Note from the Assistant Editor:

WATCH: Pope Francis' message to pilgrims in Rome at the general audience on Ash Wednesday.

To help you thoughtfully assimilate God's Word during Lent, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is pleased to share a downloadable resource on the Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent.

The devil will tempt you with at least three tricks: need, vanity, and ambition.

Back in the 1600s, Paulaner monks, who were not allowed to consume solid food during Lent, turned to a common staple of the time of their region: beer.

Holy Communion is to be withheld from divorced-and-remarried Catholics in virtue of Canon 915, which directs ministers to withhold holy Communion from those who, as an external and observable matter, "obstinately persevere in manifest grave sin."

"For Greater Things You were Born" is beautiful, instructive, challenging and can provide great lectio during Lent

Creativity is not a skill to be "taught." However, to imagine that the best way to help students be creative is to unleash them into the world and encourage their rejection of "generic knowledge and skills" is not the answer.

One of the most pervasive, yet neglected, forms of poverty now instantiated in our culture through contemporary education is what I call the poverty of the home.

I think that as a model of holiness, this balance of extremes rather than between extremes is more helpful, since it includes all that is good in both sides of the debate.

Everyone talks about "dialogue," but very few of us have the patience or are willing to do the hard work to engage in it.

Minor hardships like winter are actually quite salutary for illustrating how needy I am and how prone to ingratitude. It can be a little bit terrifying to contemplate our own neediness.

"The sacrifice required of every person is the fulfillment of his duties in life and the observance of My Law. This is the penance that I now seek and require."

To become truly adult, we need to embrace the unpredictability that loving someone other than ourselves entails.

True love, a love that sustains a vocation, is a love that's willing to suffer for the other, that says to the other you're worthy of suffering and I'm not leaving.

Love is realistically a stronger force than self-interest. Detached calculation in such matters is self-strangulating. The deepest joy sneaks in the back door when you are surrendering to some sacred promise.

Friendship, like its flashier cousin, love, can be wildly chemical and, like love, can happen in an instant.

The central purpose of praying the Mass facing east, ad orientem, is to better focus our attention on God and face all together the coming of the Lord.