My own young daughter, Kemper, was in agony from lupus, a disease ravaging her body, and I worried about leaving her to visit Washington's poor. But I had promised to share my time with a small child in one of the poorest housing projects of our nation's capital, so I had to keep my word. This visit was part of the ongoing Catholic ministry of Exodus Youth Services, Inc. (Exodus) that my husband and I had founded in 1985.
When I first met them, at the St. Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco, I hadnt gone to Mass regularly for years. I enrolled in their program knowing but not caring that it was Catholic. I just wanted to live in San Francisco and read great books. I didnt have even a passing interest in the faith. The St. Ignatius Institute changed that.
Young man, inquired Mother Teresa, do you say the rosary often? No, not really, he admitted. She took his hand, while her eyes probed his. Then she smiled. Well, you will now. And she dropped her rosary into his palm.
On the evening of October 16, 1978, when Pericle Cardinal Fellici announced that the Church had a Polish pope, an astonished world expected that it might take some time for the newly-elected successor of St. Peter to learn his job. For Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Kraków had had none of the preparation usually considered necessary for the papacy.
The short life of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was one of intense intellectual brilliance, physical anguish, and mystical vision. The son of a French bureaucrat, Pascal exhibited extraordinary mathematical and scientific abilities at an early age.
On December 21, 1968, a spacecraft appropriately named after the pagan god Apollo left the earth on its three-day trip to the moon. Thirty some years ago we had, for the first time, a compelling image of the only home that all we humans can call our own. This image urges us to reflect on the brotherhood, mutual love, and respect that our common dwelling place mandates. The inhospitable blackness of the surrounding void is not an alternative, either literally or figuratively.
For all my newfound piety, I was still fifteen years old, and all too conscious of cool. Just months before, Id left behind several years of juvenile delinquency and accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. My parents, who were not particularly devout Presbyterians, noticed the change in me and heartily approved. If it took religion to keep me out of juvenile detention, so be it.
Compassion is formed in the real and heartrending experiences of deprivation. Shania Twains adversity formed her compassion and her strength, and it is to her honor and credit that it retains priority in her heart far above all the trappings of her extraordinary success.
She spent her life caring for the sick and dying, yet she could not hide her impatience with the doctors whose efforts only postponed her own death. She was a virgin, yet millions called her Mother. She disdained the limelight, yet people all over the world knew her by a single name. Like all heroes of the Christian faith, Mother Teresa lived a life marked by contradictions, both superficial and profound. The depth of her religious commitment made it impossible for her to fulfill the expectations of a secular society.
On September 11, hijackers didnt count on facing family man and daily Mass-goer Tom Burnett Jr.