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If a miracle happens, and nobody notices, it’s still a miracle. The synod on synodality’s first general session (of two) just ended. After a break of eleven months to go home, do some laundry, get some sleep, and catch up on bills, the 365 members of the synod will reconvene next year to re-engage on…
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This isn’t the homily I heard today, but it’s the one I wish I’d heard. Yesterday was All Saints’ Day, which is a holy day of obligation. We had a big crowd for a weekday mass, we had music, we did all the things. For those of you used to a 30-minute daily mass, it…
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Yesterday, October 4, 2023, was kind of a big day in the Catholic Church. The current pope, Francis, did a couple of things that haven’t been done before. The bigger of those things was the launch of a new phase of gathering the Church together to discern what God wants us to do. This gathering,…
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I am on record for believing in low expectations. Any day that does not end in calamity is a win, in my book. But I don’t think that makes me a pessimist. Just because I can’t think of any way to turn this ship around doesn’t mean I don’t believe it can be done. I’m…
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Once there was a family, parents with four adult children, who ran a business. The parents loved all four of their children immensely, and the children all loved their parents. But the kids couldn’t stand each other. The two older siblings were always fighting about how the business should be run; they had completely opposite…
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Sufficient for a day… I’ve noticed that the theme of a lot of current health trends is to stay in the moment. The key to strength training, I’m told, is to be intentional about each moment of each rep of weights; rather than seeing how many times you can lift something or how heavy a…
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Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope. Pope Francis, speaking to young people in Paraguay, 2015 In sports, you usually don’t win if you’re playing not to lose. In life, you…
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Here’s what jumped out at me from the readings from yesterday’s Mass: encountering God is a lot more like a football game than a book group. One of the things that I struggle with is the degree to which many Christians talk about their faith in dispassionate, philosophical terms. In Catholicism, there’s a tendency to…
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Maybe the Church should shut up about sex for a while. Enough, already. Not because of hypocrisy, though there are deep layers of that. Not because sex isn’t important. Not because the Church has nothing worth saying about it. Not because I disagree with what it has to say. I think the Church should shut…
