A Most Diligent Mother: Angelica

Check out this link for a wonderful article on Mother Angelica by John Zmirak at InsideCatholic.com. It seems like most of the article was compiled from Raymond Arroyo’s biography on Mother, but even still, she is such a wonderful, inspiring person we all need a good dose of Mother once in a while, and if [...]

EWTN Audio Series

I have listened to various EWTN audio series over the last few years, most of which are excellent. I was subscribed to EWTN in iTunes and I would get which ever series was made available.
Currently I am listening to The History of the Catholic Church in the U.S. by Fr. Charles Connor. Maryland was the [...]

Shouldn’t there be more than this?

I was a catechist for today’s mass, this time for the children, but neither showed up today for various reasons. So I sat in the adult session. It went well, the other catechist handled the session well for both the readings and the Feast of All Saints.
Towards the end the RCIA director came in to [...]

Catechesis on the Priesthood – Part 2

Well, I have my second Breaking Open the Word session under my belt. I prepared three pages for discussion and it didn’t seem like enough at first, but in the end it turned out to be just right.
Like I said in my last post, a lot of the content came directly from the catechist guidelines, [...]

Catechesis on the Priesthood

This Sunday I will be leading the Breaking Open the Word again for our RCIA participants. The guideline that I have says to focus the discussion on the priesthood, both the ministerial priesthood and the common priesthood. This entails a lot of prep work, for me at least.
So I have read through the Letter to [...]

Call to Holiness Conference – Detroit

I went to the Detroit area Call to Holiness Conference at the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak last Saturday. They had a great lineup of speakers who gave awesome talks on the Treasures of the Mass while in the setting of a beautiful Art Deco church.
The first speaker of the day [...]

RCIA Catechist

I signed up to be an RCIA catechist last year at my parish, but we didn’t have any catechumens. And so the year passed. In the summer the director had a few of us attend some RCIA formation classes down at the seminary. They were very informative even though they were intended for experienced catechists.
This [...]

Adult Faith Formation – Continued

A while back I reviewed and outlined the adult faith formation pastoral plan from the USCCB (see tab above). It is a great plan, it covers every aspect of faith formation, but it involves a very dedicated parish and staff. And, well, everybody seems to be too busy with other things, at least in my [...]

What is a sacrament?

What is a sacrament? What isn’t a sacrament in the Catholic Church?
There are seven sacraments in the Church, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance or reconciliation, extreme unction or the anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony. The sacraments are aids to our salvation; they are necessary for our salvation; they point us to what [...]

Pope Benedict and Bono to meet

As stated during Pope John Paul II’s pontificat,  part of the New Evangelization is effective use of the media and pop culture.  In December 2000, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) made an address to Catechists and Religion Teachers, The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love.
 To evangelize means: to show this path—to teach the [...]