Gaspar Marcos stepped off the 720 bus into early-morning darkness in MacArthur Park after the end of an eight-hour shift of scrubbing dishes in a Westwood restaurant. He walked toward his apartment, past laundromats fortified with iron bars and scrawled with graffiti, shuttered stores that sold knockoffs and a cook staffing a taco cart in Read more
For five generations, the Gammarelli family has dressed and shod popes, beginning with Pope Pius IX in 1846, and stretching up to Pope Francis. The family business has now passed to a sixth generation, which stands ready to keep tailoring for popes from their perch near Rome’s Pantheon. For five generations, the Gammarellis have dressed Read more
When German writer and public speaker Gabriele Kuby talks about the effects of the West’s student revolution of 1968 she knows her stuff. She was there, at the Free University of Berlin, studying sociology and gung-ho with the anti-authoritarianism of the era. There has been a revolution in her own life since then and she Read more
In his Atlantic article on “What ISIS Really Wants” last March, Graeme Wood insisted that “the Islamic state is Islamic. Very Islamic.” Wood’s detractors have been similarly emphatic, arguing that ISIS is a perversion of the Islamic faith. For Wood’s critics, secular politics, far more than religion or religious ideology, is the key to understanding Read more
A long-venerated icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help turned 150 this year, and many Filipinos’ Marian devotion has never been stronger. “There is one clear reason for the thousands of devotees who flock to Baclaran: the special Marian piety of the Filipino people,” Fr. Joseph Echano, CSsR, rector of the National Shrine of Our Read more
The man phoning Doreen Badeaux had recently lost his wife. The two of them had been on a cruise to celebrate their anniversary, he told Badeaux, and it was during dinner one evening that they spotted the priest. They’d asked him to join them, and in introducing themselves, they shared that the wife was dying. Read more
Never underestimate the value of a small gesture. That was the comment of a UK port chaplain after he responded to an unusual, but not surprising, request from a visiting ship’s captain. The captain had told the priest: “What my crew would really like is to walk on green grass. All they get to walk Read more
Near the end of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises is a curious section titled, “Some Notes Concerning Scruples.” Scrupulosity is one of those pesky spiritual problems that we don’t always recognize but can give us a lot a grief if left unchecked. Believe me, I know! Never heard of scrupulosity? How about Catholic Guilt? Read more
Brother Guy Consolmagno is the director of the Vatican Observatory and president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Raised in Detroit, Michigan, he studied Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and at the University of Arizona for his doctorate. During a break in his studies he spent two years teaching Read more
The stink is unbearable, garbage is strewn everywhere and clean water is at a premium. But the old movie theater in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh is nevertheless home to Ngong Theavy, a young mother of three. And it is one she shares. Hundreds of people live in the old cinema building, which has Read more