This coming Sunday, February 5th, we Daughters of St. Paul recall in a special way, Mother Thecla Merlo, our beloved Co-Foundress and first Mother General. Without Mother Thecla we would not be what we are today. There is a song that we sing for anniversaries and even for funerals. The words are, “You are ever a part of our lives. All the good that you do will live on in our hearts.” The good that Mother Thecla accomplished lives on in us her daughters and through all our f...

The Vatican Secretariat for Communications has published the theme/motto for World Communications Day in 2017:“Fear not, for I am with you” (Is 43.5). Communicating hope and trust in our time.I look forward in a particular way to the Pope’s message with this theme; it is usually released on January 24, the feast of St. Francis de Sales, who is the patron of writers, journalists, and the Catholic press.The Vatican Secretariat for Communications issued this following st...

Four or five years after I entered the Daughters of St. Paul, I met Mother Thecla Merlo, our Co-Foundress. (Yes, she was still alive when I entered! We are a young religious congregation—only 101 years old.)I didn’t know much about Mother Thecla then, although I noticed how patient she was with me as I tried to express myself in halting Italian. Only later was I able to read the first biography written about her, where I discovered much more about her holiness.Mother Thecla was deepl...

Recently I viewed an excellent film on purgatory that included a testimony from Father Doug Lorig, a priest in Arizona. For a long time praying and offering Masses for the deceased has been important to him. He had been touched in particular by a case of a seventeen-year-old boy named Tony who had in his life been involved with drugs and gangs, finally committing suicide. Father Doug prayed for him for over a year. Some time later he was at a cemetery for a funeral and heard someone call his nam...

Okay. That’s one of those titles you see in Google Ads whose purpose is to gain click-throughs (and money). Usually you’re disappointed with the “revelation.” But in this case, it is true. Blessed James Alberione did, in fact, reveal his secret in 1919. First, let me tell you how it happened.Can you imagine someone coming up to you when you were fourteen or fifteen years old and telling you that you must become a saint? And not just any saint…but a great saint...

The previous post featured a quote from Blessed James Alberione describing the Way-Truth-Life method for making a Holy Hour. Blessed James Alberione firmly believed that the Gospel and the Eucharist express Christ’s self-revelation and self-giving, and he affirmed that Jesus, “in order to unite to himself the whole person, gave us his teaching and himself: the Gospel and the Eucharist.”  The three-part method for Eucharistic adoration that Blessed James left to us is ...

Blessed James Alberione made several holy hours daily, and he left us a particular "way"--you might call it his own "secret"--for making a holy hour, based on the Eucharistic liturgy of the Mass. (Thankfully, he's shared it with all of us!) I've been making a daily Hour of Adoration using this method for over 25 years, and it is simple, easy to remember, and completely adaptable to whatever I'm going through at the moment. Blessed James divides the hour into ...