Pope John Paul II, in his weekly audiences, has been presenting catecheses on various Psalms. VIS, the Vatican Information Services, has provided excerpts from his texts on powerful themes for the life of the Christian. Several of these follow: DO NOT BASE YOUR LIFE ON FALSE VALUES VATICAN CITY, NOV. 10, 2004 (VIS) The Pope… continue reading

Over 60 people responded to the call for a new monasticism at a recent conference in Durham, N. C. The Editors were invited to participate and to make a presentation having written about New Monasticism (and old monasticism) over the years in the Houston Catholic Worker. (Unfortunately, we were unable to participate.) The community at… continue reading

We avoided seeing “The Passion,” not by choice but by life style. We have not been in a movie theater in a number of years, though we have dropped off our grandchildren with their mother, all of whom who live with us, a number of times, which helps the kids to keep up with the… continue reading

Once a year, Emma and Benoit De Crombrugghe insist that we join them on an outing to Galveston to swim and walk the beaches as we discuss all that really matters. Emma is from Bolivia and Benoit from Belgium, a physician-researcher at M.D. Anderson cancer hospital. Recently they raised an interesting question. What happened, they… continue reading

Not long ago a couple rushed into Casa Juan Diego, very agitated, asking to speak to us privately. They had just been reading the story of Ananias and Sapphira in the Acts of the Apostles, in which those who did not share their goods were struck dead. The couple, friends of the Houston Catholic Worker,… continue reading

Dear Friends, I’m off this weekend to see four men ordained Holy Cross priests at Notre Dame. We all started off together as college freshmen 10 years ago. When I talked to them a couple of weeks ago, one of them told me that their morale is low, as is that of most of the… continue reading

Old-fashioned Marxists considered religion to be a major obstacle to social economic change, branding it as the opiate of the people. In a debate in the 70’s with a representative of the Communist Party in New York, I proposed the contrary. I claimed that the Marxist sense of revolution was shallow and that the Theistic… continue reading

It has been my experience through fifteen years of priestly service that the personal and familial problems facing Christians are greatly intensified by the consumerism that characterizes much of contemporary American life. As I have come to appreciate the psychological and religious aspects of this influence I have also become increasingly convinced of the social… continue reading

I began my philosophical and theological studies in 1964, at a moment when the theological curriculum in the Church was collapsing. I experienced what was the great crisis of theology during and after Vatican II. Here I would like to assess this crisis of the lst 30 years, and to offer what could be the… continue reading