This autumn brings a trifecta of anniversaries for those of us devoted to St. John Henry Newman.

On Sept. 5, 1920, Laura Cardoso left the family home in which she had been born to marry Salustiano Roque de Freitas. Nearly 100 years later, I visited that home, now deserted, in her village in Goa, India.

Our calendar of liturgical seasons is rather bare compared to some of our sister Catholic Churches. That is never more evident than in our long season of “Ordinary Time,” an uninspired translation of a banal original (in Latin, “Sundays of the Year”).

Anniversaries remind us to learn the lessons of history and, for a Christian disciple, to remember the workings of Providence.

The death of Fr. Jonathan Robinson of the Toronto Oratory is a sadness both for those who knew him and those many more who admired him from afar. 

Is the closure of churches and the suspension of the public celebration of Holy Mass a religious liberty issue?

Fr. Alphonse de Valk, a stalwart of the pro-life movement, touched many lives in different spheres, especially in education, the particular charism of the Basilian Fathers. I will remember him as a fellow priest journalist.

What are priests to do in a pandemic? Much fewer things than they would ordinarily do. But the one thing they must do is to keep doing the one thing which only they can do. They cannot abandon the sacraments.

Temptations indulged, temptations resisted. On the first Sunday of Lent we heard about the devil’s tempting of Adam and Eve in the garden, to catastrophic effect, and the devil’s tempting of the Lord Jesus in the desert, to salvific effect.

We celebrate this week — Feb. 8 — the feast day of one of the most remarkable saints of recent times, the slave girl who became a beloved religious mother. St. Josephine Bakhita was born 150 years ago (the date is uncertain, perhaps 1869 or 1870) but is a saint for today’s world of Islamist persecution and human trafficking.