Patricia Snow

On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in 2021, after ­churches had reopened but while many pandemic restrictions remained in place, three priests in my parish celebrated a traditional rite called the Blessing of Water on the Vigil of Epiphany. The rite is similar to rituals in the churches of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Now it was Lent, and we were just forty days from Easter. Heavy rains and rising temperatures washed the snow away, and on Ash Wednesday, when I drove to the church, the sky was crowded with clouds seemingly blowing on different winds—heavy cumulus clouds, and behind and between them lighter . . . . Continue Reading »

It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the habit of going to daily Mass. Every day at noon when the bells of St. Mary’s were ringing out the Angelus over New Haven, I drove into . . . . Continue Reading »

“I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry. . . I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place . . . . Continue Reading »

I have always been somewhat bemused by the perennial popularity of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth—century novel about four New England sisters coming of age. At least once a decade a new film or television adaptation appears, and the list of successful women writers who . . . . Continue Reading »

A year ago, with my two small granddaughters in tow, I visited a friend in an assisted living facility. Before her stroke, Terri was a daily communicant in my Catholic parish. Now she watches Mass on television. As she listed for my granddaughters the different programs she enjoys—Masses on . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1891, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the novelist ­Nathaniel Hawthorne, was received into the Catholic Church. She was forty years old. Within a few years of her conversion she conceived a heroic ministry to destitute cancer patients at a time when cancer was believed to be contagious. She . . . . Continue Reading »

Then, for three years, I traveled wherever Grace traveled. ­Wherever she went, I went, and after she prayed for my husband in Tarrytown, he wanted to go with me, for reasons I assumed were the same as mine. For three years her ministry was our church, and Ross came, too, and read some during the . . . . Continue Reading »

On a hazy afternoon in late May 1986, I wait, as I wait every weekday afternoon in a parking lot in Branford, Connecticut, for my son to be dismissed from school. While I wait, I listen to Ceci, another mother new to the school, whose son is in my son’s class. She is telling me about her car. From . . . . Continue Reading »

Six months after he was elected to the Chair of Peter, Pope Francis made one of the most provocative statements of his five-year pontificate. Asked by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro what the church (small c) most needs at this point in her history, he replied that he sees the church as a field . . . . Continue Reading »