Recently, the bishops of California made a statement regarding the attacks on the statues of St. Junipero Serra in San Francisco, Ventura, and Los Angeles. While acknowledging that there are legitimate concerns about racism both historical and contemporary, we insisted that the characterization of Serra as the moral equivalent of Hitler and the missions he founded as tantamount to death camps is simply unconscionable.

Defying the efforts of emperors, kings, popes and engineers to eliminate them, the fetid, malodorous Pontine Marshes — disease-ridden, brackish waters 10-16 miles wide — for 23 centuries lay southeast of Rome. Benito Mussolini not only made the trains run on time, in 1928 he finally succeeded in draining the Pontine Marshes. Reclaiming the land, “Il Duce” built low-cost housing and settled families there. The Lazio region is now a thriving community, producing crops in abundance.

The Covid-19 pandemic has left many of us with a great deal of uncertainty: uncertainty about how contagious the virus is and about the best way to treat it; uncertainty about how long our personal immunity will last after we get infected and whether a vaccine will ever be developed; uncertainty about the future of the economy and whether jobs will still be there for the 40 million newly unemployed; uncertainty about how long the public quarantines should continue; uncertainty about what will happen to ourselves, our businesses, our families and our friends.

Broken trust is one of the biggest impacts for a couple when there has been sexual betrayal or a pattern of pornography use.

This seems to be a terrific year for the Sumac. They are green, healthy and extremely pleasing to the eye. The three main types of sumac are smooth, staghorn and fragrant.

The smooth sumac is considered a native shrub/tree in our diocese and is well adapted to our fussy Colorado climate, soils and environmental conditions. Sumacs are especially useful for windbreaks, stabilizing embankments, naturalizing wild areas and forming thickets.

Two dates in 2020 will be etched in my memory forever: March 13, the day COVID-19 changed everything, and May 25, the day George Floyd’s death changed everything again.  

The nurses kept using the same word. The doctors used it too: Rock star.

Allow me to tell you a tale of two sons. It begins with a story told by my friend, Father Barnabas, a Franciscan friar in Connecticut. Online conversations with him over the past 10 years have often led to mutually genial exchanges of ideas — not to mention much hilarity and the joy of knowing someone totally at ease with himself as a man, as a Catholic, and as a priest.