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Having just returned from a week covering Pope Francis’ triumphant journey to the United States, I can confidently tell you that the news media are in love with the Vicar of Christ.
Time and again, commentators, pundits, anchorpersons, and editorialists opined that Pope Francis is the bomb.
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During the pope’s visit to America, I had the privilege of commenting for NBC News and for MSNBC.
Twice I was on for extended periods with Brian Williams, the former anchor for NBC Nightly News, and twice with Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball. I must say that both men are very good at what they do, namely, keeping a conversation going among several different people with varying points of view and assuring that things stay sufficiently lively and interesting.
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I had the extraordinary privilege of following the pope’s pilgrimage at very close quarters. I had this access both as a bishop and as a commentator for NBC News.
It was thrilling indeed to witness just how rapturously the American people received the pope and how affected the Holy Father was by this reception. Many images stay vividly in my mind: the pope kissing the forehead of the 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, the rabbi and imam praying together at the September 11th memorial, a little boy from a New York Catholic school showing the pope how to maneuver his way around a Smart Board.
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About four years ago, I had to take the long flight to New Zealand to give a retreat to the priests of the Diocese of Christchurch.
In order to pass the time, I brought along an iPad with the entire first season of Mad Men on it. So in one very intense period, I got immersed in the world of Don Draper, a world that I vaguely remember from my own childhood — not the booze and the affairs, of course, but the look, the feel, the colors, the way people moved and talked.
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The upcoming canonization of Blessed Junípero Serra in Washington, D.C. — the first ever to take place on American soil — has generated, as I’m sure you know, a good deal of controversy.
For his defenders, Padre Serra was an intrepid evangelist and a model of Gospel living, while for his detractors, he was a shameless advocate of an oppressive colonial system that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Indians.
Even many who typically back Pope Francis see this canonization as a rare faux pas for the Argentine pontiff. What should we make of all this?
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Every third summer, the Catholic lectionary provides a series of readings for Sunday Mass from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is the magnificently crafted chapter in which the evangelist’s Eucharistic theology is most fully presented.
It is a curiosity of John’s Gospel that the Last Supper scene includes no “institution narrative,” which is to say, the account of what Jesus did with the bread and cup the night before he died.
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Recently, Stephen Colbert gave an interview in which the depth of his Catholic faith was on pretty clear display.
Discussing the trauma that he experienced as a young man — the deaths of his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash — he told the interviewer how, through the ministrations of his mother, he had learned not only to accept what had happened but actually to rejoice in it: “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10; that was quite an explosion . . . It’s that I love the thing that I wish most had not happened.”
MADISON — When the Red Mass is mentioned, people often express some curiosity about it and wonder what it is, where it originated, and why it is called “red.”
The last question is the easiest to answer. It is because the celebrant of the Mass wears red vestments and long ago, some of the royal judges also had red vestments.
But what is a Red Mass? It is a Mass, usually celebrated as the new judicial term begins, to ask the Holy Spirit for guidance for all those engaged in the justice and legal systems.
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Conservation International has sponsored a series of videos that have become YouTube sensations, garnering millions of views.
They feature famous actors — Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, and others — voicing different aspects of the natural world, from the ocean, to the rain forest, to redwood trees. The most striking is the one that presents Mother Nature herself, given voice by Julia Roberts.
They all have more or less the same message, namely, that nature finally doesn’t give a fig for human beings, that it is far greater than we, and will outlast us. Here are some highlights from the Mother’s speech:
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Many of you have seen the appalling hidden-camera videos of two Planned Parenthood physicians bantering cheerfully with interlocutors posing as prospective buyers of the body parts of aborted infants.
While they slurp wine in elegant restaurants, the good doctors — both women — blandly talk about what price they would expect for providing valuable inner organs and how the skillful abortionists of Planned Parenthood know just how to murder babies so as not to damage the goods.
