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Mother's Day is just around the corner. There are a lot of opportunities for us to spend money, but I think that most moms really want their children close by and they want to spend time with them.

Continúo con una reflexión sobre las cosas que podemos aprender al observar los relatos de la creación del libro del Génesis. Como recordarán, lo estamos haciendo en respuesta a una pregunta de los fariseos, Jesús le dice repetidamente a su audiencia que se remonte al principio si realmente quiere entender lo que está enseñando.

Seguimos reflexionando sobre las cosas que podemos aprender sobre nosotros mismos a partir de los relatos de la Creación en el Génesis. Efectivamente todos los días que Dios crea, termina el día declarando que su creación es buena y luego la historia pasa al día siguiente.

We are continuing our reflection on things we can learn from the Book of Genesis.  Additionally, this is Easter time, so we are going to tie that in too. It is very interesting to reflect on the encounter in Genesis 2 between the First Man and the First Woman, later known as Adam and Eve.

We are continuing our reflections on things we can learn about ourselves from the Creation accounts in Genesis.

I am continuing a reflection on things that we can learn from looking at the creation stories from the Book of Genesis. You may recall that we are doing this in response to a question from the Pharisees, Jesus repeatedly tells His audience to go back the beginning if we really want to understand what He is teaching.

Then Jesus came, He revealed God the Father to us, but we tend to forget the other “revealing” He did.

We are on the cusp of Lent. Many of our conversations will go something like this, “What are you giving up for Lent?” It is a great question and a good start to observing Lent. But let’s not forget that the Church invites us to focus on three areas in our lives; prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Our Lenten devotions or practice should include all three of these.

There are almost 5 million people living in the state of Alabama.  There are approximately 85,000 Catholics in the southern half of the state.  This half of the state is the Archdiocese of Mobile.  There is not an exact distribution of citizens or of Catholics, but for ease of conversation we can say that approximately 3.4 percent of the residents in our archdiocese are Catholic.

I recently contracted COVID-19, and thankfully it was a mild illness.  I am grateful that it was mild for me, but it made me start thinking about how many people had their lives upended by losing someone they love.  I dedicate these thoughts to them.

I hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and that you are refreshed and renewed as we enter 2022.

This paper comes out on New Year’s Eve.  I don’t know when you will see it, but please allow me to wish you a grace-filled year in 2022.  But let’s be clear about God’s blessings.

This will be the final issue of "The Catholic Week prior to Christmas."  I want to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas.  I pray that you will be filled with the light of the Gospel and that the Lord will fill you with His Grace.  It is so easy to get caught up in the trappings of Christmas and we can lose our focus on the true gift that is being offered.

I think that Advent is my favorite season of the Liturgical Year.  There are lots of subconscious, emotive reasons.  I like the cooler weather.  I like it getting dark a little earlier.  I love the anticipation of light returning, and especially celebrating the coming of the True Light into the world.  I love the Advent Wreath.  I love preparing our home for Christmas.  I love trying to prepare my heart to welcome Him.  I love Advent.

The weekend that this newspaper arrives is the weekend that we celebrate the final Sunday of the Liturgical Year.  The Feast on that last weekend is the Feast of Christ the King.  As Church feasts go, this one is relatively new, declared by Pope Pius XI in 1925.

As the summer turns to fall and many plants turn from green to brown, it seems a natural time to reflect on death.  November has traditionally been a month when we think about and pray for our beloved dead.  

We are in the midst of Respect Life month.  This call to respect all human life is really all-encompassing.  Respect life means that we recognize that each human person has value and dignity.  Humans have this dignity precisely because of how we were made, and by whom.  Every issue matters, and we should have respect for human life at the core of the way we approach any and every issue.

The other morning I was praying before Mass and I had some thoughts that I would like to share. I was offering all of myself to the Lord. Specifically that morning I was offering him all of my failures, my shortcomings and imperfections. I have heard great saints talk about how their shortcomings is all they have that is truly theirs. Anyway, then I started to feel that maybe I shouldn’t be offering such “trash” to the Lord. Then this hit me.

I am writing this on the feast of the exaltation of the Cross. This seems a strange thing to exalt and celebrate. St. Paul says that the Cross is a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. I know that by the time you read this the feast day will have already passed. However, we proclaim not just Christ, but Christ crucified. The Cross does in fact seem foolishness to the eyes of the world and it is in fact a stumbling block for many.

I hope that everyone was safe and relatively unharmed by Hurricane Ida. We were very fortunate here. It is odd to think about how different so many people are experiencing life right now. I am writing this on Aug. 31, just a day after Ida passed through.