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eCatholicism.org is a collection of Internet Resources with up-do-date and current information regarding the Church's interaction with the modern world, politics and society.

Besides being a resource for information, eCatholicism.org will also offer our visitors the ability to proclaim the Good News in new ways, to serve as witnesses to the Saving Power of our God and to re-affirm their identity as faith-filled communities to a world which desperately needs to hear the Gospel message - now more than ever before.

THE CHRISTMAS STORY - IN THE BEGINNING What would the Christmas story be with no stable, no manger, no Joseph, no Mary, no Bethlehem, no shepherds, no angels, no star, no wise men and no baby? No angels, swaddling clothes, or sheep enter the scene to deflect attention from the essential point: God, through whom the world was created, the one who gives light to all people, became flesh and lives among us. Could the Christmas story even be told without those very familiar elements?  READ MORE

NEW NY ARCHBISHOP — A CHICAGO PRIEST, MISSIONARY, BRIDGE BUILDER The appointment is widely seen as a signal from Rome that the center of gravity in U.S. Catholic leadership is continuing to move away from media-driven cultural confrontation and toward a model rooted in listening, social engagement and pastoral proximity — a model closely associated with both Pope Francis and his successor. THE NATIVITY ISN’T CUTE OR COZY. IT SHOULD SCANDALIZE US It’s time to revisit the Christmas story. The true cause of our “comfort and joy” is that God is with us in our weakness and suffering, in our smallness and insignificance. In a season that at face value celebrates material wealth and the cozy, rosy side of life, let us hear and tell the Christmas story anew, the one that shocks, challenges, scandalizes and saves.   COURAGEOUS VULNERABILITY - GOD IS WITH US, PLAIN OLD ORDINARY US God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us. And through Mary’s example, God invites us to take the risk of love. BETHLEHEM MOMENTS Discover the Bethlehem moments in your life by taking some time to reflect. In Bethlehem, we discover that the life of God can enter into our hearts and dwell there. Have we made room in our hearts for the gift of Jesus this Christmas? UNTIL CHRISTMAS COMES AGAIN Christmas, the remembrance of the birth of Jesus, is not a remembrance at all. It is an awareness that grows in us from day to day all our lives. Christmas, this consciousness of eternal Life alive among us, is not a feast day, it is a ferial day that never ends. It is a call to make today better than yesterday because on a day just like today, Christ came before us. CHRISTMAS - SHATTERING THE CONTAINERS OF OUR EXPECTATIONS Funny how God invariably shatters the containers of our expectations. We have a notion of how God should act and God ends up acting in a way that shatters all of those expectations and yet fulfills our expectations in a deeper way. That’s certainly true of what happened in Bethlehem at the first Christmas.   THE REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF THE FIRST CHRISTMAS Our culture has downgraded the Christmas stories into sweet little songs and primary-school Nativity plays. But the birth of a baby who will inherit “the throne of his ancestor David” —as the angel says to Mary in Luke 1:32—announces the start of a revolution. “SWEET SINGING IN THE CHOIR” Based on the diversity that God has embedded throughout His creation and the rich beauty that can only emerge from complexity, it is likely that our disparate festivities are just narrow ranges of commemoration that merge before the Father into a mesmerizing complementarity that leaves Him breathless and savoring our joy. That is something worth doing at any time and in any way we can.