For our Church, the month of November always begins with two beautiful feasts of remembrance and hope — All Saints and All Souls.

In this month, the Church calls us to raise our hearts and minds to seek the things that are above! We are called to remember that going to Heaven is the goal that God desires for each of our lives.

Our God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.

God did not make death, we know this. He wants only life for his children. Death entered our world through our sinfulness. But death does not have to be the final word in anyone’s life….

Our faith in Jesus Christ is a beautiful treasure and a precious gift.

But we need to always remember that our faith is a gift. We received it.

That means none of us came to our faith alone. None of us knows the love of Jesus Christ because we thought it up by ourselves. We know Jesus and we became children of God because someone else knew him first and told us about him. Because someone else had faith before us.

This is the beauty of the family of the Church. This is the mystery of the Communion of Saints. St. Paul said, “We are surrounded by so great a cloud of…

We are slowly losing our sense of religious liberty in America.

Our government and courts no longer seem to value the public role of religion or recognize religious freedom as a basic human right.

Scholars like Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon and Michael Sandel have observed that the right to hold and express religious beliefs is nowadays treated as only one of many private lifestyle options that a person can choose from.

These trends are the reason the U.S. Catholic bishops recently established a new Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.

My brother bishops and I are deeply…

We are in hard times. All around us, we have the numbers to prove it.

Last month, our government reported that more than 46 million Americans, about 15 percent of our neighbors, are living in poverty. The percentage here in California is higher — more than 16 percent. Here in Los Angeles County it is higher still. One in six of our brothers and sisters is officially “poor.”

Every one of these “numbers” is a person, a child of God who was created for a purpose in God’s plan.

So it is sad and worrying to see so many without work, or without enough work to be employed…

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Gospel of life. Jesus said: “I came so that all might have life and have it to the full.”

The U.S. Catholic bishops have chosen these words of Jesus as the theme for this year’s celebration of October as Respect Life Month.

This month let us pray together as a Church to ask God’s mercy to stop every offense against the sanctity and dignity of the human person. Let’s ask God to open the eyes of our brothers and sisters so they are able to see that all life is sacred.

Blessed John Paul II said that as Christians we are called to be people…

I know that many of you followed the news of our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI’s recent trip to his homeland of Germany with great interest. So did I.

I was inspired and challenged by his message — which was not only intended for the people of Germany, but for all of us.

The theme our Holy Father gave to his visit was: “Where God is, there is a future.”
In his addresses and homilies, he repeated that the real problem in our world today is secularization — the many pressures to drive God out of our society and out of our lives.
The Pope said we need to know God in order to…

As the new school year begins, I’ve been thinking about how important Catholic schools are to our nation’s future.

Here in Los Angeles, our Catholic schools are making a major contribution to the region’s social fabric and the common good. We serve 80,000 students, which makes us the third largest school system in California. Nearly 70 percent of our students are ethnic minorities. Over one-third come from families living below the poverty line.

What our students are achieving is really amazing. And this story is being repeated in Catholic schools all across our country….

At World Youth Day last month, Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI, gave us a new “doctor” of the Church — St. John of Avila, a 16th-century priest and spiritual writer.

St. John used to say that the Mass contains the whole history of salvation. In the Mass, he once wrote: “You will see a semblance of the love shown in our Lord’s incarnation, nativity, life and death … These mysteries are renewed in the Holy Sacrifice of the altar.”

The new translation of the Mass that we will begin using this Advent helps us to better express and experience this beautiful truth.

In the…

What happens at Mass?

We have a beautiful moment in these next few months to pray and reflect on this question, as we anticipate Advent, when we will start using a new translation of our Mass prayers.

The Mass is ever ancient and ever new. Many of the prayers we hear and say in the Mass were written before the ninth century. Many are taken almost word-for-word from the sacred Scriptures or adapted from the preaching of the early Church Fathers.

We should go to Mass every week aware that we are sharing in the spiritual worship that has nourished the family of God since the day of…

This coming Advent, Catholics throughout the English-speaking world will begin using a new translation for the prayers that we say in the Mass.

This new, third edition of the Roman Missal is the fruit of many years of work by the Vatican and bishops in America, Canada, England and elsewhere, working with the Vatican’s Vox Clara Committee and the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL).

The translators did a beautiful job. They have given us prayers that will help us to lift up our hearts and minds to give glory and praise to God in language that is reverent and…