Martin Luther King—In His Own Words

    In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, I thought I’d offer some quotes from his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” written from a prison cell to the clergy in 1963. Parts of the letter have become well known, such as King’s insistence that “Injustice...
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The Wisdom of the Wise Men

    The twelve days of Christmas end on January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates “wise men from the east” (Matthew 2:1) coming to worship the child Jesus in Bethlehem. They are commonly called “Three Kings,” but the Bible doesn’t call them that and doesn’t...
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Get Singing!

  The opening verse of Psalm 96 provides a fitting message as we begin the Year of the Lord 2024: “O sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth!” To sing a new song is to give voice to a new tune and lyrics. Something not heard before will now be offered to...
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Christmas Sedition

    Christmas incites observers to contemplate the overthrow of the worldly order on behalf of the oppressed. The pro-life movement, in order to protect the unborn, sustains the seditious nature of Christmas and enlivens Christmas hope. Casting down the Mighty Sometime...
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The Christ Child in Carols—and in Us

    The traditional Nine Lessons and Carols opens with the carol “Once in Royal David’s City.” The words were written by Cecil Frances Alexander in 1848; they first appeared in the U.S. in Cantica Sacra, Hymns for the Children of the Catholic Church, in 1865. In the lessons...
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HE WAS BORN IN A BETHLEHEM BARN FOR THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS

           “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human…. “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins….” –The Nicene Creed (In 2025, the 1,700th...
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Live Not by Lies

    My son and I are reading through a biography of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and dissident who exposed to the world the brutal and then hidden underbelly of Soviet brutality, and who pleaded with the world—East and West—to “live not by lies.”  This...
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The End

  The season of Advent begins this coming Sunday, and one of the readings for the season, from Matthew 24:37-4, tells of the end of time, in which Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be...
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Momentary Friends

    I had spent the night in an airport on a ten-hour layover, not quite as awful as it sounds but no rival for the much-anticipated comfort of my own home. Bleary-eyed as we took off at 7 AM—no one on the flight was what my father would have called “bright-eyed and...
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Keep Praying

    The Church of the Holy Family, where I serve as pastor, is in midtown Manhattan, across the street from the United Nations campus. The church is open Monday to Friday from 7 AM to 6 PM. Day in and day out, I am impressed to see the many people who come in to pray...
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