Do you remember last week's Gospel or the one before? Have you read this week's Gospel before coming to Mass? When was the last time you opened your Bible and meditated on a Psalm, Proverb, or one of Jesus' parables? In a more and more secular world, a key question for us Christians is: how can we strengthen our personal relationship with God? How can we love GOD? For Jesus Christ, the first and greatest commandment is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:36-37). How can we...

About 20 years ago, I was working in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Region of the World Bank. We were helping some former communist countries associated with the Soviet Union to join the European Union by making recommendations on new economic policies. This gave me the opportunity to visit Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. On my first visit to Bulgaria, the Government officials invited us to a working dinner in a Russian restaurant. It was very dark. Practically no lights. Only a few candles on each table. The food was good. The discussion was intense...

At every Mass we pray as a community together with all the Saints in Heaven, who are an integral part of the Church. Every Sunday Mass, we can remember two special Saints whose first-class relics are sealed within our new altar dedicated by Cardinal Wilton Gregory last January: Saint John Bosco and Saint Maria Mazzarello, both Italians who lived in the 19th century and are both closely related to the devotion to Our Lady Help of Christians. Every daily Mass in our Chapel, we can remember two other Saints, two early martyrs (second and third centuries) whose bones -first-class relics - are sealed within the altar of our Chapel:...

"SEEK WHAT IS ABOVE, WHERE CHRIST IS SEATED AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD. THINK OF WHAT IS ABOVE, NOT OF WHAT IS ON EARTH" says St Paul in his letter to the Colossians (beginning of Chapter 3). This is a powerful message given 2,000 years ago. How does it apply to our current world in 2022? When I was a child, my brother and I loved to spend time watching the thousands of stars in the sky. We were also looking for the sudden apparition of "etoiles filantes " or "shooting stars" in English. On a special night, we even saw...