This feast day, I have been thinking about the Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden, Colorado and the beautiful and holy mountain that it sits upon. In the early 1900s, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini saw the mountain, she thought it would make a great place to build a convent for her sisters and a summer camp for the girls in their orphanage. So she purchased a part of the mountain.

St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, tells us “you denied the Holy and Righteous One… and killed the Author of life.” These are harsh word, but isn’t that what we have done here in America, my brothers and sisters? Through the licensing of abortion, the slow drift towards nation-wide euthanasia, the steady erosion of life — haven’t we, in all this, denied the authority of God, the authority of the Author of life?

Friends, for some years now, I have expressed my concern that the #DeathPenalty is both cruel and unnecessary and I have called for its abolition. So, I welcome the changes to The Catechism of the Catholic Church on the #DeathPenalty and I am grateful for @Pontifex's leadership in working for an end to judicial executions worldwide.

Friends, the law is a teacher and so is the way we enforce our laws. So what lessons are we teaching at our nation’s southern border? The pictures are dramatic and they fill you with sadness and anger. #ImmigrationCrisis #ZeroTolerance Immigrant children — some barely old enough to walk, some infants still in their mothers’ arms — being torn away from their undocumented parents as they try to cross the border. More than 2,000 children have been seized by border authorities in the last six weeks alone.