This is the feast →

Here in northeastern Indiana, it’s rather gray and windy for Easter Monday, but we won’t let the weather dampen our spirits. Easter isn’t past — it’s present, and we will be celebrating especially during the octave, which ends with Divine Mercy Sunday, but also all the way through Ascension Thursday to Pentecost Sunday, when the 50 days of Easter finally draw to a close.

Yesterday, as on every Easter Sunday, I reread St. John Chrysostom’s Easter homily. When your spirits need a lift during this Easter season, it’s better than another Cadbury Creme Egg. I’ve always found it comforting during those years when my Lenten observance was frustrated (or frustrating), and this year — for many of us, perhaps the most frustrating Lent of our lives — is no exception.

The coronavirus and a stark reminder that wellness was not always a given →

One of the most popular books for Lenten reading in the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches is “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” by St. John Climacus. St. John, a seventh-century monk and abbot of a monastery on Mount Sinai, wrote “The Ladder” for his fellow monks. Divided into 30 “steps,” the book uses the image of Jacob’s ladder (cf. Gn 28:10-19) as a metaphor for the monk’s advancement in the Christian life. . . .

I’ve read a chapter of “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” every day during Lent a few times over the past 25 or so years, each time finding deeper meaning in different steps, depending on my state in life. As I work my way through it again for the first time in probably seven years, I have been more aware than ever of St. John’s emphasis, step after step, on the need to keep our own mortality ever before our eyes.

The Amazon exhortation is a ‘Humanae Vitae’ moment for the Church →

In the weeks leading up to the release of Querida Amazonia (“The Beloved Amazon”), Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on the October 2019 Amazon synod, all of the public voices in the entire Catholic Church seemed to be united on one point: Pope Francis was going to write something that would call into question the future of the celibate priesthood in the Roman rite of the Catholic Church.

Both those who supported a revision of the Church’s discipline on priestly celibacy and those who were opposed to it seemed to agree that the only question remaining was whether Pope Francis would suggest an exception to the ban on ordaining married men limited to the Amazon region, or whether he would open the door to much broader exceptions (or even a complete rethinking of the discipline) worldwide.

In the end, everyone got it wrong.