Category: Editorial

A one-man play on the life of St. John Vianney will be performed in the Madison and Milwaukee areas by actor Leonardo Defilippis. VIANNEY will be staged at St. John Vianney Parish in Janesville on Friday, Sept. 11, at 7 p.m. and at four other locations (see details below).

This play has been in the works for over two years, but coincidentally (or by divine inspiration), Pope Benedict XVI declared the Year for Priests in June under the patronage of St. John Vianney. So this play became even more appropriate for viewing.

The Catholic Church teaches that couples should not live together before marriage. Some people today might think that teaching is old-fashioned and unrealistic.

Statistics show that over 60 percent of couples in our country cohabit before they get married. It’s obvious that Catholic couples must be numbered among those living together and not following the Church’s dictates.

These cohabiting couples should reconsider their lifestyle. Recent studies have validated the Catholic Church’s teaching and reveal that living together before marriage often does not lead to marital bliss.

Many Americans seem to think vacations are not necessary. People in our country reportedly take fewer vacations than those in other countries.

Workaholic Americans even give back millions of hours of unused vacation time to their employers every year! If you’re one of those workers, you should consider taking all the time you have coming for vacation.

The start of the new school year is just around the corner. Soon over two million children will be going back to school at over 7,000 Catholic elementary and secondary schools throughout the United States.

The past year (2008-2009) saw a 3.5 percent decrease in enrollment in Catholic schools in our country, according to figures released by the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA). There were 78,382 fewer students than the previous academic year.

If there would be a feastday for grandparents, it would probably be July 26. That is the feast of Sts. Joachim and Anne, the parents of our Blessed Mother.

As a new grandparent myself with two granddaughters born last year, I was happy to hear Pope Benedict XVI mention the importance of grandparents July 26 during his Sunday Angelus talk in the mountains of Italy, where he is vacationing.

Health care is a basic human right alongside food and shelter. All persons in the United States should be able to access good, affordable health care.

The injustice of millions of people in our country lacking access to health care must be remedied, says the Catholic Health Association (CHA) in its vision for Catholic health care reform.

Pope Benedict XVI has been writing an encyclical on charity for some time. But in releasing the encyclical Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”) on July 7, it looks as if the Holy Father is responding to our current world economic crisis.

His words are certainly prophetic and inspiring. In fact, they should be assigned reading for not only members of the Catholic Church, but also for leaders of every nation, business executives, workers . . . well, everybody!

Many of us celebrate the July 4th holiday with family picnics or other fun activities. I imagine few of us take time to reflect on the meaning of this holiday and its significance in our lives.

However, with news reports about the recent political upheaval in Iran, I began thinking how lucky we are to live in the United States of America. We owe our freedom and democratic system of government to the earliest Americans. They had to fight to establish this country — and we should fight (not necessarily in the physical sense) to preserve the freedoms they gained for us.