Pope Francis shook up the scandal-plagued Vatican bank on Wednesday, removing four of five cardinals from an oversight body in a break with the clerical financial establishment he inherited from his predecessor. … The four cardinals were removed just 11 months into their five-year terms as commissioners, which began under former Pope Benedict, who resigned […]

  From Les Misérables: At the end of the day you’re another day older And that’s all you can say for the life of the poor It’s a struggle, it’s a war And there’s nothing that anyone’s giving One more day, standing about, what is it for? One day less to be living. At the […]

Tonight my wife and I were watching Les Misérables on TV. After we finished crying at the end, we looked up some of the lyrics. One of the lyrics that struck us most was near the end of the movie, when the barricades were being manned. It reads like a parent’s prayer, whether that parent […]

I had one of those, “the penny dropped,” experiences this morning. This morning before the Divine Liturgy, I was frustrated because of an interaction yesterday with a fellow priest in another state. It had to do with matters from at least four years ago. I had obviously been carrying it about because when the proistamenos […]

  As the cartoon above finishes, “too bad he usually gets religious nuts.” All of us are very aware that religious nuts are much more prominent than fruitful believers. In fact, often it seems (and may very well be) that religious nuts number more than fruitful believers. For me, the problem has often been to […]

OK, I found this photograph from back in 2010. So, there is the Patriarch of Moscow, and he does not appear to have any wind touching him. Then, there is the Patriarch of Constantinople, and he looks like he is in a windstorm! Between them is the President of Russia. The side of his coat […]

The cartoon above made me laugh in rueful memory. I can remember when our three daughters were teenagers. I can remember the almost inevitable fights that we had back then. They became teenagers in a foreign country and we had hoped that this would mean that they would not be as rebellious as if they […]

OK, look at the logo above. Now read a quote from the sermon that Pope Francis delivered on the Feast of Epiphany: I would like to tell all those who feel far from God and the church — and I say this respectfully to those who are afraid or indifferent: The Lord loves you and […]

An editorial writer named Ruben Navarrette, Jr, recently wrote an article that I found to be most enlightening. Ruben is a Mexican-American editorial writer who generally tends conservative. He followed the Duck Dynasty controversy and then watched the controversy over the Romney adoption jokes on MSNBC. It was watching those two back to back that […]