Alaska’s Orthodox Christian leaders praised Pope Francis and applauded a series of recent high profile meetings between him and Orthodox Patriarch on Constantinople Bartholomew, but they also expressed guarded enthusiasm about whether the encounters constitute significant progress toward uniting the long-divided churches.
Part of the unethical character of drug abuse flows from the fact that we are treating something good, namely our personal, conscious experience as if it were an evil to be avoided. Recreational drug users seek to escape or otherwise suppress their lived conscious experience, and instead pursue chemically-altered states of mind, or drug-induced pseudo-experiences. Any time we act in such a way that we treat something objectively good as if it were an evil by acting directly against it, we act in a disordered and immoral manner.
Redemptorist Father David Tobin, who served for a time in the Archdiocese of Anchorage, died June 27 after a heart attack. He was 77.
In the 1960s, he helped run a popular summer camp, St. Theresa’s, from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church on the Kenai Peninsula.
In July Cardinal Orlando Quevedo, of the Archdiocese of Cotabato, Philippines, made his third visit to the Archdiocese of Anchorage and his first since Pope Francis made him a cardinal in February. The recent trip was part of the now decade-long Global Solidarity Partnership between Cardinal Quevedo and Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz. The arrangement, which seeks to build solidarity and friendships between Catholics in Alaska and the Philippines, has resulted in several priests from Cotabato coming to serve in Alaska over the years.
While in Alaska, Cardinal Quevedo sat down with the Catholic Anchor to discuss the future of the partnership and his recent appointment as a cardinal.
Few things shake a person’s feeling of self-worth and stability as much homelessness. Pope Francis, during Advent last year, spoke about the great difficulties faced by families without a fixed place to live, and compared their situation to that of the Holy Family facing the birth of Jesus in a stable.
Holy Family Cathedral in Anchorage lost an energetic priest with a passion for pro-family and pro-life outreach. Father Paul Raftery, who first arrived at the cathedral in 2012, has been reassigned to serve again as head chaplain at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., a post he previously held from 2006 to 2012. Father Raftery’s love for outdoor adventures with parishioners was well known during his time at the cathedral.
CatholicAnchor.org Father Tom Lilly is somewhere along an ancient pilgrimage path, hiking the narrow footpaths, farm trails, cobbled streets and byways of Spain. The pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Anchorage is on his way to the historic cathedral that houses the relics of Saint James the Apostle. Known as Santiago de Compostela, the…
In an effort to solidify relationships that have provided the Anchorage Archdiocese with much needed priests and religious, Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz visited South Korea earlier this spring.
Earlier this year, Father Michael Shields received an invitation to give an eight-day retreat in Rome for nuns of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity congregation. He had no idea that the invite would land him face to face with Pope Francis, in the pontiff’s private chapel.
Three young women with a passion for inspiring faith in youth have landed in Alaska to help launch the inaugural season of St. Theresa’s Camp — a Catholic summer camp in the Mat-Su Valley. Thanks to the work of a local non-profit, Southcentral Alaska will again have a vibrant Catholic summer camp for the first time in nearly a quarter century. The last camp on the Kenai Peninsula closed in the early 1990s.