The best gift anyone can give to a friend is to pray for him.
The prayer of listening makes things simple but it also makes us vulnerable, and that is frightening. Listening makes us open to Christ, the Word of God, spoken in all things: in the material world, the Scriptures, the Church, and sacraments and, sometimes most threateningly, in our fellow human beings. To listen at prayer is to take the chance of hearing the voice of Christ in the poor, the weak, those whom we love and those whom we do not love.
We've all got a terminal illness. It's called life.
The rosary is a weapon against depression and hopelessness.
And I have found that when we Catholics, in the spirit of love and charity, declare our faith boldly and with conviction, we are more likely to find kindred spirits. This is how we must comport ourselves if we are to fulfill our Lord's command in the Gospel of John (17:21), Ut unum sint, that all may be one.
We are developing in the United States a huge underclass of unwanted people, many of them the descendants of the exploitation of the South American and Latin American countries by American piratical capitalism. Not all capitalism is piratical, but some of it certainly is. And we have a fantastic gap beginning to exist between rich and poor.
