BIG C CATHOLICS

While the U.S. networks have big plans for next Friday’s royal wedding (or hadn’t you heard), a mere 48 hours and 1,100 miles away in Vatican City another big event will unfold: the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Beatification is the first step to Sainthood. •FNC will carry the Beatification Mass beginning at 4amET Sunday, May 1. Jamie Colby and Eric Shawn will anchor the Mass from New York while religion correspondent Lauren Green will report from Vatican City. Rome-based correspondent Greg Burke will report and FNC analyst Father Jonathan Morris makes a return to Rome to contribute. •MSNBC’s Chris Jansing who will be covering the royal wedding, travels from London to Rome Saturday morning and will begin appearing on MSNBC Saturday. Jansing will anchor live coverage of the Beatification Mass beginning at 4amET. She’ll be joined NBC’s Vatican analyst and author George Weigel and Vatican Art Historian Liz Lev. Jansing covered the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Ben

Who is Saint Faustina? Helena Kowalska was the third of ten children, born August 25, 1905, in Głogówiec, Poland. At fifteen she left school to help support her family. Helena felt called by God to a religious vocation. In 1925, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, taking the name Sister Maria Faustina of the Blessed Sacrament. This simple nun with only three years of formal education lived a short but consequential life. Through her, God reveled His compassion, His desire to forgive sins, and reconcile mankind to Himself. She endured great hardships in carrying out this Divine mission. Sister Faustina received visions of our Lord, in which, Jesus instructed her to tell the world of His infinite love and mercy. She kept a diary of these visions; later published under the title Divine Mercy in My Soul: The Diary of St. Faustina . Read it online here . Sister Faustina was thirty-three when she succumbed to tuberculosis. Following her death her writings w

An excerpt from the Easter Vigil homily of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI: [. . .] In the opening words of his Gospel, Saint John sums up the essential meaning of that account in this single statement: “In the beginning was the Word”. In effect, the creation account that we listened to earlier is characterized by the regularly recurring phrase: “And God said …” The world is a product of the Word, of the Logos, as Saint John expresses it, using a key term from the Greek language. “Logos” means “reason”, “sense”, “word”. It is not reason pure and simple, but creative Reason, that speaks and communicates itself. It is Reason that both is and creates sense. The creation account tells us, then, that the world is a product of creative Reason. Hence it tells us that, far from there being an absence of reason and freedom at the origin of all things, the source of everything is creative Reason, love, and freedom. Here we are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in

Fr. Michael J. Woolley The Lord is Risen, Alleluia! This is the Church’s message to our troubled world tonight (this Day) and for the next 50 days: He is truly Risen! He is Risen, despite the treacherous greed of Judas which stripped Him of all He had, He is Risen, despite the cowardice of His Apostles who in the hour of darkness found themselves powerless to aid Him, He is Risen, despite the blindness of His own people who preferred the sham Barabbas to the true Messiah, He is truly Risen, in spite of the excessive beating the Romans gave Him, He is truly Risen, in spite of the four sharp nails that were driven into His Sacred Flesh, He is truly Risen, in spite of the death He truly underwent as a man, in spite of the three days His cold and lifeless Body spent in the tomb. No, not greed, nor cowardice, nor rejection, nor beating, nor crucifixion, nor death itself could overcome Jesus Christ. He has overcome them all, He has trampled them underHis pierced Feet. The

Some Catholics are concerned with what they see as an attempt by environmentalists to hijack Easter for their own Earth Day purposes. In a letter dated April 1 to churches across the country, the environmentalist group Earth Day Network encourages priests to remember Earth Day Sunday, even though Easter is that same Sunday. “This year we again invite you to celebrate Earth Day Sunday and share with your parishioners a story of creation care that will impart to them the importance of protecting a nurturing the planet that was provided to us,” the letter reads. “Earth Day Sunday is a great way to bring your parish together through community building and sharing the faith with those in the community while improving the world around us.” The letter does add that if priests want to celebrate Easter instead, they could consider delivering a climate change sermon on the following Sunday. Michael Voris of REAL Catholic TV, however, is not buying it, calling the campaign a push for a “pag

The gospel writers record seven statements uttered by Jesus while he was on the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."[Lk. 23:34] "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise."[Lk. 23:43] "Woman, behold, your son!" [Jn. 19:25-27] "E′li, E′li, la′ma sa‧bach‧tha′ni?" [Mt. 27:46] [Mk. 15:34] (Aramaic for "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"). It is also a quotation of the first line of Psalm 22. The latter refers to piercing of hands and feet, and has been interpreted as a reference to Crucifixion . "I thirst."[Jn. 19:28] "It is finished."[Jn. 19:30] "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!"[Lk. 23:46]