construction dates to pre-Civil War years.

According to the publication The Word Among Us, July 6 was designated the optional memorial to Saint Maria Goretti, Virgin and Martyr.  I thought that was her feast day.  Please explain the difference.

Many of us are familiar with an often-quoted line from T.S. Eliot: “The last temptation is the greatest treason; to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

If you read any national Catholic publications like National Catholic Reporter, Our Sunday Visitor or America Magazine, you may have seen that Pope Francis reimposed restrictions on the use of the Latin Mass that was celebrated prior to Vatican II.

On some of father’s vestments I have noticed a pelican.  Was this symbol taken from our Louisiana state flag that has a mother pelican feeding its chicks with its own blood?

We have many photographs of St. Therese of Lisieux. Her sister Celine loved using a camera and took many photos of St. Therese, but there’s an interesting thing to note in those photos. The British Carmelite Sister Ruth Burrows once did a study of those photos and commented that in all of them, St. Therese is always somehow alone, by herself, even when in a group photo.