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In our novena prayers, we continually call on Mary to help us in our temptations and when we sin. However, Mary not only gives us the grace to overcome our temptations, but she can also save us from the loneliness that comes after we sin. She is there for us,...
I enjoy shopping for gifts. However, I wouldn’t say I like buying any readily available, reasonably priced gift or a standard item on every gift list, like a pen, book, or a popular CD. I prefer to take my time, looking for something I believe the recipient would need or...
My reflection is based on a portion of John’s Gospel. Mary, the sorrowful mother, stands beneath the cross of her Son as the dying Jesus calls to her: “Woman!” Of course, this is not the first time that Scripture quotes him speaking to his mother. When the wine runs out...
In the Old Testament’s Second Book of Maccabees, there is an account of high priest Eleazar’s final words before his death. In his bold profession of faith, he reveals the mystery at work in the heart of every martyr: “I am not only enduring terrible pain in my body…but also...
The Rosary: A Creative Prayer of Love In his apostolic letter On the Most Holy Rosary, Pope John Paul II writes: “With the rosary, the Christian people sit at the school of Mary and are led to contemplate…the depths of [Christ’s] love.” Unfortunately, a complaint people have about praying the...
More than 100 years ago, in a tiny mountain village hidden in the Pyrenees, our Lady appeared to Bernadette, a fourteen-year-old peasant. Since then, Lourdes has become a center of Christian devotion—perhaps the greatest Christian shrine to our Lady. A journalist once asked a priest visiting Lourdes, “What is the...
The Icon In 1968, while the Soviet Union gripped his part of the world, a courageous Redemptorist Ukrainian bishop named Vasyl Velychkovsky, CSsR, wrote a book titled A History of the Miraculous Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. He wrote this book for the centennial of the presentation of...
It’s sometimes hard to measure up to the expectations we place on ourselves, let alone those of others. No day or hour goes by without our feeling the guilt of inadequacy. It seems we feel we never do enough and what we do is never done well enough. Generally the...
Believe it or not, before Vatican II, it was generally believed that the Mother of God was not only exempt from original sin but also from the pangs of childbirth, fatigue, doubt, temptation, ignorance, and death. These human experiences, it was reasoned, were a consequence of sin, and Mary was...