News - June 2023 RSS Feed

To welcome people and to make them feel as if they belong, “we need to get into the fielding position,” said John Cooper, pastoral associate and business manager at St. Anthony Parish-Davenport, as he crouched into position to demonstrate.

Candy Boucher’s heart ached when she read an anonymous prayer intention this past spring in which a youth described feeling alone and longing for others to know “who I really am.”

Catholics carrying banners, the Book of the Gospels and an icon of the most Holy Trinity led a procession into the Rogalski Center of St. Ambrose University for the Diocese of Davenport’s Synodal Summit on June 17.

Bishop Thomas Zinkula wondered why Pope Francis chose the feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary for a moment of prayer in support of the upcoming Synod of Bishops in Rome in October. “Probably because the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth had synodal dimensions,” he said in a homily during a diocesan Mass on the feast day (May 31) at St. Paul the Apostle Church.

In my last column I included several images of the Church. In particular, I honed in on an image of the Church emphasized at Vatican II: the people of God. This image suggests that the Church’s identity is communal. In this column I want to highlight another image, that of the tent.

A single Catholic in his 20s in our diocese whose frustration with his job has its roots in loneliness, reached out on social media asking for help. “I need community,” he later told his loved ones. Loneliness is part of the human condition but its pervasiveness in today’s culture compelled the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy to issue an advisory last month. “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community” lays out the crisis and remedies...