What is the hardest thing to understand about this faith we try to follow? You might say that maybe it’s the Trinity, after all, that is sometimes described as a mystery. Sometimes, the more it’s explained to you, the worse it gets, so I suspect that would be a typically Catholic answer to this question. But I think maybe the thing that most of us struggle with the most to believe, maybe without realizing it, is what we hear in that first reading from the book of Wisdom. It’s that God loves everything God has created. That means every single individual thing, including you as an individual, and not only…

It’s the campaign season, and that means there are some time-honored rituals that are being re-enacted every day. One of them is the supposedly informal campaign meal, where the candidate, accompanied by plenty of cameras, eats and chats at a diner, or the food tent at a state fair, or even an ordinary home. It’s meant to show that the candidate is a regular person, like us, even though sometimes all this backfires just a little, like the candidate a few years ago whose staff told him that in Philadelphia he had better be seen eating a cheesesteak, even though in the pictures it was clear he had never seen…

I don’t mean to offend anyone, I’m just reporting the research. But it appears that they have proven this scientifically. They asked ordinary people just to take a look at a series of people who walked into a room and then left again, saying nothing, all dressed pretty much the same, and just looking at the people who came in, these ordinary people were asked to estimate the annual income of the people they had just seen. And I guess you could have predicted this, the short people were estimated to earn on average $30,000 less per year than the people who were taller. And not only has this turned…