Jeanie Hannaman

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture - Have you ever stopped to consider how closely joy is associated with hope? This is so true that the Latin verb which means “to be without hope” is desparare, from which we get the English word despair. And despair is also what destroys joy. It is the ultimate sadness... I mention this during the Christmas Season because it is the answer to the riddle of our modern pursuit of pleasure. It is obviously desirable to feel pleasure, but pleasure is a hideous trap without hope.

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine - Kneeling is good for the soul. It lifts you up by making you, in stature, no more than a child... The cardinal of Chicago, Blase Cupich, has issued a directive to demand that parishioners in the archdiocese not kneel to receive Holy Communion, on the grounds that doing so interrupts the flow of the procession and calls attention to the individual. Of course, kneeling at a Communion rail would not interrupt anything at all, or call attention to anyone at all; and it would provide in a most powerful and memorable way the experience of human community that is supposed to be, but never is, imparted by standing in line.

By Msgr. Charles Pope - For more than fifteen hundred years the Jewish people had been making sacrifices in the Temple... They did this because God commanded it. And yet, in the quote from Hebrews above, it is said that God neither desired nor delighted in these things. Linguistically, this is a Jewish way of saying that the sacrifice pointed to something that God desired more: obedience.