Planning for end of life situations is important. We should put in place an advance directive before our health takes a serious turn for the worse and we are no longer able to indicate our own wishes or make our own decisions. Advance directives can be of two types: living wills and health care agents.
Brokenness is something I know a lot about. Maybe we all do. We speak about brokenness in many ways. Broken promises. Broken hearts. Broken marriages. Broken lives. Broken bodies. Broken spirits. Broken minds. Brokenness is all around us. The world at times seems so broken. Out of order. It is a witness of original brokenness called original sin.
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista called, demanding to know what I thought of “This crazy speech of the pope’s about the Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate.
Catholic Social Services just completed the reaccreditations process by the Council on Accreditation (COA) this summer. A team visited us in August and had many positive things to say. Their report emphasized three elements: Our excellent continuous quality improvement program; our engaged and knowledgeable board of trustees; and the strong sense of teamwork they observed with people respecting each other and focused on delivering outstanding services.
Harper Lee was notorious for avoiding journalists, and now she, or her representatives, say she gave no authorization for the book. But clearly, Mills spent months fishing, feeding ducks and drinking coffee with the reclusive writer. As part of her arrangement, Mills agreed to avoid certain subjects, and consequently the book seems a little banal. She says Lee is the best conversationalist this side of the Mississippi, but she offers few good examples. The book’s best quote, an African proverb, came from a friend of Lee’s, and is actually the point of this column: “Every time an old man dies a library burns down.”
I suspect there may be at least some people in the world who, unlike Peter, do dream about the best that life can offer: the best food, finest home and the most expensive wine. But, as my friend Peter admitted, all that does get a bit stale after a while. There must be something deeper and more lasting in this life than the taste of wine.
There are two basic forms of religious persecution. The first is more subtle and moves by almost imperceptible degrees in an effort to restrict and prohibit people of faith from running charitable outreaches and schools or conducting their business in a manner that reflects and respects their deeply held religious beliefs.
I don’t hear our Catholic leaders pointing out that requiring Catholics to finance immoral foreign policies violates our religious freedom. Just this century alone, we’ve been forced to help finance the breaking of several of God’s 10 Commandments.
Pope Francis understands the crisis of marriage culture in its multiple dimensions, just as he understands that the family, which begins in marriage, is a troubled institution in the post-modern world; that’s why he’s summoned two Synods on the topic of the family. And that’s why the Synod, fully aware of the gravity of the situation, should begin, continue and end on a positive note, offering the world a pearl of great price: the Christian understanding and experience of marriage.
Making Sense of Bioethics A June 2014 article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health, points out that marijuana is not the harmless drug that many imagine. Rather, it is associated with “substantial adverse effects, some of which…