Spirituality
Maryknoll missioners reflect on liturgical feasts, doctrines and other elements of the Catholic faith, often told through the lives of the people they accompany.
Last May 8 is destined to become one of those “Where were you when ... ?” moments. As white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel and joy erupted at the words Habemus papam! I was sitting outside having lunch when Maryknoll’s bells joined the chorus ringing out from churches around the world. We had an hour to wait to learn who would be the 267t...
The white smoke had barely stopped billowing from the roof of the Sistine Chapel on May 8 when posts began to blitz the internet. One “meme” video showed Pope Leo XIV in papal finery. His Holiness declared that “woke” meant waking up to others’ suffering and that Christians should speak out in the face of injustice. These beautiful sentim...
Let’s be blunt about it. We see many Christians today flooding the news and social media with interpretations of Christianity that directly contradict Jesus’ teachings and proclaim other saviors of Western civilization. The late Irish actor Richard Harris grappled with a similar situation in his poem titled “There Are Too Many Saviors on My C...
In the Book of Genesis, the first thing God creates is light. Not so God can see, but rather so that we can. The Bible and all of Creation will reveal God. Light illumines everything. Without it, nothing is visible. Yet light itself is invisible! It must be reflected off of something. But for the full miracle of light to be experienced, one more th...
A rabbi was giving a workshop on Scripture to Maryknollers in Africa some years ago. As part of his visit, the missioners showed him around Tanzania: Mt. Kilimanjaro, wildlife in the Serengeti, and of course, the wonderful hospitality of a Tanzanian family. As they sat down to dinner, Father John Sivalon, who was Maryknoll’s regional superior for...
As an Italian-American Catholic, I was raised on stories of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini. The first U.S. citizen to be canonized, she is the patron saint of immigrants. My mother unknowingly implanted in my heart the desire to become a missioner when she read to me from Mother Cabrini’s biography Too Small a World. Pope Leo XIII, reluctant to ap...
"Who do you say that I am?” If you could go back to the time of Jesus, what would you see? The first challenge, of course, would be figuring out which one was Jesus. He wouldn’t be wearing the bright white, red and blue robes portrayed on holy cards. He would be wearing the same faded cotton or linen robes as everyone else. Without a halo, he...
One of the first challenges a missioner faces overseas is learning to communicate in a different language. Scripture gives us ample warning that to communicate the love of Christ to all peoples, we must do a lot of “dying” to ourselves. We are “strangers in a strange land” (Exodus 2:22), and in a new place, missioners will make linguistic m...
My fondest memory of celebrating Christmas as a boy is midnight Mass. The church smelled of fresh pine, melted wax and incense. The highlight began when the priest intoned Gloria in excelsis Deo — then stopped! That was the signal for the altar servers, candles lit, to line up before the altar. Under a purificator, a statue of the Baby Jesus rest...
