On this All Saints’ Day, let us consider what we can look forward to living as saints in heaven one day. But first, how does one get to heaven? At the moment of death, our immortal souls will separate from our mortal bodies and go immediately to our particular judgment. There we will be judged according to our faith and deeds in Christ...

Revelation 22 is the final chapter of the Bible, and verse 20 contains Jesus’s final words in all of Sacred Scripture. And yet, with almost 2,000 years having elapsed since Christ’s Ascension into heaven, the modern reader might reasonably ask what exactly Jesus meant when He said that He is coming “soon.” The Greek word for “soon” used in these verses is tachy, which can also be translated “quickly.” The same adverb is used in Matthew 28:8...

It’s good that The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls) Day is a Sunday this year. It gives us a chance to focus on Church teaching about the four last things: Heaven, hell, death and judgment, at the beginning of November, the month dedicated to prayers for the dead. Here are six takeaways drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

I want to start by telling you a story about going to Mass. More than a decade and a half ago, my wife and I embarked on our honeymoon. Since we both lived and grew up in the UK, we’d both seen enough of Europe that we wanted to go somewhere else for our post-nuptial getaway. For obvious reasons — we were young, early in our careers, and had just thrown all our savings at a wedding reception — we didn’t have a lot of money to play with, but we wanted to make the most of what we had.

Before I was a priest, I worked for a hospice for a number of years. I am no stranger to death. So much of my experience – especially now as a priest – has confirmed my belief that faith and death go hand in hand; that the full meaning of death is beyond our comprehension. I would like to share a recent experience that confirms this. I received a call recently that someone was in the hospital and they didn’t have long left in this world...

There are those, living and dead, who have made a significant contribution to baseball. There are likewise those who have, in their manner, served as shining examples of faith. And then there are some who’ve done both. October begins on the feast of St. Thérèse de Lisieux and ends on All Hallows’ Eve, with several significant feasts in those days between. All of us know that it’s likewise the month when the baseball season reaches its climactic conclusion...

I’m so excited for you to watch this week’s Sunday Reflection that I filmed on a recent pilgrimage to Mexico City while literally climbing up Tepeyac Hill, the place where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to St. Juan Diego in 1531. It doesn’t get much humbler than Juan Diego. He was a peasant, an absolute nobody by the standards of the world. But God chose to work through him to bring about the largest mass conversion to Christianity in history...

People caught in the chaotic highways around Los Angeles have been known to shout at God from time to time — often in the form of angry curses aimed at other drivers. But that was the mysterious setting in which Anthony Hopkins had a quiet epiphany in which God quietly spoke to him, offering the actor — an atheist alcoholic at the time — a choice that changed his life. While most episodes of “Crossroads” focus on religious issues...

Archbishop Alexander Sample has been elected chairman of the US bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty after an unusual tie in the conference vote. The plenary meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops delivered an unexpected moment when the routine election of a committee chair ended in an extraordinary stalemate.

The bishops of the United States elected a new conference president and vice president from among their number Tuesday morning. The selection as president of Oklahoma City’s Archbishop Paul Coakley, erstwhile secretary of the conference, was widely predicted. Following a recent run of vice presidents ineligible to go on to serve as president because of age, the secretary position had become the de facto new poll position from which to run for the top office.