Catholic Church

By Msgr. Charles Pope - The Gospel today features the endearing story of Zacchaeus, a man who climbs a tree because he is too short to see Jesus. By climbing this tree (of the cross), he encounters Jesus and is changed... The danger with familiar stories is that because they are familiar, it is easy to miss their remarkable qualities. Let’s look at today’s Gospel with fresh eyes, searching for the symbolic in the ordinary details.

By Maike Hickson, LifeSiteNews - Already in February, unbeknown to the general public, the Cong. for Religious Institutes under Cardinal João Braz de Aviz suppressed the historic 120-year-old Carmel in Philadelphia that was the cradle of the devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux in this country... Rome and the local archdiocese did all they could to discourage a revival of the monastery and that they are the ones who will receive much of the monastery’s estimated assets of approximately $10 million.

By Sean Fitzpatrick, Crisis Magazine - There is a house down the street from us that becomes an object of annual interest to my children as the days grow short and the nights cold. When we go for evening walks, they pause before it with wide eyes. Skeletons carrying coffins march across the lawn. A spectral bride’s veil stirs in the breeze... As we took it in this year, remarking on a couple of new cadaverous additions, my son scratched his scruffy 10-year-old head and said, “Dad, what does Halloween celebrate?”

By Kristine Christlieb, Church Militant - Dioceses across North America are facing radical changes. Not only are hundreds of parishes merging or closing, how parishes are administered is shifting as well... Bishops point to declining numbers, declining dollars and declining priests as the factors forcing the changes and stressing the relationship between them and parishioners.