Listen to this inspiring talk by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen about the importance of adoration.
There’s a business on Main Street in downtown Peoria, across the street from the courthouse, called The Nut House. The inside of the business consists of a tiny storeroom that is lined with glass display cases along three sides. Inside the display cases are numerous trays and jars that contain different types of candy and nuts. On top of the display cases and on shelves attached to the walls are decorative jars that are also filled with candy and nuts. There are at least 200 different items on display that a customer can choose from.
Have you ever heard of Bum Phillips? He was the football coach who built the Houston Oilers into one of the top NFL teams in the late 1970s. Phillips was best known for his larger-than-life, no-nonsense character. He referred to himself as a “coach, cowboy, and Christian,” and customarily dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, a work shirt, and a white Stetson hat.
About 20 years ago, when one of my relatives was going through some tough times, I tried to get him to commit to praying a rosary every day. (For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call him “Jim.”) Over a period of six months, Jim and I met on three separate occasions.
My oldest daughter, Anna (30 years old), has been married for nine years. She and her husband, Josh, have four children, all of whom are under the age of eight. Anna recently sent an email to everyone in our family with a suggestion:
One of the top ten movies on my recommendation list for Catholics is The Incredibles. Produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures in November 2004, The Incredibles won two Academy Awards and was the first entirely animated film to win the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Performance.
During the fall semester of my senior in high school (1974), my friend Dennis told me about a new grocery store that had opened in the Westlake Shopping Center (across the street from Northwoods Mall). The name of the store was Randall’s, and it was the first store in Peoria that had scanners at checkout lanes instead of cash registers, so items didn’t have to be rung up one at a time by hand. At that time, I was 17 years old. I asked Dennis for the name of the store manager, and he told me that his name was Steve.
For some unknown reason, during the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the 10 principal virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As a reminder, the 10 principal virtues are (1) her profound humility, (2) her lively faith, (3) her blind obedience, (4) her continual mental prayer, (5) her mortification in all things, (6) her surpassing purity, (7) her ardent charity, (8) her heroic patience, (9) her angelic sweetness, and (10) her divine wisdom.
When my wife and I returned to Peoria after I graduated from law school (1982), a cloud of fear overshadowed Central Illinois. Peoria was still reeling from the thousands of layoffs that had taken place in the late 1970s. Families were fleeing to other states in search of good-paying jobs.
During the summer of 1989, most evenings I came home from work, ate supper with my family, and then sat in a lawn chair in the front yard of our home to read the newspaper. We lived in a quiet, residential neighborhood in Peoria where there wasn’t much traffic.