Dear Reader,

Allow me to present to you an unusual issue of The Angelus. Indeed, this one is geared toward Catholic spirituality. It is unusual for the pages of this magazine which we usually dedicate to social, family, and polemic topics, such items which demand urgent attention from most of us. Yet, it is good sometimes to return to the essentials, to refresh ourselves with things both simple and sublime like the beatitudes, the life of Christ, the sacraments, in a word, Church spirituality.

The word “spirituality” may be daunting for many of us. Most of us are aloof to such things, sunk as we are to the neck in the whirlwind of 21st-century cybernetic, immersed in the worldly world, having to fight daily mundane struggles. How much time do we have left to dedicate to the “only necessary thing,” our soul and God? And so, from time to time, like on the occasion of a Lenten meditation or a yearly retreat or a summer pilgrimage, we want to freshen up our mind and deepen our contact with God within, God who is more intimate to us than our own soul.

As you go through the index of this issue, you’ll appreciate the various touches we wished to include in this palette, distributed according to multiple religious spiritualities or the key periods of spiritualities begotten in time of special needs. Perhaps you’ll be apt to discern how a thing both simple and complex is contained in the word “spirituality”: variety in the details and unity in the essential principles.

We hope that this reading will give us all a better grasp of the elements of the spiritual life and show us how much we all are in need of it. But this is only one part of the toil. Now, we’ll need to put the hand to the plow and follow the furrow traced by our predecessors in the Faith. Should we not wish that all Catholics drink from the fountains of Life, which are given us from the treasures of Christ and His Church?

Fr. Jürgen Wegner

Publisher