In many police departments across the country, the four-to-midnight shift is known colloquially as the “four-to-four.” Get it? You work the first eight and then imbibe until the wee hours of the morning at your (quite often divey) establishment of choice. This was a schedule I kept up for a good portion of my twenties…
I never did get my father to see his two grandsons serve the old Mass – I’d harbored a vague notion that seeing them up there amidst the “smells and bells” might help bring him back into the fold. When they assisted at his requiem this past October, it was the first time they were…
This past summer, just before the God of Surprises ordained it be revealed that Grindr users’ location data is accessible to the public, Pope Francis issued something unsurprising to traditional Catholics who didn’t have their heads in the sand – Traditionis Custodes. I’ve heard and read a lot of things along the lines of this:…
A mechanically inclined friend of mine once commented that a church in his city looks like an enormous Harley Davidson that was disassembled and dropped in a heap of parts. I’ve seen the place from the outside, and my friend’s description is apt. It’s struck me that too much of the Catholic Church in recent…
Because their ranks are filled with men and women of at least nominal Catholic backgrounds, the police and mob worlds that have supplied Hollywood with so much fodder for its cultural products have also given the industry cause for depicting its characters’ faith lives. Where older films and shows are concerned, these depictions can cause…
While my parents are well within the Baby Boomer age range, they were not hippies. But if they had been, and if there were extant film footage that depicted them frolicking in mud pits at Woodstock, or holding up “Drop Acid, Not Bombs” picket signs, I would not let my children see it. If such…
“Amen, Amen, I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. A woman, when she is in labour, hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but when she hath brought forth the child, she remembereth…
