12/19/99 Jesus’ Family Tree: counting the ancestors and the ancestors who count
Family genealogy has become a small industry. Americans who used to be content to identify with the future and forget the past are now searching for “roots”.

12/12/99 The Universal Call to Holiness: Jubilee and Eucharist
At the beginning of the U.S. bishops’ annual meeting two weeks ago, Cardinal Hickey of Washington, D.C., dedicated a monumental marble frieze on the back wall of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

12/05/99 Christ Will Come Again: longing for a change
Advent is to prepare us for Christmas, when we see clearly that God has become man, that the eternal Wisdom of God assumes human nature and takes human flesh of the Virgin Mary, when Christian humanism is born in the mystery of the Incarnation.

11/28/99 A House of God for the Household of the Faith
At a moment in the Church’s history when ecumenism has become clearly intrinsic to the Church’s sense of her mission in the world, the decrees of the Council of Trent (1537-1542) are being studied with new insight.

11/07/99 Civic Responsibility for a New Millennium
A year from now, citizens of the United States will elect a president, the House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate, as we do every four years. The primary campaigns in the political parties have been in the news for many months

10/31/99 Reformation Sunday: l999
The anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing his ninety five theses to a church door in Wittenberg in 1517 is celebrated each year on the Sunday nearest to October 31. For centuries, Lutheran and other Protestant congregations on Reformation Sunday heard a sermon about the errors of the Church of Rome and occasionally, I’m told, about the Pope as anti-Christ.

10/24/99 The New Evangelization and World Mission Sunday
This Sunday, all the dioceses of the world will celebrate World Mission Sunday. This annual celebration tries to deepen Catholics’ understanding of the Church’s mission and gives an occasion for Catholics to pray for missionaries and to help support them financially. I hope all give generously to the world Mission collection on October 24.

10/17/99 The Great Jubilee and the New Evangelization
The preparations for the celebration of the Year 2000 outlined in the last two columns should help to make us an evangelizing people.

10/10/99 Sanctifying space and time: The Great Jubilee, (part 2)
In exploring, last week, how the creation narratives in the book of Genesis show God making time and space holy, we come to understand how the celebration of Great Jubilee 2000 calls us to enter in a new way into our time and our space.

10/03/99 The Great Jubilee: sanctifying space and time, (part 1)
A time of Jubilee is a time when God sets us free of sin and of other limitations as well. Space and time limit our activity; but they are as subject to God as are we. God is the Lord of history, and the call to celebrate a Jubilee is a call to enter again into God’s space and time and to be set free by him. Jubilees send us on pilgrimage, because God makes space and places in it holy.

09/26/99 Catechetical Sunday l999: God our Father, God of Love
Last Sunday, September l9, the universal Church marked the 64th celebration of Catechetical Sunday. In 1935, the Holy See began this annual event, “in order that the minds of the Christian people may be directed to religious instruction.” The decree which called for Catechetical Sunday also called it a “Feast of Christian Doctrine”, and asked that each parish celebrate it “with as much solemnity as possible.

09/12/99 Jean-Baptiste DuSable and the future of metropolitan Chicago
Learning Chicago history fifty years ago, I heard of the Potawatomi Indians, who inhabited what is now Cook and Lake counties for centuries; but they were considered, unfairly, mostly in the light of an event we called the Fort Dearborn Massacre.

09/05/99 The Baptists are coming, the Baptists are coming...
A few weeks ago, I met with a large number of Filipino Catholics from many different parishes in the Archdiocese in order to talk about how the pastoral mission of the Church here can better meet the special needs of this Catholic people. Sometimes Catholics from Filipino families are overlooked in the Archdiocese because they are not congregated in particular parishes but live out their faith in many parts of the city.

07/11/99 Welcoming and Praying, in season and out of season
In the fourth and fifth century, theologians in Constantinople complained that they couldn’t get their hair cut without hearing an argument about the Blessed Trinity from the barber and the people in the shop. Trinitarian theology was at the center of people’s lives because God was at the center of their lives, and their understanding of God affected everything else they did or stood for.

06/13/99 Chicago Priests and their Archbishop in Convocation
The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus this year fell on June 11, the last day of the priests’ convocation. The feast of the Sacred Heart has been celebrated for the last five years as the “World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests.”

05/30/99 The Church in America: Chicago and Mexico City
As the Church and the world enter a new millennium, the mission of the Church has to change to accommodate new challenges. “Globalization” is a term much tossed about.

