It’s Week 7 of Encounter the Risen Jesus! Visit archden.org/easter2021 to watch the reflection and follow along with the prayer guide...

“Are you saved?” This is something you might hear after the doorbell rings. “What does that even mean?” you might wonder, as you think of what to say in response. The door-to-door evangelist would tell you that Jesus died to forgive your sins and if you believe the truth of that statement, you will be saved. That is an important part of salvation but by no means the full account. To be saved is not simply to have your sins forgiven or to be given a ticket to heaven, because G

In the last edition of the Denver Catholic magazine, I began a three-part series on our story as Catholic Christians, the story of our...

Let me adapt to recent circumstances a thought-experiment theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar proposed decades ago: Imagine that a friend contracts a severe case of COVID-19 and medicine can do no more for him. The doctors inform his widowed mother and us, so we gather with her for the final scene in the drama of this life. The ventilator is removed; the man grows weaker from lack of breath and whispers his final farewells. We hear the death-rattle. Then he expires and takes on

Image by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash First of all, I want to thank you all for the tremendous outpouring of support we have received in...

There is no need to belabor the awfulness of the year of lockdowns, shutdowns, and other downers that began in mid-March 2020. Among the failures that will bear serious scrutiny going forward are those of inept local governments. If Americans can fly an SUV-sized robotic rover to a planet 292 million miles away, and then soft-land it on a dime, why can’t we distribute vaccines rapidly? (Perhaps the vaccination program should be led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one age

Featured Photo by Joshua Sukoff  on Unsplash On February 25, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives could have addressed any number of pressing issues. The nation was in its 11th month of a pandemic that had already caused enormous economic and social dislocation. Schools remained closed as evidence mounted that online learning was disserving vulnerable poor children. Civil unrest continued in cities whose local governments refused to maintain public order and protect small

As the names Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, and John Chrysostom suggest, the middle centuries of the first millennium, the era of the Church Fathers, were the golden age of the Catholic episcopate. The Catholic Church recognizes 35 men and women as exemplary teachers; 14 of them – 40 percent of the entire roster of the “Doctors of the Church” – were bishops who lived in that epoch. Their’s were not tranquil times. But even as these brave shepherds battled heresies within the

Featured Photo by Julien Gaud  on Unsplash I don’t know about you, but I find myself getting agitated pretty easily these days, often in ways that are not fitting for a believing Christian. I have been thinking a lot about the perils of living in a society which is becoming more and more overtly hostile to many of the norms that were simply taken for granted by the vast majority of our fellow citizens a mere 20 years ago. I’ll come back to that in a minute.  Read a letter to

Featured image by Catholic News Agency According to the movie  Love Story , “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Typical Hollywood fluff, you might say. Yet the best answer to that asininity was given by a Hollywood all-star, the late, great Charlton Heston. Asked the secret of what would eventually become his 64-year long marriage to Lydia, Chuck Heston replied, “Learning to say five words: ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong.’”   It’s a lesson that seems especially hard to di

We buried my Mom last month. In the summer of last year, I first drove her to her new memory care facility. My heart was breaking. She...

All lives are consequential, for every human being is an idea of God’s, and everyone is a someone for whom the Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, entered history, suffered, died – and was raised from the dead to display within history a new, glorified humanity. Thus to every life, as Mrs. Loman noted in  Death of a Salesman , “attention must be paid.” Or as C.S. Lewis reminded us in  The Weight of Glory , “there are no  ordinary  people,” for everyone you m

Once, an editor of The Times newspaper asked G.K. Chesterton, “What is wrong with the world?” Chesterton, the great master of common sense and wit that he was, responded: “Dear Sir: I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.” “I am.” There is starting honesty and humility in recognizing that the world’s problems rest in the heart, and not ultimately in any of the great social, political, or economic forces on the outside. It is the problem within the heart that causes those exterior trou

Ten years ago, I began a most extraordinary Lent by walking up the Aventine Hill to the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the first day of the Roman station church pilgrimage – an eight-week journey that led to the book  Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches , co-authored with my friend Elizabeth Lev and my son, Stephen. Liz Lev is the premier Anglophone art-and-architecture guide in the Eternal City, and her masterful descriptions of the Roman stational churches confirm the truth

When one is close to the events of history, it can be hard to have an objective perspective on their significance, but it does seem that...

Featured Photo by Robert Nyman  on Unsplash Thirty years ago, on January 22, 1991, Pope John Paul II’s eighth encyclical,  Redemptoris Missio  (The Mission of the Redeemer), was published. In a pontificate so rich in ideas that its teaching has only begun to be digested,  Redemptoris Missio  stands out as a blueprint for the Catholic future. The vibrant parts of the world Church are living the vision of missionary discipleship to which the encyclical calls us. The dying parts

Featured image by Josh Applegate  on Unsplash In his encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia , Pope St. John Paul II invited Catholics to “rekindle” our sense of “Eucharistic amazement,” for “the Church draws her life from the Eucharist,” which “recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the Church” – Christ’s glorified, abiding presence with, in, and through his people, fulfilling his promise to remain with us “to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20). In the Eucharist, the Churc

Below is the full transcript of Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila’s homily he gave during the Respect Life Mass, celebrated Jan. 23 at the...

The list of grave issues that must be addressed during a future papal interregnum, and by the cardinal-electors in a conclave, continues to grow.  The finances of the Holy See are arguably in worse shape than at any time since the papal interregnum of 1922; then, money had to be borrowed to pay for the conclave as Benedict XV had virtually bankrupted the Vatican in his efforts to aid refugees and POWs during World War I. Notwithstanding the reforms Pope Francis has put into p

Featured image by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz  | Unsplash By Josh Evans Who should get the COVID-19 vaccine, and in what order? Does Catholic thinking have any wisdom to offer on this question?  There is, unsurprisingly, no official Catholic “teaching” on the order of priority for vaccine distribution. The Church cannot have an explicit official teaching on each and every scenario. Rather, here is a situation where prudence must apply Catholic principles to the specific case. T