Father Joseph Guo Fude, SVD, died on Dec. 30, 2024, two months from what would have been his 105th birthday. He was one of the few remaining Catholic priests in China who had been ordained prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
“Father Guo is a symbol of the courageous faith and extraordinary suffering of China’s Catholics,” Benedict Rogers, human rights activist and author of “The China Nexus: Thirty Years in and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny,” told CNA.
Rogers noted that although the priest had “spent a quarter of a century in prison,” he continued serving and ministering to his people through his 90s. “He treated prison not as the harsh injustice that it was but as an opportunity to grow in faith, spirituality, and prayer.”
According to AsiaNews, which reported the Chinese cleric’s passing, Guo spent a total of 25 years in prison during his lifetime.
3. Catholic parishes offer shelter, relief to evacuated families near LA fires
modern “feminism” capitulated to a male-normativity concerning sex, parenting, and work that thereby undermined the early feminist vision of a society that was truly hospitable to women in the fullness of their dignity. Indeed, society has yet to experience a nation of strong, liberally educated women who enjoy the full panoply of civil and political rights, properly understood. No wonder young women are so afraid of pregnancy and the prospect of bearing (and raising) children today. To find their place in the hyper-sexualized, woman-degrading culture into which they have been born—reflected most egregiously in the porn-saturated internet—they learn early and often how to escape from the beautiful gift of female fertility and its potential for the extraordinary experience of motherhood.
But early feminism did more than praise the gift of motherhood as women’s distinctive superpower. It also called men to their responsibilities as fathers, not only for the good of women and children, but also for the good of men themselves. As Sarah Fish of Rochester noted in a letter to the 1852 women’s convention: “When we shall have the bright sunlight of truth beaming in our pathway, we shall hear no more about its being exclusively the mother’s business to train her children—thus lulling to rest the mental and spiritual energies of the father—but there will be a mutual responsibility.”
- Mary Eberstadt: The Boys in the Bandwidth
There is something unique called male self-respect. It’s grounded in the belief that rules exist and retain their authority, from baseball to church to war, no matter how many times they’re broken. Forgetting that fact of nature renders progressivism and its fellow-travelers incapable of understanding a major chunk of the electorate. The real mystery in the political sex imbalance isn’t about boys and men, but girls and women. It’s why so many obediently keep trotting in the same lanes marked out for them since the 1960s, pelted with the same messages that have been making life miserable for decades now—men are bad; the future is feminine; career first, egg-freezing next; the best ending after falling for someone and making a baby together is to get rid of it.
For generations, a preposterous creation story has been passed around and imbibed, according to which the differences between men and women amount to minor anatomical variations. If that were true, the gender gap wouldn’t exist in the first place. Politics didn’t create this divide. But in the political quarterbacking to come, its real origins demand a closer, more empathetic look than they’ve yet gotten anywhere.
working with the homeless population is difficult. You’re going to suffer from burnout if you’re not giving of yourself in a spirit of love. And people can tell when someone genuinely cares or when they don’t. When you encounter genuine love as a person who’s homeless, it makes you want to better yourself.
12. OSV News: What Michael Scott can teach us about New Year’s resolutions
Michael’s belief that his problems were solved simply by “declaring bankruptcy” is not unlike our tendency to declare a New Year’s resolution without considering the practices and habits that put us in an undesirable state in the first place. We think we can stop some detrimental behavior — or begin some salutary one — simply by resolving to do so. Like Michael, we make a grand declaration but do not make any intentional change in the practices and habits that are not consistent with the change we seek. We think we can stop making bad choices without becoming the type of person that makes fewer bad choices.
13. The Pillar: Camino sets another new record for pilgrims in 2024
Nearly half a million pilgrims visited Santiago de Compostela in 2024, marking a new record for the popular pilgrimage site in northwestern Spain.
In a time when Bible sales are seeing a sudden spike amid research that suggests people are unsubscribing from religiosity at large, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that “The Rosary in a Year (with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR)” climbed to #1 on Apple Podcasts to start off the new year — holding that spot for three consecutive days before falling to a noteworthy #2 on January 4.
Its humble host is the director of communications and the director of Priestly Studies of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (CFR), whose primary mission is the “wholehearted embracing of Jesus Christ and their Holy Father, St. Francis of Assisi.