05/16/99 Mothers’ Day in the Mother Land
On May 6, many Americans celebrated the 48th National Day of Prayer. I was in Washington, D.C., to begin the day of prayer in the Caucus Room of the Cannon House of Representatives office building.

05/09/99 Ministry to homosexuals; chastity and charity;
chastity and charityCatholics and other Christians turn to Mary with many requests and in all circumstances, but one reason to pray to Mary is to ask her to protect our chastity. Chastity, as a Christian virtue, is that form of self-control in sexual matters that permits us to live constantly and joyfully with God.

05/02/99 Staying spiritually connected: vocations versus violence
Last week in the midst of an ongoing war in Yugoslavia in which Albanian Kosovars are daily made refugees by the army of their own country and Yugoslavian military targets are daily bombed by the NATO forces, 14 high school students and a teacher were killed or committed suicide in Littleton, Colo. Faced with a tragedy which seems even more senseless than usual, the media and many others raise a question about God’s goodness: “How could this happen, if God is good?”

4/04/99 This Good Friday, praying for the peace of Jerusalem...
Among the prayers which accompany the Good Friday liturgy are those from the psalms which invite us to pray, especially on the anniversary of the Lord’s crucifixion, for the peace of that city which is a symbol for the peace of God’s kingdom, the Jerusalem on high. Praying for the peace of Jerusalem is also in the prayers of the Jewish community at Passover.

03/28/99 ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died...’
The fifth week in the Church’s Lenten journey is spent with Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha and Mary. All were Jesus’ dear friends. Lazarus died and Martha, in her grief and from her faith, complained that Jesus had not saved him (John 11: 21-22). Jesus, however, used even death as a sign to show who he is and he raised Lazarus from the dead. Finally, Jesus used his own death to defeat death for all of us.

03/21/99 The Man Born Blind: growing in faith and holiness
The fourth week of Lent brings into our journey a man whom Jesus cures of his blindness (John 9: 1-41). Never to have seen the faces of his parents or friends, the light of the sun, the objects surrounding him, the man born blind is pictured for us as someone seeking to see. “Lord, that I may see,” is his call. He asks Jesus to cure him, and he gains both sight in his eyes and insight into his healer.

03/14/99 The Woman at the Well and Women in the Church
The third week of Lent is lived in company with the Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at Jacob’s well (John 4:5-42). She came looking for ordinary water and Jesus led her to the source of living water, which is his gift of the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine calls the Samaritan woman “a symbol of the Church not yet made righteous but about to be made righteous.”

03/07/99 Listening to Christ in San Antonio, in Chicago and in our hearts
Last Sunday I was in San Antonio, Texas, celebrating Mass in that city’s historic San Fernando Cathedral.

02/28/99 Lenten reflections on a pilgrimage: Conversion is a trip
The pilgrimage of love to Constantinople and Rome that ended last week was many things: an occasion for some Orthodox and Catholics from Chicago to come to know and appreciate one another more deeply, a journey of discovery of sites and events that united us for a thousand years, a moment in a hopeful but often difficult dialogue between two sister Churches.

02/14/99 Pilgrimage of Love: Ministry of the Bishop and his Life with God
When this piece is published in The New World, I will be in Turkey with Metropolitan Iakovos, the Presiding Hierarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Chicago. When the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, visited Chicago a year and a half ago, he invited Bishop Iakovos and me to visit him in Istanbul, the modern name for the city founded in 330 A.D. by the Emperor Constantine after he gave freedom and imperial recognition to the Christian Church.

01/31/99 A Continent of Hope becomes a Continent of Life
Last week, in Mexico City, Peter came to where Mary once stood, and he brought all of us around the altar of her Son, our Lord. In his homily during Mass at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Jan. 23, Pope John Paul II spoke of America as a continent of hope, a designation Latin Americans have often used to describe their lands. He then called for the continent of hope to become a continent of life. There are signs that this can happen.

01/24/99 Full Communion: the week of prayer for Christian unity
Each year at the Easter Vigil, parishes have become used to receiving into the Catholic Church those who have already been baptized with water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We call this reception a “coming into full communion”, which means that those who were already one with us through baptism are now becoming fully one with us so that they can receive all the gifts that Christ wants his people to enjoy.

01/17/99 Human Rights and the 'Moral Structure of Freedom'
At the beginning of this last year of the second Christian millennium, the Bishop of Rome has written a New Year’s message to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948.