Fr. Scott Haynes Feast of Our Lady of Montserrat April 27 There are moments in life when words fail us. When suffering presses too deeply, when confusion clouds the mind, when even prayer seems distant or difficult. In such moments, the Church places on our lips not a long formula, but a single word—ancient, universal, and full of power: Mother. This is how the Christian heart learns to pray when it can no longer rely on its own strength. It is the cry of the child who does n

Fr. Scott Haynes A Meditation for the Feast of. St. Paul of the Cross April 28 Saint Paul of the Cross was born Paul Francis Danei at Ovada, near Genoa, on January 3, 1694, into a devout Catholic family. From his youth, the Crucified Christ seemed to stand before him not as an idea, but as a living Person. The old Catholic Encyclopedia says of him that “from his earliest years the crucifix was his book, and the Crucified his model.”¹ That sentence contains the whole secret of

Fr. Scott Haynes On April 25, the Church keeps the feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, one of the four sacred writers of the Gospel. He is often represented by the winged lion, a symbol of courage, majesty, and resurrection. The lion also suits the opening of his Gospel, which begins not with the infancy of Christ, but with the strong voice of Saint John the Baptist crying in the desert: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” (Mark 1:3). Mark appears in the New Testament under the

Fr. Scott Haynes An Exhortation on 1 Peter 2:16 Charles-François Poerson (1653-1725), “Saint Peter Preaching in Jerusalem” Saint Peter gives us a warning that is as searching as it is simple: “As free, and not as making liberty a cloak for malice, but as the servants of God.”¹ He does not deny that Christians are free. On the contrary, he insists upon it. We are no longer slaves of sin, no longer chained to the old life, and no longer bound to the tyranny of every passion, re