In this month of Thanksgiving and table fellowship, many people struggle to buy groceries while government cutbacks to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) have limited food aid to low-income citizens and their families. As happens more than we want, while political partisans point fingers and blame those in rival camps, people of goodwill step […]
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which represents the church’s moral and political views, seems to be at an impasse with the Trump Administration regarding issues of immigration. The irreconcilable differences are rooted in The Catholic Social Teachings, specifically the dignity of personhood that calls us to look at illegal aliens and see, […]
When I was a kid in middle school, I broke my left arm at the elbow. It has never since been straight. In my twenties and again in my thirties, I had orthoscopic surgery on my left knee. For most of my life, I have favored my right side and now, in my sixties, I […]
Twelve years ago, when the new pope, unknown to the world was elected, the first question he was asked by the gathered press was, “Who are you?” He responded by saying, “I am a sinner.” Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) began as a movement in the 1930s in Ohio. At the center was Bill W who, though […]
Herman Melville once wrote, “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads and, along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes, and they return to us as results.” “Catholic” means universal. The Catholic Church has been a good reminder through time that all humanity is part of […]
I remember being at a Martin Luther King Day celebration decades ago when many well-meaning people, mostly whites who wanted to make a statement against racism, wore T-shirts bearing the words: “I am color blind.” The keynote speaker, Alvin Brooks, challenged the audience to not be color-blind but, rather, to be color-sensitive, to not only […]
On Valentine’s Day, 1929, in Chicago, when tension between organized crime gangs and city police exploded, there was a bloody massacre that is still talked about today. Four years later in June, at Kansas City’s Union Station, another bloodbath occurred when local mobs and what later became the FBI tangled in a similarly notorious shoot-out. […]
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