When five-year-old Jake Finkbonner showed up to play his last basketball game of the season in Ferndale, Wash., he had no idea it would change his life and lead to events that would culminate in the canonization of a saint.

Although separated from her by three centuries, an ocean and major cultural differences, Jesuit Father Paolo Molinari absolutely loves Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk woman who will become a saint in October.

When one partner in a marriage commits adultery, finding healing may seem impossible, especially if the affair results in a pregnancy and the baby's biological father is of a different race.

OTTAWA – The Catholic Church is one of the few remaining churches that teaches marriage is a covenant, evangelist Craig Hill said June 9.

A girl from Tawargha, Libya, draws as she celebrates World Refugee Day at a refugee camp hosted by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Benghazi, Libya, June 20.

Canada Day comes this year in the wake of the body parts of a murdered young foreign student being mailed to various organizations and of the apparently cold-blooded murder of three security company employees in Edmonton. Such incidents are not typical of Canadian reality; however, they are flagrant examples of an increasing ferocity in what once was known as the peaceable kingdom.

FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

Mysticism is an exotic word. Few of us connect mysticism with ordinary experience, especially with our own experience. Mysticism is generally seen as an exotic thing, a paranormal thing, a special kind of consciousness given only to the most elite within the spiritual life, something for spiritual athletes or for the weird, visions and altered states of consciousness, snakes and ladders in the spiritual life.

RALPH HIMSL

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 8, 2012

Today's readings invite us to examine an element abiding in every relationship, that of "power" – and to meditate upon it.

SR. LOUISE ZDUNICH, NDC

What is atheism? Agnosticism? What is the difference between the two?

FR. ROBERT BARRON

Recently it was announced that I have been named the new rector-president of Mundelein Seminary, my alma mater and one of the largest seminaries in the United States. I believe that one reason Cardinal Francis George chose me for this position is that I've been working the past several years in the evangelization of the culture.