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…
CatholicAnchor.org A resolution has been making its way through the Alaska Legislature to enable more parents across the state to choose private schools for their children — and unless it is considered and passed this session, the bill will die. Introduced last February by Senators Mike Dunleavy, Fred Dyson, Pete Kelly, John Coghill, and…
CatholicAnchor.org The Anchorage Archdiocese has three men studying at St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, Minn. — Arthur Roraff, Robert Whitney and Kevin Klump. These seminarians, all in different phases of formation, are on pace to be ordained to the priesthood over the next four years. In December the Catholic Anchor connected with two of…
CatholicAnchor.org From 1965 until 2013, the total number of priests in the United States dropped from 58,632 to 39,600. During the same years, the total number of graduate level seminarians dropped from 8,325 to 3,694. And yet, the number of self-identified Catholics increased from 48.5 million to 78.2 million. Now a large, aging population…
CatholicAnchor.org My daughter Elizabeth has a home in a charming little town near Philadelphia. One drawback, however, are East Coast squirrels. As a former Alaskan, I know that those in the Last Frontier take pride in size, especially when it comes to conversing with Texans. If it comes down to it, Alaskans will even…
CatholicAnchor.org The Sixth isn’t the only commandment Father Tad Pacholczyk’s December column about “good guilt” told some, but not all, truth. As the 1960s promised to “free” us from our inhibitions about sex, so the 1980s promised to “free” us from our inhibitions about selfish materialism. Today our secular-valued society preaches “Greed is good” and…