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It’s time to make a big liturgical leap — from adoring Baby Jesus in the manger to contemplating Jesus, now an adult, being baptized by his cousin John in the Jordan River.

Since Christmas, the Church has led us rapidly through the Nativity, the visit of the Magi at Epiphany, and now the Baptism of the Lord. This quick progression can feel like a spiritual whirlwind, even a little confusing, especially for children who tend to associate baptism with babies. But the Church places these feasts together deliberately, inviting us to see them as part of a single revelation.

Taken together, these three feasts of Nativity, Epiphany and Baptism are all about telling us who Jesus is. It makes sense, actually, to show the world that this little baby, whose birth was foretold by the Old Testament prophets, is who the shepherds, the Magi and St. John the Baptist say he is. He is the long-awaited Messiah.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to have been present at Jesus’ baptism? St. Matthew tells us, “After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming upon him. And a voice came from the heavens, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’” (Mt 3:15-17).

Wow. What a scene. The only one who knew for sure that Jesus was the Messiah at this point was St. John the Baptist, so this would have been an earth-shattering moment for those who were present. It’s not every day you hear the voice of God coming from the heavens. And you can bet that word spread pretty quickly, even without Instagram or Facebook. The Jewish people had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries and were keenly aware of the prophecies that were being fulfilled.

This moment of Jesus’ baptism is a culmination of all the prophecies from Advent and the infancy narrative heard at Christmas. First, we are told in Advent to look for the Messiah, to be ready, to repent and stay awake because he is near at hand. Then, with Christmas, he arrives, though, rather shockingly, as a helpless, poor baby born in a dingy manger, but welcomed by choirs of angels and recognized by shepherds and wise men from the East.

When we get to the Baptism, which marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, St. John the Baptist is even reluctant to baptize his man-God cousin because he knows who Jesus is. Matthew says John “tried to prevent him,” saying to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you and yet you are coming to me?”

Why does life feel empty—even when everything seems “fine”? 

Fr. Mike Schmitz and Dr. Arthur Brooks explore why modern life leaves so many people restless, anxious, and disconnected. From neuroscience to faith, they reveal why pleasure isn’t happiness, why technology can’t give us meaning, and how returning to God may be the only way out of the Matrix. 

If you’ve been searching for purpose, this conversation will change the way you see happiness—and your life.

When you get rid of extra stress, lasting inner peace becomes attainable.

When someone asked me, “How are you doing?” a few years ago, I would usually say fine, and give my biggest, fakest smile. The real answer to that question was “stressed out of my mind,” but most of the time, the question “How are you?” is perfunctory and not an actual inquiry — and so we answer politely out of habit. But if you asked me that question today I would answer “fine,” and truly be fine (not insanely stressed).

That said, event though I’ve made progress, I still find myself filling any free moment I have with busyness. Even though I have fewer stressors in my life, I occasionally feel like I should be busier and start creating unnecessary stress to fill the void. 

If you struggle with stress, self-imposed or not, have I got a woman for you. She’s a 19th-century Carmelite named Sister Marie-Aimee of Jesus, and she wrote a little book called The Twelve Degrees of Silence.

Sister’s intent was to help people attain inner silence so that they could know God better. But I have found that if you look at her steps today, you can use them more superficially to help fight day-to-day busyness and stress. When you get rid of extra stress, acquiring a lasting inner peace becomes attainable.

Check out these 6 touch points from Sister Marie-Aimee, and see if you can find any ways to change your routine in response to them.

1. Silence of words

We’re inundated with communication every day. For example, texting. Are all of the texts you send necessary, or could you cut back on some texts and free up that mental space? Could you set a few times during the day that you send messages and then not text in between those times? That might allow you to have some clearer headspace.

2. Silence of movements/actions

Ever noticed a nervous tic you have? For a while I would shake my leg when I was thinking or bored. When someone pointed it out to me, I realized the constant motion was not actually helping me, and worked to change that habit. Try to find some movements or actions that you do in a day that are just fillers, and are actually making you less calm and more busy. 

3. Silence of imagination

Do you spend a lot of time during the day thinking about what the future will look like? That might be what you’re doing tomorrow, or what you’re doing when you get home tonight, or what you’re doing for lunch. Regardless of how far into the future you are looking, it is better to focus on the present moment if you want to foster inner peace. 

Work, family, plans with friends, sports … when do you take time to savor life?One of the problems that constantly comes up in many people’s lives is maintaining balance between work life, family life, and personal time. But in most cases the root of the matter is the inability to prioritize what is really important, especially caring for one’s own life. When something is really important for us, we find the time for it.

We tend to postpone the important things because of what’s urgent so our health and our relationships with others suffer. In fact, it’s the family that usually pays the high price of all the rushing we do. Don’t you think we need to stop from time to time? Could it be that we’ve forgotten the importance of taking breaks in everyday life? Have we forgotten the art of stopping?

We may be doing well in our work and achieving our goals, but on the way we can forget to take care of the life that sustains everything else.

How can we take better care of ourselves and not fall into unbridled busyness? The recommendation, from the ancient philosophers to the experts in occupational medicine, is to learn to take breaks in day-to-day life. It is an old and wise custom to pause in the middle of any activity, and it has great benefits.

Philo of Alexandria (1st century AD) understood rest as an activity without effort, as a creative state of calm. For the Jewish philosopher, only the irrational man is agitated, while the wise man knows how to rest to get in touch with his own creativity.

The art of stopping

The word pause in its Greek origin (anapausis) refers to “repose,” “interruption,” “rest.” In ancient times, the pause was understood as a creative act, as a healing interruption.

Specifically, it is interrupting what one is doing in order to do something totally different. While there are many exercises that can be done to rest psychologically and physically, a true pause must always include the opposite of what we are doing at work.

