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2016

The Feast of the Holy Family: Not Just a Model

| Timothy P. O’Malley

Those of us suspicious of the pious platitudes that too often make their home in Catholic homiletic practice know that the feast of the Holy Family is a "code-red" day for such platitudes. We families assemble in our parishes a...

Holy Family

The God Who Had Strep Throat

| Timothy P. O’Malley

Timothy P. O'Malley, director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, on the powerful weakness of God revealed at Christmas in the infant Christ.

Nativityicon

Auden on the Feast of St. Stephen

| Samuel Bellafiore

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes— Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt...

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Advent and the Angelus

| Jared Dees

Jared Dees of Ave Maria Press writes about the power of the Angelus as a devotion intended to prepare us to celebrate feast of Christmas.

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Waiting in the Mystery of Hope

| Jessica Keating

What surprises me, says God, is hope. —Charles Péguy, The Portal to the Mystery of Hope Every Advent I sit around a small prayer table with four-year-olds and contemplate the great mystery of messianic hope announced by the ...

Peguy

Advent Fun and Festivity: St. Lucy's Day

| Carolyn Pirtle

Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. Lucy, a third-century Sicilian girl who pledged her virginity to Christ and endured a martyr’s death when she refused to renounce her faith. Numerous versions of St. Lucy’s martyrd...

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The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Season of Advent

| Maxwell Johnson

For some Christian people throughout the world, especially Mexican and Mexican-American Christians, December 12, of course, is the celebration of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe. The feast commemorates her December 9–12, 1531 appearan...

Johnson Crop

The Immaculate Conception: A Dogma of Consent

| Renée D. Roden

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is a doctrine that continually mystifies me. Each year as December rolls around, I annually struggle to understand what exactly is so significant here that elevates this feast to a holy day of ...

1200 Px Immaculate Conception Zurbaran

The Problem of Experience

| Madeline Running

What happens when experience is treated as an end unto itself? Madeline Running thinks about how young people might properly understand experience in college.

Experience

Burial of the Dead: Opportunities and Challenges

| Brian W. MacMichael

Brian McMichael of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend suggests that the pastoral rites for the dead are an occasion for practicing the virtue of hope.

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