An excerpt from the Second Reading from the Divine Office for the Feast of All Souls: by St Ambrose, a book on the death of his brother Satyrus “Let us die with Christ, to live with Christ” “We should have a daily familiarity with death, a daily desire for death. By this kind of detachment …
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In his Angelus message for on this day in 2012, Pope Benedict XVI reflected on, quote: “the liturgical feast, and how it draws our earthly gaze toward Heaven. He spoke of how the Saints, those we are familiar with and those known only to God, are where heaven and earth meet because formed and opened …
November is my favorite month. Mainly because of The Feasts of All Saints on November 1st and All Souls on November 2nd and the general trend in the Church’s liturgical readings in the Mass and Divine Office on Christ’s Coming (First and Second). This leads to November being considered the “month of the dead”. While …
This is an annual post on a fruitful pious devotion for November: Catholic Culture has an excellent article regarding a very beneficial pious activity that can aid in your own spiritual progression. It also is a good reminder of where we’ll end up someday. (A grave. Morbid, true, but you wouldn’t be here unless you’re …
This post is difficult but it is a must-write. It is later than other current posts in the Catholic blogosphere on the crisis-scandal in the Church involving Bishops and priests and their evil sexual behavior with minors and seminarians (and probably with each other) going back decades, including cover-ups. Seems like every Catholic with a …
“Say what? What’s Paulcoholic mean, ‘Another chance to celebrate Lent!’ Doesn’t he know it’s August?” Of course, I know! But Time is open to interpretation. For a number of years I have introduced to my blog readers something I discovered (I forgot the source) a few years before I started Sober Catholic in 2007; that …
I blogged a few months ago about my decision to start attending a “Traditional Latin Mass,” or the “Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite,” to refer to it by its proper name. This post may repeat some of the points I made then, so bear with me. This post also further explains my recent blogging …
What do you think of death? Is it something to be feared, avoided and denied? Like many people do you ignore it and hope it never bothers you? I have had a relationship with death stretching back to my childhood. Not that I lost anyone close to me during that time, but I feared that …
As a person who suffered from alcoholism, I can say that I have already experienced death of a sort. The old me has died. Some parts of the old corpus may still be twitching, but essentially out of the agony and expiration of the old Paulcoholic a new person has been reborn. Oblivion did not …
In about a week I will commemorate the twelfth anniversary of my Mom’s death. One of the impacts of her dying and eventual death has been my increasing interest in Catholic teaching on the afterlife and specifically a growing devotion to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. When I started Sober Catholic almost eleven years ago …
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