On this feast day of Sts. Joachim and Anne, being a wife and mother myself, I find it quite natural to feel myself being drawn to Saint Anne and the problems she must have encountered after the birth of her daughter, particularly following that world-changing event, the Annunciation (Lk 1:26-38).
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by Fletcher DoyleI am a journalist and a convert. That sounds like an oxymoron.
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by Brooke Paris Foley
When only seventeen, I experienced my period every other week. My greatly concerned mother took me to see her gynecologist who promptly prescribed the birth control pill. This, the doctor did, though she performed no tests to discover why the frequent menses.
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By Cathy Ruse
Just when you thought the American Psychological Association couldn’t get any more psychologically unbalanced, along comes their next task force. It’s for what they call “consensual non-monogamy.”
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Fresco in the Church of Saint Nicholas in Valencia, of Saint Maria Goretti (1890 - 1902)
If we could have traveled to a poor sharecropping farm in central Italy early in the 20th century, we would have seen a humble building – formerly a cheese factory – sheltering two families of tenant farmers.
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Most of us have an ideal of what a good mother is and what a good mother does. Mary is the prefect mother, tending to all the details of our lives, as long as we are open to letting that relationship grow and we are open to her.
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The heart that resembles that of Christ more than any other is without a doubt the Heart of Mary, His Immaculate Mother, and for this very reason the liturgy holds them up together for our veneration” (Pope Benedict XVI).
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Perhaps he got it from his father—an Italian immigrant who managed with his wife to raise a large family on a barber’s salary during the toughest of economic times.
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Saint Anthony of Padua (1195 – 1231), whose feast we celebrate on June 13th, enjoys popular renown, of course, as the patron saint of finding lost articles. Two lesser-known facts about him, however, are that he was Portuguese and not Italian by birth, and that he began his life in religion as an Augustinian, not as a Franciscan friar.
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When they entered the city, they went to the upper room where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers” (Acts 1:13 – 14).
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