I have had a number of times in my life where I have fainted. Nearly all of them were anxiety related, where the stress in question was just too much for my mind and body to handle, and so my body decided to "disappear" for a moment. I am reminded of Queen Esther from...
For Mother’s Day, I decided to reflect on what Mother Mary teaches all of us—women and men—about the feminine posture of receptivity. So, I read Pope Benedict’s Mary: The Church at Her Source regarding the Magnificat. Mary speaks of “magnifying the Lord.” What does...
A special blog by Monica Ashour, honoring Pope Benedict XVI’s death and thus his entrance into eternal life. When my friend and colleague, Sheryl Collmer, texted me this morning, “Rest in eternal joy, dear Benedict,” I smiled and said, “Well done, good and faithful...
October 22, 2022 Happy Feast Day, St. John Paul! “Are you Monica Ashour?” a stranger said to me. We were on a train to Rome for St. John Paul’s Canonization on April 28, 2014. Shocked, I said, “Yes. Do I know you?” She said, “I’m Mary Sladek, and this is my husband,...
September 29 is the Feast of the Archangels, but this day has also traditionally been called “Michaelmas,” and has a long history of religious and harvest celebrations connected to it (start looking up those Goose recipes!). The traditional story of St. Michael as the...
Blessed feast of the Nativity of Mary, the Theotokos, whose body carried God made flesh. 43 years ago this week, Pope St. John Paul delivered the very first audience of his Theology of the Body (TOB), his greatest contribution to our Church and our culture. Having...
Catholics often think of St. Joseph as the obvious exemplar for fatherhood. However, like many Christian mysteries that we take too easily for granted, I think we often overlook how counterintuitive it is to place St. Joseph as the model of fatherhood. First, the...
As Halloween approaches, I think about candy and haunted houses, Trick or Treat and the color orange, spooky decorations, and the World Series. But perhaps I need to be reminded that Halloween originated as a celebration of All Hallow’s Eve, the day before we...
Fr. Paul Schulte, Oblate of Mary Immaculate (©"The Flying Priest Over The Arctic" by Fr. Paul Schulte, Harper & Bros, 1940.) Meet Fr. Paul Schulte, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate and the sort of priest you’d love to have had for your spiritual father. Paul was in...
The theme of our times, the thread that passes through every aspect of our lives in these 2020’s, is mistrust. We’ve been betrayed, misled and deceived so many times, and by so many we should have been able to rely on. There’s no need to catalogue the betrayals. The...