According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), “The matrimonial covenant … is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”    It is important that engaged couples have a frank discussion about children before getting married. For those graced by God to be physically able to have children, the question is not whether to have them, but rather when and how many.

When you’re in your 20s and 30s, you often feel invincible – like there’s so much time to make mistakes because you’ll fix them tomorrow. It’s easy to boast that this is the time to do whatever you want. But then something happens. Maybe you lose your job or your longtime friend stops returning your texts.

As a second grader at St. Ann School in Metairie, my daughter Annelise had really been looking forward to her first Communion. She and her classmates had been preparing all school year for their special day.

Underscoring the importance of mercy for his pontificate, Pope Francis convened 600 priests from all over the globe – priests he had commissioned as “Missionaries of Mercy” in 2015 – for a second time in Rome April 8-11.

As Father Kurt Young indicated in a worthy reflection last year on the feast of All Souls, we must be careful about eulogizing the recently deceased, such as during funeral services, lest we neglect to pray for them among the poor souls in purgatory.

Imagine a fictitious employer, Sgt. Sourpants, who opposes giving his employees a holiday every year on Memorial Day! After all, his company loses opportunities, and potential profits are squandered!  He sees no reason to honor the dead if they’re already dead – much less to take the living away from their job-focused lives.

Seniors from the northshore gathered Feb. 26 at Our Lady of the Lake School in Mandeville for a day of retreat and formation. Students from the St. Paul’s School, St. Scholastica Academy, Pope John Paul II High School and Archbishop Hannan High were invited. We all had no clue what the day would entail. I was really looking forward to talking to students from other schools and to see how their senior year was going as they prepared to take the next step in their lives.

It has been very “cold” start to the new year at Pope John Paul (PJP) II High School in Slidell, but our spirit and hearts remain “warm.” In just a matter of weeks, our Jaguar family committed to a new theme: “Helping Hands, Warm Hearts.”  As our school’s namesake once said, “Remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm and look forward to the future with confidence.”

Over Christmas break, a ragtag group of 11 young men, two youth ministers and a priest traveled to Mexico for a 10-day adventure of a lifetime. This was a joint trip through my home parish, Our Lady of the Lake in Mandeville, and Christ the King Parish at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

If a bishop issues a statement that nobody hears, does he make a sound? It’s not a joke. A woman wrote recently asking why the U.S. bishops had never said anything about the racist demonstrations and subsequent violence in Charlottesville this past summer.

Today, people find themselves so busy that no one has time to do much of anything else. Society has placed an unhealthy amount of strain on all individuals, leaving no time to step back and examine their faith lives and relationships with God. The distractions that exist today are endless.

What are you looking to accomplish with your life? For you, what is the bottom line of your existence? The Catholic perspective on this question is that the supreme purpose of every human being is to save his or her soul. We do this by accepting Jesus as Lord, and by helping others to save their souls.