Ministering to millennials
Born in the late 80’s, I came to youth ministry in the age of worship song hand motions and purity cards. The gay rights debate raged far and away from my Midwestern town of origin…or least severely under the …
Rules for the sake of Rules, or Law for the sake of Love?
“Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a …
Bodily love: A personal affair
Human Love in the Divine Plan
This is the first of a series of posts outlining Pope St. John Paul II’s thought on the human person and love, human embodiment and sexuality, as found detailed first in Love and Responsibility, …
An identity made for love
“O Lord, who are You? O Lord, who am I?”
This simple, profound prayer seems tailor-made for young people at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We’re caught up like never before in a quest to define ourselves, to understand …
Exclusive: Fr. Mike Schmitz on new book for young Catholics with same-sex attraction
The young Catholics to whom Fr. Mike Schmitz ministers love Christ and are faithful to his Church, yet for many of them, the struggle to understand the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is real.
In his new book, Made for Love: Same-Sex Attraction and the Catholic …
“Coming out” at Christmas: A pastoral response to parents
Amid the many joys of the Christmas season, we also come face to face with many challenges. It’s an incredibly busy time, for a start, which often leaves little time or energy for the kind of spiritual preparation that such …
The Vernacular of Pornography Part II: Our Pornographic Lives
Click here to read “The Vernacular of Pornography Part I: The Metaphysics of Porn”
This attitude of preferring the simulation of potentiality over the tactile heft of actuality has seeped into the world of things, and also the world of …
The Vernacular of Pornography Part I: The Metaphysics of Porn
Pornography is everywhere. By this, I do not simply mean that we are awash with images of sexualisation of men, women, and now even children, although there is ample evidence of this too. By this I mean that, even …
Coming out for the holidays
It’s a complicated world. A parent in your child’s school leaves her husband for a neighbor woman. The most involved parents in the Rosary Apostolate have a son who now identifies as female. Your cousin, niece, nephew, uncle, son’s …
From the pulpit to the pews: Preaching with clarity and charity about homosexuality
And how are they to hear without a preacher? (Rom 10:14) Saint Paul asks this pressing question about the Gospel in general. We could ask it about particular dimensions of the Gospel, about those hard teachings that are not …
