Marriage & Family

By Fr. Nick Ward, Crisis Magazine - I’ll never forget the day a student pointed a handgun at my dad’s face, back when he was principal of Bishop Neumann High School in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I was too young to be a student, so I wasn’t there, but the drama of that terrible morning was burned into the collective memory of the whole Catholic community in that town for years to come... That may have been the first (or among the first) Catholic-school shootings in U.S. history. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last. Many of us are now sadly familiar with the shooting that happened in Minneapolis, where a gunman fired multiple shots from varied weapons into a Catholic Church during a school Mass.

By Randall Smith,  The Catholic Thing - Imagine you are applying for a highly competitive job, and someone says, “I can tell you how to be more competitive than 98 percent of the other applicants.”  Would you be interested?... Let’s say he adds: “It’s not hard, but you may not like it.”  Perhaps it’s something like wearing a coat and tie to your interview, and you hate wearing a coat and tie.  I’m with you on that, but if you really want the job, wouldn’t you make that little extra effort?  Or would you complain? “Why should I wear a coat and tie?  Coats and ties are stupid!  If they want a coat and tie, the heck with them.”