Anna Caruso

                 If you were asked to sum up your life to this moment in one brief statement of twenty-five words or less, how would you do it?  What would you say?                 Think about that for a moment.  You have been living now for fifteen years, fifty years, or however long it’s been.  Those years have contained a combination of good and bad, success and failure, fulfillment and disappointment.  Now you want to summarize them in one brief statement.  How would you go about doing that?                 Admittedly, it would not be easy […]

You and I are living in a forward-looking time.  Adventure and progress are the themes of the day.  Individuals and groups are breaking out of old forms and moving ahead into what they hope will be a bright new day. Though we are sometimes frightened by this rapid change, we dare not sit in total condemnation of it.  A lot of things needed to be changed for a long time.  But in days such as these, we should also recognize that there is a danger of throwing overboard some valuable cargo that ought to be kept.  So, in the midst […]

Many thousands of people, caught in the grasp of some personal tragedy, have said, or least thought: “If God will do so, He can cure me.”  When trouble comes and  human solutions fail, most of us think of God.  And our first reaction is the same as that of many people – if God were so inclined, He could solve this problem and set things right. But we are well aware that most personal tragedies do not turn out with a happy    ending.  I have known, and so have others, that many people prayed for a deliverance that never came.  […]

Christians of practically all the major denominations accept the Nicene Creed as a valid profession of their faith.  Those who recite this creed in their Sunday worship service, as we Catholics do, will easily remember that in it we profess our faith in “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”  Not only the Church itself, but also its unity, its holiness, its catholicity, and its apostolicity are the  objects of our faith. In other words, we believe that the church is not a merely human organization, and therefore subject to inevitable decay and dissolution, like the great empires of world history; […]

There is a well-known proverb which says, “It’s not the gift but the thought that counts.”  And the truth of that saying is easy to document and difficult to dispute.  Look at your own experience.  I dare say the most cherished gifts you have received have not necessarily been the most expensive. One man told a typical story about an old pocket watch which he kept in a glass case on his desk.  The watch had no practical usefulness.  It had long since stopped keeping time, and it had almost no monetary value. But the man also indicated that it […]