I've been visiting sisters’ homes across Britain and Ireland, seeking to collaborate with them in reflecting on suffering and its relationship to love.
Fond memories and beautiful places are fine, but they are not all that matters. Indeed, there is a “Catholic way of doing things” when it comes to death.
How did a shy young woman from the suburban Midwest turn into someone brave enough to travel by foot from village to village in the midst of a civil war?
We never admitted that the lake was terrifying, that it was a dark, alluring, fearful hole in the world, more grim than serene. We never said the word “drown."
Canada’s long-standing ban on physician-assisted death is over. Though Canada has a predilection for polite and civil exchange, was the debate heated enough?
Like Twain’s mother, scrawling her thoughts on little scraps of paper, Scott Simon distilled his long hours in the ICU into clipped reflections, rich with meaning.
After he died a bunch of us were playing basketball one night, in one of the parks where we used to play summer-league ball—eight of us. And then this thing happened
My mother was like a hermit crab who was busy moving out of its shell, and then only the shell was left. “Enjoy it, dear,” she said. She took to staring at the sky.
When we visited Frigolet last year, we asked Joël what makes for a vital religious community. “New men,” he replied. Not money, not administrative acumen, but men.
The importance of loving care for persons near the end of life is fundamental in Catholic teaching. But we've embraced a version of love without that obligation.
Current students are taught by lay people. Our teachers were Benedictine monks, and teaching only begins to describe the role those virtuous men played in our lives.
