Rich Donnelly has a World Series story that is out of this world.

Donnelly’s daughter Amy had passed away four years before his trip to the World Series in 1997 with the Florida Marlins, but her presence was felt keenly at the end of the seventh game. The coach has recounted the story to thousands of people around the country every year.

His story has a special impact on other parents whose children are struggling with terminal illnesses or have already died. Because only they can know what it’s like to lose a child, Donnelly says he has a soft spot in his heart for such families.

In fact, family was what brought Donnelly back from his own wayward path earlier in his career. The...READ MORE

During the sacrifice of the Mass, the last part of the Introductory Rites is a prayer called the Collect.

In our current version, this is called the Opening Prayer, but, in fact, “collect” is a richer word, and it will be useful for us to begin employing it to refer to this prayer.

All that we have done so far in the liturgy — the entrance procession with its chant, the Penitential Act, and on some days the Gloria — is now “collected” in a focused way by the prayer the priest proclaims. This prayer is always proper to the day, and, as such, it gives a precise focus to the particular celebration that is now under way.

The collects of the new translation are much richer. They follow more...READ MORE

ROME (EWTN News/CNA)—The lack of silence in contemporary society is making many people’s lives “more agitated and at times convulsed,” Pope Benedict XVI has said.

“Some people are no longer able to stay long in silence,” he told members of a silent Carthusian monastery in the southern Italian region of Calabria Oct. 9.

“Most young people, who are already born in this state, seem to fill every empty moment with music and images, almost afraid to feel, in fact, this void.”

The monastery visit was the Pope’s last stop on a one-day trip to the south of Italy. Upon his arrival in the town of Serra San Bruno, crowds of more than 30,000 greeted the Pope as he made his way through the streets in...READ MORE

WASHINGTON — A case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights could have negative consequences throughout the Americas for marriage and the family, religious freedom and national sovereignty.

The case involves a child-custody claim advanced by a Chilean judge who abandoned her marriage to pursue a lesbian relationship.

Chilean father Jaime López Allende has had sole court-ordered custody of his three daughters for the last eight years and is the girls’ preferred custodial parent.

Despite these facts, the transnational Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has ruled in favor of awarding custody to his ex-wife, Karen Atala. The Washington, D.C.-based commission concluded Chile’s...READ MORE

Catholic & Orthodox Churches are Finally on the Right Track - Marta Petrosillo, La Stampa/Vatican Insider

Truth: The Paradox of Beauty - Brent Stubbs, VirtuousPla.net

The Problem of Non-Liturgical Texts at Mass - Jeffrey A. Tucker, The Chant Café

Feast Day of Blessed John Paul II Coming to America? - Zenit

William Roper vs. Richard Rich - Donald R. McClarey, The American Catholic

The Glory of Being Shut Up - Marc Barnes, Patheos/Bad Catholic

Fr. Robert Barron’s “Catholicism”, a Cultural Prayer - Kathryn Jean Lopez, Patheos

The Archbishop Is On The Right Side Of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” - Teresa Rice, Catholibertarian

Why Catholics Should Build Beautiful Churches - Fr. Dwight...READ MORE

The great English convert and Cardinal Blessed John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was convinced that the issue of liturgical reverence was of decisive importance in every age of the Church.

In fact, he contended that the presence or absence of this virtue distinguished true believers from fraudulent Christians.

With audacious verbiage, Newman declared, “There never was a time since the apostles’ day when the Church was not; and there never was a time but men were to be found who preferred some other way of worship to the Church’s way. These two kinds of professed Christians ever have been — Church Christians and Christians not of the Church; and it is remarkable, I say, that while, on the one...READ MORE

Pope Benedict XVI’s most gripping remark during his four-day state visit to Germany may have been his veiled reference to his homeland’s legacy of Nazi war crimes: “We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the state became an instrument for destroying right — a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss.”

Delivered during his address before the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, the warning could be described as a shot across the bow of the nation’s collective conscience. The statement carried additional potency because it was uttered by a German...READ MORE

Jackie Francois, 27, lives her dream. From her roots as a youth minister, her career has taken her all over the country as a singer/songwriter, worship leader and speaker. Most recently, the Orange County, Calif., native traveled to Spain to sing for World Youth Day.

What moved you to make the change from youth ministry to your present career as singer/songwriter and speaker?

I still feel like a youth minister who travels around the country, but the change came when Spirit & Song/OCP asked me to be one of their “artists” in 2006. At the time, I was a full-time parish youth minister, so I discerned for six months where God wanted me. I discerned that God was calling me to do full-time...READ MORE