Paul was addressing a community experiencing conflicts and differing loyalties. Every community of faith—including yours—has such divisions.

In Catholic churches, most of the adults in the pews have, at one time or another, chosen a Confirmation name. Do they ever think of themselves in regard to that name?

IT MAY SEEM a faint expression if we compare the Feast of Pentecost to an old country song made popular by Olivia Newton-John. But what gives country music its immense and enthusiastic audience is its capacity to speak plain truths in plain ways.

The Spirit of God goes out to renew the face of the earth, the psalm says. That renewing Spirit is present in the surprising connection between the desperate region of Sudan’s Western Darfur and a place called Ginghamsburg Church in the Ohio town of Tipp City.

MARTIN MARTY, renowned church historian, was giving a talk recently on Martin Luther to a packed house filled with friends, colleagues, and students of theology. Five minutes into the lecture a man in the front row called out a question.

AS A SEMINARIAN, I spent four years helping out in a small parish that was not blessed with more than a handful of Sunday Mass lectors. Every year it seemed that the same lector was scheduled to read on Pentecost.

Today’s readings tell us that the Holy Spirit in us:

On this great feast of Pentecost we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray to be filled with that Spirit.

When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled. The Greek word Pentecost means “fiftieth” and refers to the Jewish Festival of Weeks, a harvest feast celebrated for 50 days, when first fruits were offered to God.

Now what the soul is to the human body, the Holy Spirit is in the Body of Christ, which is the church. The Holy Spirit does in the whole church what the soul does in all the members of a single body.