Catholic Church

By Fr. Nnamdi Moneme, OMV, Catholic Exchange - Have you ever had the thought of quitting on some inspired goal? Maybe you have been trying to practice a particular virtue or overcome a vice? Maybe you have been trying to meet some set spiritual goal or accomplish a project that you sense God has inspired in you. Maybe you have been trying to reach out to a loved one who never seems to reciprocate your love?

By Msgr. Charles Pope - The Gospel for Thursday of the 29th Week of the Year speaks of a great cosmic battle taking place all around us. In it, Jesus speaks of His mission to engage our ancient foe and to gather God’s elect back from the enslaving clutches of Satan, who was a murderer and a liar from the beginning (cf John 8:44)... Jesus is approaching Jerusalem for the final time and describes the battle that is about to unfold. It is a battle He wins at the cross and with His resurrection, but it is one whose parameters extend across time to our own era.

By Sean Fitzpatrick, Catholic Exchange - The Beatitudes are the code of human happiness; and happiness is nothing to be suspect of, for “happiness,” as St. Thomas Aquinas declares, “is the end of life,” and the Beatitudes are the way… Happiness is essential to holiness, and the example of children, who are famed and celebrated as happy, is central to the paradoxical blessedness of the Beatitudes: rejoicing in things invisible and imparting an earthly taste of the heavenly happiness that is to come….

By Robert Duncan and Anne Condodina, CruxNow - The more than 250 Catholic bishops from around the world meeting at the Vatican in October missed an opportunity to confront the global sex abuse crisis, said Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia... “I wish that we had spent more time not only talking about (the crisis) but apologizing to people for it,” said Chaput, one of the delegates elected by the U.S. bishops to participate in the Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment.