Patricia Snow

In the fall of 1970, a year after Yale welcomed its first female freshmen and six months after it descended into the vortex of a Black Panther trial and a university-wide strike, Gloria Steinem came to the college to speak. She wasn’t yet a household name—the launch of Ms. magazine . . . . Continue Reading »

The Catholic way is to include, and then sift: wise words from a wise priest that I remembered a few years back when I was reading, in this journal, an article withering in its condemnation of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the British court decision that opened the way . . . . Continue Reading »

On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany in 2021, after ­churches had reopened but while many pandemic restrictions remained in place, three priests in my parish celebrated a traditional rite called the Blessing of Water on the Vigil of Epiphany. The rite is similar to rituals in the churches of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Now it was Lent, and we were just forty days from Easter. Heavy rains and rising temperatures washed the snow away, and on Ash Wednesday, when I drove to the church, the sky was crowded with clouds seemingly blowing on different winds—heavy cumulus clouds, and behind and between them lighter . . . . Continue Reading »

It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the habit of going to daily Mass. Every day at noon when the bells of St. Mary’s were ringing out the Angelus over New Haven, I drove into . . . . Continue Reading »

“I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry. . . I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place . . . . Continue Reading »

I have always been somewhat bemused by the perennial popularity of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s nineteenth—century novel about four New England sisters coming of age. At least once a decade a new film or television adaptation appears, and the list of successful women writers who . . . . Continue Reading »

A year ago, with my two small granddaughters in tow, I visited a friend in an assisted living facility. Before her stroke, Terri was a daily communicant in my Catholic parish. Now she watches Mass on television. As she listed for my granddaughters the different programs she enjoys—Masses on . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1891, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, daughter of the novelist ­Nathaniel Hawthorne, was received into the Catholic Church. She was forty years old. Within a few years of her conversion she conceived a heroic ministry to destitute cancer patients at a time when cancer was believed to be contagious. She . . . . Continue Reading »

Then, for three years, I traveled wherever Grace traveled. ­Wherever she went, I went, and after she prayed for my husband in Tarrytown, he wanted to go with me, for reasons I assumed were the same as mine. For three years her ministry was our church, and Ross came, too, and read some during the . . . . Continue Reading »