Lake County Ohio Weal

Why We Need Graveyards  I have always enjoyed walking in cemeteries. They can be places of serenity where it is possible to escape the noise of everyday life. But when I strolled through Montparnasse Cemetery in 2019, it was not as refuge from the hectic pace of a trip to Paris. My visit was, instead, a kind of pilgrimage to the final resting place of many important writers, including Samuel Beckett, Charles Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the year since my wife died, I had not written a word and was hoping that being in the “presence” of such important literary figures might inspire me to sit down at my desk again. Walking down the narrow lanes of the cemetery, I stumbled upon the grave of Susan Sontag. Had I realized that Sontag was buried there, I certainly would have been looking for her grave, because I knew her work well. I had taught Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others, and had re-read her critique of conceptualizing cancer metaphori...

  Pope Leo, OSA Terence Sweeney is an assistant teaching professor in the honors program and the humanities department at Villanova University Move aside Gregor Mendel and Martin Luther—there’s a new Augustinian on the world stage, Pope Leo XIV. As we all reach for different insights into this new pope, we would do well to consider the religious order he has belonged to since he was undergraduate at Villanova. The Order of St. Augustine does not have a standard founding, or a single founder like St. Dominic or St. Ignatius. Instead, several hermits living in Tuscany were instructed to form a single community by Pope Innocent IV in 1244. This was called the Little Union and was followed by yet another papal call to unity in the Grand Union of 1256. Having two foundings, both featuring a bunch of hermits told to live in community by two different popes, does not make for a tidy narrative. This might be why the Augustinians have long been overshadowed by orders with more famous founde...

  Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation   Dear brothers and sisters, welcome! I thank the President and members of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, and I greet all of you who are taking part in this annual International Conference and General Assembly. The theme of this year’s Conference – “Overcoming Polarizations and Rebuilding Global Governance: The Ethical Foundations” – speaks to us of the deepest purpose of the Church’s social doctrine as a contribution to peace and dialogue in the service of building bridges of universal fraternity. Especially in this Easter season, we realize that the Risen Lord always goes before us, even at times when injustice and death seem to prevail. Let us help one another, as I said on the evening of my election, “to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, joining together as one people, always at peace.” This is not something that happens by chance but is rather an active and continuous interplay of grace and freedom, o...