The young news clerk at the newspaper I edited in North Carolina had a healthy, if peculiar curiosity about Catholics and our beliefs. Did we really pray to statues? Did we pray in a language (Latin) also used by Satan? Did we really drink blood at Mass? Did all Catholics …

Simon Sinek, a current bright star on the leadership and management scene, has some interesting thoughts on social media. He thinks there’s more wrong with it than right, at the very time the entire world seems to have decided otherwise. Sinek, who is just a few months older than my …

The Catholic Church seems to be engaged in a slugfest. I know a scant bit about boxing because my Dad enjoyed the sport, something he learned in the Army. He felt the manly art of self-defense was something I needed to learn because I was hopelessly not fleet of foot. …

Two of my grandchildren saw war – real war — for the first time in August. They saw the picture of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, sitting dazed and bloody in the back of an ambulance in Aleppo, Syria. It was published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. His …

Members of the archdiocesan central office staff recently attended a workshop that featured an extensive session on prayer. I’ll never pretend to be a theologian  but I have navigated tough situations and times over many years on instinct. That alone tells me that the Jesus’ teaching in Luke 11 should …

Watching my father care for his father proved a chore for a pre-teen boy with his head full of kid thoughts and body full of kid energy. They did not speak much on those days when we went to pick up laundry and tidy up grandpa’s tiny apartment over Frenchie’s …

Danny Diego always wore a huge smile. A guy who had beat childhood polio, he was not a man terribly impressed with obstacles. But as circulation manager of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., 20 years ago, the smile would become a near grimace every New Year’s Day …

“How Catholic Are We?” asks the April 2016 edition of Cincinnati Magazine. Over the next 20 well-designed pages is a package of well-written and well-researched stories and factoids that quantify the changes in church attendance and population in the greater Cincinnati metropolitan area. The numbers and sidebar stories support the …

It’s one of those infamous dinnertime phone calls. “Hello, Steffen, this is Travis at Marketing Research Associates. You’ve been identified as an opinion leader and we value your opinions. I would like to ask you a few questions.” If you’re a registered voter and have a landline listed in one …

There’s much talk and much more being written these days in the Catholic world about evangelism – sharing the joy of the Gospel message with others. We’ve all met evangelists, seen them on TV or witnessed them giving their witness in any number of forums – including in the political …