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Ten bridesmaids, a late bridegroom, and the night before the big exam — why the wise ones wouldn’t share, and the kind of readiness nobody can lend us.

When the young Thomas Merton said he wanted to be a good Catholic, his friend told him that wasn’t enough: say youwant to be a saint. On the Feast of All Saints, we see the Beatitudes as a portrait of holiness, and why wanting to be a saint may be the whole qualification.

At his father’s wake, Fr. Patrick met dozens of people he had never seen before, and every one of them said the same thing: your dad was a great friend to me. On the Sunday Jesus names the greatest commandment, he reflects on how we learn to love, and why the friendships in our lives may form us more than anything we ever learned in school.

Before he became a friar, Fr. Patrick worked on 1 7 election campaigns. With Election Day near, he takes on one of the Gospel's most misunderstood lines. “Give to Caesar” is not a call to keep faith out of public life. A priest has to be political, he says, but never partisan. Before he became a friar, Fr. Patrick worked onseventeen election campaigns. With Election Day near, he takes on one of themost misunderstood lines in the Gospel. “Give to Caesar” is not a call to keepfaith out of public life. A priest has to be political, he says, but neverpartisan.

Most of us don’t turn God down by saying no; we say “not now.” Fr. Patrick looks at the wedding-feast parable: a king who won’t cancel the party, and the guest who showed up but let nothing change him.

THIS IS FOR FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2026. I POSTED THE WRONG EPISODE.

Two sons, one vineyard, and a major-league umpire on why it's never too late to reverse the call.

Nobody hired them. So the landowner went out one more time. What the parable looks like when you stop reading it from the grumblers' side.

Twenty-five years ago, I wanted revenge. Two months after the attacks of 9/11, my fellow novices and I were asked the impossible: to look at the men who flew those planes with the eyes of Jesus.

My cousins loved my dad and were also afraid of him...on who's selling us fear, and why we're called to something else.

Nobody sells a life all at once. Politicians promise it painless, Peter begs Jesus to skip the cross, and we edit the Gospel down to something comfortable — while the real trades happen in payments too small to notice.

A friend of forty years asked me over dinner what Fulton Sheen thought of Vatican II — and I could hear the worry underneath the question. Two thousand years of rough water, one shaky fisherman, and the question Jesus is still asking. "Who do YOU say that I am?"

A seventh-grader, a giardiniera sandwich, and the day he asked his mother to make him someone else. What a Canaanite woman shouting at Jesus has to say about who belongs at the table.

Peter didn't sink because he made a mistake. He sank because his math was correct - a man cannot walk on water. Being clever can make it harder to notice God standing right in front of us.

One little word - "of" - and Paul's most famous lines mean something entirely different. This podcast explores abundant love, the Greatest Generation, and what it actually costs us to love somebody without keeping a ledger.