Tag: EWTN

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Fr. Rick Heilman

Wisconsin is becoming battle ready!

Guest Column

If you’re looking to go deeper and grow stronger in your faith, to know more about your purpose and call to action as a Christian, or if you’re struggling to connect with your spouse, friend, or loved one about the faith, then you need to experience the BATTLE READY Rally!

A BATTLE READY Rally is a 90-minute talk on what spiritual battle actually looks like, how to identify it and prepare for it, and how to engage in it. These three components are key for those of us who are here on earth as the Church Militant.

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Kevin Wondrash

Madison Society of St. Vincent de Paul featured in EWTN television series

MADISON — The District Council of Madison Society of St. Vincent de Paul will be featured in some episodes of the special series titled Our Faith in Action: Today’s Society of St. Vincent de Paul, showcasing how members of St. Vincent de Paul conferences (known as Vincentians) and other volunteers contribute to helping our neighbors in need across the country.

Episode three, airing on Wednesday, July 26, includes the local St. Vincent de Paul that serves Dane County, and showcases the Lacy Pantry Garden and the Food Pantry.

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Bishop Robert Barron

The spiritual legacy of Mother Angelica

Mother Angelica, one of the most significant figures in the post-conciliar Catholic Church in America, has died after a 14-year struggle with the after effects of a stroke.

I can attest that, in “fashionable” Catholic circles during the ’80s and ’90s of the last century, it was almost de rigueur to make fun of Mother Angelica. She was a crude popularizer, an opponent of Vatican II, an arch-conservative, a culture-warrior, etc., etc.

Effective evangelizer

And yet, while her critics have largely faded away, her impact and influence are incontestable. Against all odds and expectations, she created an evangelical vehicle without equal in the history of the Catholic Church.

Starting from, quite literally, a garage in Alabama, EWTN now reaches 230 million homes in over 140 countries around the world. With the possible exception of John Paul II himself, she was the most watched and most effective Catholic evangelizer of the last 50 years.

Read Raymond Arroyo’s splendid biography in order to get the full story of how Rita Rizzo, born and raised in a tough neighborhood in Canton, Ohio, came in time to be a nun, a foundress, and a television personality.

For the purposes of this brief article, I would like simply to draw attention to three areas of particular spiritual importance in the life of Mother Angelica: her trust in God’s providence, her keen sense of the supernatural quality of religion, and her conviction that suffering is of salvific value.

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Carol Zimmerman, Catholic News Service

Priest’s mission: getting people — and God — to dinner table

fr. leo patalinghug
Chef Fr. Leo Patalinghug displays a Lenten seafood pasta meal he prepared in his Baltimore kitchen recently. The priest has started an apostolate, “Grace Before Meals,” which aims to bring families to the dinner table and bring God to the table. (CNS photo/Chaz Muth)

BALTIMORE (CNS) — For Fr. Leo Patalinghug, faith and food go hand in hand, or in cooking terms, they blend; there is no trick to folding one into the other.

“The idea of food in faith is implicit in our Scriptures. It’s implicit in our liturgical calendar,” he said, also adding that without question it’s a key component of the Mass.

Blending food and faith

The 45-year-old Filipino-American, known as the cooking priest, has made the blending of those two worlds his life’s work with his apostolate, “Grace Before Meals,” which aims, as he puts it: “to bring families to the dinner table and bring God to the table.”

He not only does a cooking show on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) called Savoring our Faith, but he also travels across the country giving parish workshops and speaks at conferences, on radio programs, and via social media about the need for families to celebrate not just Catholic feast days but everyday meals together.

He also has written three books and is currently working on two more.

Without irony, he says there is a hunger for this ministry, noting that the parish workshops he gives are typically booked, filled with parishioners of all ages interested in how food and faith meet and on connecting or reconnecting with each other and God.

When Catholic News Service met Father Patalinghug at his Baltimore home February 24, he had just returned from a series of parish missions in California and Chicago and was about to leave the next day for the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress.

Oh, and he also was having about 30 family members over that night for dinner, so he needed to get meat in the oven and a pasta dish started.

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Chris Lee

‘Battle Ready Rally’ to be held in three locations in diocese

MADISON — The Wisconsin State Council of the Knights of Columbus is sponsoring the “Battle Ready Rally” in Wisconsin featuring Doug Barry, founder of RADIX and co-host of EWTN’s Life on the Rock.

The rallies — for men, women, and children ages seven and older — are described as helping people to become “aware of, prepare for, and engage in the spiritual fight.”

 

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Kevin Wondrash, Catholic Herald Staff

EWTN personality concerned about modern education

WAUNAKEE — The air-conditioned parish hall at St. John the Baptist Parish in Waunakee was a welcome break from the heat one recent Sunday afternoon.

A crowd of families and supporters from Madison’s St. Ambrose Academy, as well as varying degrees of literary fans, gathered to hear about Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton.

Chesterton has become one of the most quoted writers in the English language. Scholars and fans of the author say he foresaw and wrote about the issues Catholics struggle with today, such as social injustice, the culture of death, the decline of the arts, assaults on religion, and attacks on the family and on the dignity of the human person.

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Chris Lee

St. Thérèse of Lisieux lecture to focus on Christ in The Hobbit

Joseph Pearce

MADISON — In a prestigious 1997 British readers’ poll, J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings was voted the greatest book of the 20th century.

In the United States, a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers selected this same novel as the greatest book not merely of last century, but of the millennium.

No less celebrated is this novel’s charming prequel, The Hobbit, as last year’s new blockbuster motion picture adaptation bears witness.

How did J.R.R. Tolkien’s devout Catholic faith influence his story telling and serve as a guide for communicating beauty, goodness, and truth in The Hobbit? How can this film provide a cultural means for evangelization?

World renowned Catholic author and EWTN television host Joseph Pearce will be exploring these questions and more at the spring St. Thérèse Lecture on Friday, April 5, at the Bishop O’Connor Catholic Center in Madison at 7:30 p.m. His lecture is titled, “The Hobbit and the Beauty of the Christian Life.”

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Sr. Rosalia Bauer

Mourning and celebrating the life of Nellie Gray

To the editor:

My heroine, Nellie Gray, founder of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C.,  died August 13, 2012.  I mourn and celebrate her death.

Mourn, because of her death after being a beacon of inspiration to all who respect human life, from conception to natural death. Celebrate, because Nellie has come to her Heavenly reward where she can sing, dance, and praise God forever.

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