Sometimes, amid the chaos in our lives, we just need to know that someone cares.
Tag: love
Knowing what the Church teaches and why
I do not need to tell you about the conflict and confusion that reign in our world, country, and Church. Every day, we see evidence of it.
Offer the best we have in simple acts of love
Everyone experiences personal difficulties at some point, times of heavy crosses we must carry for a short time or all our lives.
We are made in God’s image
A beautiful, basic tenet of our faith, articulated in the creation account of Genesis, is that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, the imago Dei.
The Scriptures narrate the words of God Himself: Let us make man in our image and likeness.
This conviction is the bedrock of the Church’s defense of human dignity, proclamation of inherent rights, and responsibilities of each person and a motivation for all of our concern for the poor, the young, the elderly, and the suffering.
Racism is a life issue
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has formally condemned racism in four pastoral statements: in 1958, 1968, 1979, and in 2018 with Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love — A Pastoral Letter against Racism.
Teens grow in faith and help their neighbors
MADISON — On the mission field this summer, wearing masks, and hearing Collatio talks over Zoom calls, Love Begins Here (LBH) Missionaries around the diocese entered deeper into the spirituality of their patroness St. Teresa of Calcutta and her mystical relationship with our Blessed Mother.
Love Begins Here adjusts to pandemic
MADISON — Eleven years ago, Love Begins Here (LBH) launched in the Diocese of Madison with week long, local mission trips for teens in middle school and high school.
She sent a hundred love letters
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In a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Cutter chronicled the death of her father by suicide. As he struggled with rapidly progressing prostate cancer, he lost more than 30 pounds, becoming gaunt and emaciated. Back pain and nausea forced him to spend much of his time in bed.
A few days before Christmas, he shared with Kimberly that he was thinking about shooting himself. Kimberly argued with him, stressing that she and her sisters couldn’t accept a violent ending: “If he shot himself, my father would die alone. Someone in our family would have to find him,” she wrote.
Looking into options
His daughters convinced him to look into other options. When he started investigating lethal drugs, he ran into questions of reliability. He encountered horror stories about “wrong dosages and unreliable contents, painful, drawn-out demises.”Focusing on forgiveness this Lent
“Say ‘I’m sorry,’” I remember telling my children when they were toddlers squabbling over toys.
“I’m sorry,” parroted the perpetrator, who sometimes had to repeat it a few times before exhibiting the requisite tone of remorse.
“Now say ‘I forgive you,’” I would tell the victim, who also parroted the phrase without completely understanding its meaning.
For years we have done this in our household, trying to explain to the children the importance of forgiveness. And yet, I myself was an adult before I understood its full meaning.
Remembering Rabbi Swarsensky’s example
As I’ve been hearing about the recent incidents of violence fueled by anti-Semitism in our country, I remembered the life and example of the late Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky.
I had the privilege of meeting the smiling, soft-spoken rabbi a number of times, primarily when he served as Chair of Jewish Learning while teaching at Edgewood College in Madison. He was a friend and colleague of the late Sr. Marie Stephen Regis, OP, a Dominican Sister who served on the faculty at Edgewood College.