The Catholic America Tour is planning a road trip, a big one. And we need your help to make it successful.

We will cut a CAT path from New Hampshire to Saint Louis, down to Texas, over to Florida, and up the East Coast back to New England. The tour will take three weeks, leaving New Hampshire on February 10, and getting back home on March 3. Since the tour is “on the road” in the most literal sense, we can arrange stops anywhere along the way. Read More »

Having an aversion to serialized articles on the Internet, I have opted not to call this “Father Arnold Damen, Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle: Part II.” A clunky name, that. This is, nonetheless, a second article on Father Damen, but a “free-standing” one. Whereas Chicago’s Jesuit Apostle focused on our subject’s Windy-City work, here, we will consider Father Damen the missionary and, for your edification and/or amusement, Father Damen the ghost; for, according to some, the departed Dutch Jesuit still has an affinity for his old haunts in Chicago. Read More »

One of the presidents of the American United Steel Workers Union was a very devout Catholic. He was Phillip Murray (1886-1952), an Irishman whose family emigrated from Scotland in 1902 when he was sixteen years old. Murray, who had worked with his father in the coal mines, figured prominently in advocating the rights of workmen, especially in the 1930s, when they were very harshly exploited by avaricious capitalists. Read More »

“Mitte Belgas” (send Belgians), implored Saint Francis Xavier in a letter written from India to his Father General, Saint Ignatius Loyola.  The Indian mission of the East required religious who were not only proven in virtue but strong in physical constitution.  Belgian priests almost always fit the bill. In later centuries, especially the nineteenth, this one country, no bigger than the state of Maryland, was supplying missionaries to every corner of the globe.  Read More »

Enjoying a varied reputation as pioneering parish priest, educational trail-blazer, inspiring mission preacher, formidable religious controversialist, and, oh yes, a ghost that haunts historical buildings on Chicago’s Near West Side, Father Arnold Damen, S.J., is an important figure in American Catholic history. The Society of Jesus, to which the Dutch-born priest belonged, can boast an almost four-hundred-year history on our continent, a history consistent with the Jesuits’ Marine-like reputation as the first ones at the scene of a battle. They were builders, founders, religious frontiersmen — or, if you will, special forces sent in to take out the demonic first line of resistance in enemy territory. Read More »

( “For I trust that God will give me the strength to reach San Diego, as He has given me the strength to come so far. In case He does not, I will conform myself to His most holy will. Even though I should die on the way, I shall not turn back. They can bury me wherever they wish and I shall gladly be left among the pagans, if it be the will of God.”)

So wrote Blessed Junípero Serra in 1769, as he was on the journey which was to begin his most famous life’s work. Read More »

This is the only complete letter from the first thirty-five years of Blessed Junípero Serra’s life. Today it is kept in the Capuchin Convent (monastery) in Barcelona.

“Most Dear Friend in Jesus Christ, Father Francisco Serra,

“Words cannot express the feelings of my heart as I bid you farewell nor can I properly repeat to you my request that you be the consolation of my parents to sustain them in their sorrow. Read More »

“For seventy years, more than six hundred Jesuits had toiled in Baja California, moving steadily northward, never abandoning a mission.” (De Nevi and  Moholy) Now, with no regard for age or illness, they were ousted from their Indians and herded aboard overcrowded ships. The people of Mexico, rich and poor, watched the spectacle with overflowing tears. What caused this unbelievable spectacle? Read More »

There are several interesting facts in the history of West Virgina that highlight the footprints of the Catholic Church in the most mountainous state east of the MIssissippi. The first is a tradition handed down from the eighteenth century that the state’s original capital, Wheeling, was named after a Father Whelan, an Irish missionary priest who sometimes toured the area providing the sacraments for settlers. Even the Protestant frontiersmen so admired Father Whelan that they joined the Catholics in naming the settlement town after him. Read More »

Brian Kelly has written on this site about Our Lady of America and her apparitions to the holy religious in Ohio, Sister Mary Ephrem (Mildred Neuzil). These apparitions are approved by the Church, as the recent canonical study of the case by Archbishop Burke testifies. While there are many supposed apparitions which claim our attention, we put no credence in those lacking the Church’s approbation. Since this apparition is approved, and since it has a message for the Church in America, we consider it worthy of attention, especially now. Read More »