CatholicAnchor.org Jesuit priest Father Normand Amedée Pepin, an acclaimed composer and organist who served the Fairbanks Diocese for more than 30 years, died Jan. 4 in Weston, Mass. Born in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1933, Father Pepin grew up an avid hockey player and served as an altar boy. According to his obituary, in the…
CatholicAnchor.org The Anchorage Archdiocese has connections to one of the newly appointed cardinals chosen by Pope Francis last month. Nearly 10 years ago, Cardinal-elect Archbishop Orlando Quevedo of the Archdiocese of Cotabato, Philippines, entered into a Global Solidarity Partnership with Anchorage Archbishop Roger Schwietz. The 2004 agreement provides mutual support between the sister archdioceses. Delegations…
CatholicAnchor.org When the Spanish sailor Juan de Camus sorted through the ashes of a burned-down house in the Philippines in April 1565, he happened upon a plain pine box. Opening it, he found what would in later centuries become one of the most important icons in Filipino culture — a discovery that continues to…
CatholicAnchor.org While a number of laws in Alaska deal with trafficking, efforts are underway to strengthen these laws. In the last legislative session, Gov. Sean Parnell introduced a bill to provide stronger protections for victims and survivors, while strengthening penalties and sentences for sex trafficking and giving law enforcement more investigative tools to track down…
CatholicAnchor.org People outside Russia usually ask me how and what I am doing. I then give a litany of what we are doing, leaving out what we should be doing and our failures. At the end of the conversation I run to the nearest priest to confess the sin of exaggerating in order to look…
CatholicAnchor.org Each Christmas Catholic Social Services (CSS) has a “Helping Holiday” project where local individuals and organizations provide Christmas gifts for families served by CSS. Today I received a touching thank you note from a family in our Homeless Family Services program that benefited from our Helping Holiday project. The head of this family is…
CatholicAnchor.org I’m probably preaching to the choir here, suggesting an Alaskan book to a readership of Alaskans who have no doubt devoured this book by now. But if somewhere on the Last Frontier there’s a person who has not read, “Pilgrim’s Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier,” do…
CatholicAnchor.org From what I was later told regarding the following event, it probably happened on a cold November weekday in the year 1924. The setting was a country church named Saint Henry in rural North Dakota. The event was a christening ceremony. Seemingly, there was a certain urgency about occasion and the ritual about…
CatholicAnchor.org “I never tire of repeating those words of which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: ‘Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’” Pope Francis offered…
CatholicAnchor.org I serve as a Catholic priest in a country that suffered under Communist materialism where God was an enemy of the state, the church needed destroying and faith in Christ was considered no better than superstition. For nearly a century, Christians across the world have offered prayers for the conversion of Russia. Is it…