September 2012

Lord Acton was one of the most influential Catholic lay people in England in the 19th century. He wrote in a letter his famous dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Jesus is concerned with the misuse of power in the Gospel but, to appreciate this, it helps to see what comes […]

To emphasize His own vision of leadership, Jesus give His disciples the example of paying attention to a child. In ancient cultures, children were the least important of people. People had children to serve them and provide financial security in their elder years. And they had many children because the mortality rate for children under

In today’s Gospel Jesus teaches that, as the Messiah, He is the Son of Man who is destined to suffer and die. Peter, having been the first to profess openly that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah who will liberate Israel, then seems to go and spoil it all by incuring Jesus’ reproof and

“He was driving home one evening, on a two-lane country road. Work, in this small mid-western community, was almost as slow as his beat-up Pontiac. But he never quit looking. Ever since the Levi’s factory closed, he’d been unemployed, and with winter raging on, the chill had finally hit home. It was a lonely road.

When societies or governments create lots of laws, it’s often a sign that something is going wrong with that particular society. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, the original and proper use of the law is to help people live virtuously. It is to encourage their basic goodness, and to help them live together in harmony.