Hawaii Catholic Herald

Newspaper of the Diocese of Honolulu

Mary Adamski: Ceasefire Sunday

by

“This is a weapon free zone.” That was the sign on entry door of the assisted living apartments we visited recently. It echoed the instructions on the doors of restaurants, supermarkets and malls: “No handguns or other weapons permitted” or “All weapons prohibited on these premises.” Our friends and family in Wisconsin don’t even blink […]

Manaolana | Lisa Gomes: What is necessary for a Christian marriage?

by

YOUCAT*: A sacramental marriage has three necessary elements: (a) free consent, (b) the affirmation of a lifelong, exclusive union, and (c) openness to children. The most profound thing about a Christian marriage, however, is the couple’s knowledge: “We are a living image of the love between Christ and the Church.” [1644-1654, 1664] I was recently […]

Second in a series :History and evolution of the sacraments of initiation

by

People are naturally creatures of habit. They sit in the same place each week at Mass. They eat the same food every Thanksgiving. Annually they look forward to Advent leading to Christmas and Lent culminating in Easter. The current practice in the Diocese of Honolulu is to confirm adolescents who were baptized as infants several […]

Kathleen T. Choi: All fired up

by

Sunday we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. We’ll remember the day the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, looking like flames above their heads. But how often do we think about this third person of the Trinity, much less call upon him? He’s been part of us since baptism, yet the Holy Spirit remains the […]

Manaolana | Karen Osborne: Providing hope where none seems to exist

by

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope, lately. I live in Baltimore and for the past few weeks, we’ve been in the news for peaceful and violent reasons. We’ve seen the entire spectrum of protest, from burning police cars to calm speeches in front of City Hall following the death of Freddie Gray, a Baltimore […]

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk | Making sense of bioethics: What is VSED and why should it matter to us?

by

More than 20 years ago, Dr. David Eddy, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, described how his mother, though not suffering from a terminal illness, chose to end her life through VSED (voluntarily stopping eating and drinking). She was “very independent, very self-sufficient, and very content.” When she began to be afflicted […]

Father Kenneth Doyle | Question Corner: I’m divorced. Can I be a Catholic?

by

Q: I am a 68-year-old woman and am seriously considering converting to Catholicism. But I have been married more than once, have now been divorced for 11 years and, prior to the divorce, was separated for 10 years. I was exposed to Catholicism at an early age (when the service was in Latin), and I […]