A parish festival is a great celebration and a great fundraiser, and St. John in St. Paul had plenty of reasons for both. Dedicated on Frances Street (known today as East Fifth Street) in St. Paul in 1886, the Irish Catholic parish quickly became known for its parish festivals, which happened multiple times each year.

St. Thomas the Apostle appears as a quaint country church along County Road 10 at a crossroads with County Road 116 in Corcoran, about 25 miles west of Minneapolis in Hennepin County.

They say that home is where the heart is. If that's true, then my current home is the Catholic Church with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, with the aim of my ultimate home being heaven. The short answer in response to the question of "Why am I Catholic?" can be summed up in three words: faith, hope and love. Let me elaborate.

Corey Manning was preparing for the priesthood when he felt a call to leave seminary and to be open to marriage. At first, the call was daunting.

 The sun shines brightly through the stained-glass windows of St. Mary’s Chapel on Summit Avenue in St. Paul as seminarians stream in for daily Mass at The St. Paul Seminary.

This column is part of a series on holy orders and the first on the priesthood. It follows eight columns by Father Van Sloun on the ordination and ministry of deacons in the Church.

In the opening story of this collection — which lends its title to the whole — the reader is introduced to Bub, a young boy reluctantly dragged off by his father to “help” his elderly grandmother.

The ministry involved with implementing Archbishop Bernard Hebda’s 2022 pastoral letter “You Will Be My Witnesses, Gathered and Sent From the Upper Room” does not aspire to be a quick fix for evangelization.

Deacons Francis “Frankie” Floeder and Philip Conklin are counting down the days until their priestly ordination on May 25, when they will receive the sacrament of holy orders with 11 other men at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul.

Father Mark Pavlak is about to go fishing — fishing for men, that is, as he takes up the role of vocations director for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis this summer.