Hammerhead sharks look like a fish that’s had its face flattened by a cartoon mallet and decided to just roll with it. They’re freaks of nature, haters might say, but these marine marvels are actually masters of adaptation, equipped with bizarre yet brilliant features that make them some of the ocean’s most efficient predators.

Earlier this week I spoke to an OCIA (formerly RCIA) class of 170 or so college students at St. Mary’s Catholic Center at Texas A&M (the campus ministry I used to run). You might be amazed by that number, because it is a large class, but here is the real shocker - that is less than ½ of the students in the OCIA program! The class I spoke to started last spring (plus some other students joined after a summer intensive to catch them up). There is a larger class which met for the first time in a different room and they are at about 250 students, for a total of 420+ or so! The number of students could possibly go even higher.

Why in the world did God command the Jewish people to offer animal sacrifices? Not only do they appear inhumane and gross to us twenty-first-century Americans, but the Bible seems to be inconsistent. After all, Scripture pushes for the fair treatment of humans (“love your enemies”), yet not for animals. They get killed left and right.

People who watch Rome closely know that who a pope promotes and who he punishes is far more important than what he says in statements to the press or even, in some cases, what is released in public documents. Who gets a red hat in the College of Cardinals and who does not? Who is appointed to posts that shape and guide projects (the word synodality is relevant) that could, potentially, change church doctrine?

Pope Leo XIV proclaimed the Italians Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis as saints of the Church on Sunday.

Popes give special attention to those they canonize in Jubilee years. The joint canonization of Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis today marks a highlight of Jubilee 2025, and perhaps a high point of Leo’s pontificate. For the Jubilee 1900, Pope Leo XIII canonized two saints, both with fairly wide popular devotion, Jean-Baptiste de La Salle and Rita of Cascia...

A common Protestant claim is that the Catholic doctrine of purgatory is nowhere to be found in the Bible. But is this true? Since the Bible assures us that nothing unclean shall enter heaven (see Rev 21:27; cf. Heb 12:14), this implies that souls who die in a state of imperfect friendship with God must undergo some kind of final purification prior to their entry into eternal life...

What a difference a “vibe shift” makes. That was one of the thoughts that ran through my head when I heard about the transgender-identifying terrorist who murdered Catholic school children as they were worshiping at a Mass opening their school year in Minneapolis. Of course, that was not the only thing that ran through my mind. Many thoughts did. The same thoughts that, I’m sure, so many others had.

At the start of an Aug. 23 Catholic wedding in St. Paul, Minnesota, all eyes turned to the back of the church for that iconic moment: the bride’s procession down the aisle with her father, before he hands her off to her husband-to-be. Except when the back doors of St. Mary’s Church opened for the big reveal, Liz Holman wasn’t standing with her dad...

Suffocation awaited a young man with Down syndrome when the eroded surface of a toxic sewage tank crumbled beneath his feet. Joseph Vander Woude would have died alone in the cramped tank surrounded by toxic fumes, but his father jumped in, pushing him toward the surface with his last breath. Even as his lungs filled with toxic gases, Tom called out to the farmhand who was trying to pull Joseph out. “You pull, I’ll push,” he said.