If we have been sitting in front of a computer, the pause cannot be a video game, but should involve physical activity. If we have been talking a lot, the pause should be silence. If we have been reading a lot, the pause is not to read something else, but to do something different.

The pause for those who work with great physical effort is stillness. For those who are working alone, their pause may require contact with others. And if it is the other way around and you work with many people, the pause will be a time of reparative solitude.

The following editorial appeared in the Jan. 11 issue of The Catholic Register.

The familiar claim that war solves nothing must be balanced off with the acknowledged wisdom that peace is not the mere absence of war. It’s wisdom particularly applicable at the start of 2026 when the prospect of war breaking out somewhere in the world is a far greater, more realistic threat than the achievement of everlasting peace for everyone on Earth.

The U.S. military strike against Venezuela on Jan. 3, while absent an actual declaration of war, showed in the very way it caught global leaders off guard how quickly quasi-peace can flare into unnerving, to say the least, bombing of civilian population centres. At the same time, the precision of the assault debunks the nostrum that violence never achieves anything. (So does one of the avowed intentions of returning democracy to Venezuelans.)

Violence, limited and in the hands of an elite military unit, achieved the goal of bringing a handcuffed tyrant before an American court to face the proverbial arms-length list of charges ranging from drug smuggling to narco-terrorism. It’s a better end by far for strongman Nicolás Maduro than the end hundreds of thousands of his subjects suffered under his oligarchic rule.

Our colleagues at OSV News underscored the point with a story quoting Astrid Liden, a Venezuelan-American communications officer for the Hope Border Institute, which works to apply Catholic social teaching to the U.S.-Mexico border region.

“In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have sought protection in the United States, many passing through the U.S.-Mexico border,” Liden told the news service. “Millions of Venezuelans live abroad due to the situation in Venezuela, and we share their hope in the end of the reign of Maduro, whose rule led to the displacement of so many.”

But Liden also stressed the sobering other side of the “successful” raid on Nicolás Maduro’s presidential palace: hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who remained behind in their country of birth are now at risk from the political, economic and social upheaval that has a high probability of following the U.S. strike.

Civil war, of whatever scope and duration, is not out of the question. Even if it is averted, and we should all pray it will be, the people of Venezuela will be reminded for weeks, months, perhaps years that peace is not the mere absence of war.

It is not, of course, either the place or the competence of a Canadian Catholic newspaper to declaim on the rights and wrongs of the American action under international law or the geopolitical complexities that might ensue. This is not Gaza where the unspeakable evil of Hamas on Oct.

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, many of us are divided into two distinct camps: the keeners – the same people who love September for the new pencils and the potential – and those of us who, like Catherine Doherty (foundress of the Madonna House apostolate), believe that with God every moment is the moment of beginning again. Catherine doesn’t think we need a new year to change anything. Every day is New Year’s Day.

Whichever side you take, our culture has decided to hang a lot of hopes on January.

Leila Marie Lawler, author of The Little Oratory and writer about all things home, wrote a wonderfully liberating little piece on resolving to improve in baby steps. “I’m not a minimalist except in resolutions,” she writes. Her delightful advice leaves us lots of breathing room.

Lawler’s list includes things like leaving your phone far away from where you sleep and buying an alarm clock. Other resolutions are to pray, from the heart, five minutes a day, to keep the Sabbath holy (this one made another important list way back in the Old Testament), and to plan the family’s menu.

Both of the heavy-hitter Teresas (Therese of Lisieux and Teresa of Avila) wrote that the closer we get to God, the simpler we become. In Psalm 131, we read David’s lament, “I have not gone after things too great…” In the spirit of David’s humility, we recognize our smallness and cling to the generosity and mercy of God.

We recognize our smallness and powerlessness in our reactions and in our close relationships. The new year offers an opportunity to surrender our interactions to the realm of the Holy Spirit, so that love and gratitude can become our main motivators in all that we do instead of fear of abandonment or rejection. May the Holy Spirit reorient our hearts in love “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Indeed, resolutions are little acts of repentance, or to put it in more positive language, to set out for home again. If we saw the dawn of each year as an opportunity for a joyous homecoming instead of something self-focused, the necessary changes would feel more like a relief than a burden.

There is one thing necessary for the new year, every year, and that is the awareness of Christ’s presence in our midst.

In the Lorica of St. Patrick, an ancient prayer commonly known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, St. Patrick knows exactly what he has to do: seal all entry points of the enemy by firmly rooting himself in Christ.

This prayer could very well be the January prayer of the Catholic: “I arise today, through God’s strength to pilot me: God’s might to uphold me, God’s wisdom to guide me, God’s eye to look before me, God’s ear to hear me, God’s word to speak for me, God’s hand to guard me, God’s way to lie before me, God’s shield to protect me, God’s host to secure me.”

Scrupulosity is a psychological disorder primarily characterized by pathological guilt or obsession associated with moral or religious issues. If you’ve ever dealt with it—or know someone who has dealt with it—you know how confusing and difficult it can be. 

Today, Tanner helps you identify it, call it what it is, and turn to the Father’s merciful love for you.

You probably don’t outright lie on a regular basis. But, do you exaggerate? Do you give half truths sometimes, or leave things unclear on purpose? Do you hide some facts in order to smooth things over? 

Today, Fr. Mike shows us the very-human reasons we all struggle with these “white lies”, and how to tell the “full” truth more often. 

“Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” —Jesus in Matthew 5:37

When should you turn to a priest, a mental health professional, or even an exorcist? 

Sr. Josephine Garrett offers practical guidance for navigating struggles, whether they’re mental, physical, spiritual, or emotional. She shares simple but powerful steps for strengthening your spiritual life, including monthly confession, joining a Bible study, and finding a spiritual director.