Explaining the Vatican’s lingering ambivalence on “zero tolerance” for sex abuse...
“Zero tolerance” for sexual abuse has become one of those notoriously elastic phrases, such as “change,” “hope” and “progress,” which everyone claims to be for but no one seems to define in exactly the same way. In American Catholic parlance, however, the term “zero tolerance” does have a fairly precise meaning, derived from the US bishops’ 2002 Dallas charter and norms...
The inevitable long, hot summer: Sooner or later, masks will have to come off...
Why this Pentecost calls for a different kind of reopening...
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.” It’s a line we proclaim during the Nicene Creed, a prayer that is still very much a part of Mass whether online or with social distancing measures, in 2020. Don’t we need life, and don’t we need the presence of its Giver more than ever right now? So many of us have experienced an abrupt change in our lives...
This is a news story: Shuttered churches fuel death of Catholic newspapers during pandemic...
When it comes to religious media, there is nothing like the Catholic press. Spanning the doctrinal spectrum, there are 600 Catholic-based news websites and newspapers in the United States and Canada alone. In the past few years, the diversity of the Catholic press has provided a wealth of information and insights to readers and to mainstream journalists. Like secular news outlets, Catholic media also face financial hardships created by the pandemic.
Unraveling the complicated life of Norma McCorvey...
“Her whole life was an attempt to tell her real story. That never really happened. I hope it can posthumously.” So laments Protestant minister Rob Schenck, a onetime pro-life leader with Operation Rescue and one of three pastors who co-officiated the 2017 funeral of Norma McCorvey, along with his former colleague Flip Benham, who baptized McCorvey in a swimming pool in 1995, and Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, who received her into the Catholic Church in 1998.
Hong Kong Catholics are right to fear Beijing’s henchmen...
A guide to celebrating the Sacraments of Initiation outside the Easter Vigil...
Coronavirus on the edge of a grimpen, where there is no secure foothold...
The pandemic has suddenly thrown our affluent and seemingly secure and safe lives into a tailspin. In fact, the security and certainty was always an illusion, and in East Coker T.S. Eliot ponders life’s shifting uncertainty. The line that always catches my imagination is, “On the edge of a grimpen, where there is no secure foothold.” Eliot liked word games, and the very strangeness of the word “grimpen” served his purpose. The word is not in the dictionary. We may not know what a grimpen is, but we suspect it is the endless bog, the slough of despond, the windswept moor with hidden pits of tar, or the jungle swamp ambushed with quicksand.
Vatican orders founder Enzo Bianchi to leave ecumenical Bose community...
“The smallest Catholic church in 49 States” is in West Virginia...
Galileo, the Catholic Church, and the impact on science...
Four hundred years after the trial, the mere mention of the name “Galileo” is often considered a powerful one-word refutation against the Catholic Church. Why? Because, according to the popular telling of the “Galileo Affair,” it was Galileo who: 1) proved heliocentrism, despite a Church that officially declared heliocentrism to be a heresy; 2) was tortured and martyred by the Church, and; 3) discovered that Scripture—and by extension, the Catholic Church—was a fraud.
Pope Gregory the Great in the time of plague...
Bishop Murry of Youngstown, Ohio, submits resignation after his leukemia returns...
Holy water and Super Soakers don’t mix, priests say...
The need for God’s fire and water in our lives...
Knights of Columbus founder Father Michael McGivney to be beatified...
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I have come to cast a fire on the earth — A homily for Pentecost Sunday...
What a wondrous and challenging feast we celebrate at Pentecost! A feast like this challenges us because it puts to the lie a lazy, sleepy, hidden, and tepid Christian life. The Lord Jesus said to the apostles, I have come to cast a fire on the earth. This is a feast about fire, a transformative, refining, purifying fire that the Lord wants to kindle in us. It is a necessary fire, for as the Lord first judged the world by fire...
Pope Francis asks Mary to intercede for end to pandemic during Rosary with world’s shrines...
No Mass and Communion? Let faith trump feelings...
During this period of not being able to attend Mass—a period which is now ending ever so slowly in most of the United States—I’ve reflected frequently on this question: What discernible impact is the absence of public Masses having on me? I presume each moderately serious Catholic has reflected on the same personal question. Here are ten possible answers...
The oldest church in America took its time getting to Marquette University...
100 years ago this month Joan of Arc was declared a saint by Pope Benedict XV, and although she may be remembered as patron of France, part of her elaborate legacy has found a home on the campus of an American Catholic university. In the central mall of Marquette University sits the Saint Joan of Arc Chapel, which the Jesuit institution likes to boast is the “oldest structure in the western hemisphere still being used for its original purpose,” effectively making it the oldest chapel in the United States.
Kendra Clark, a Catholic convert from Mormonism, describes her journey...
‘Racism is not a thing of the past’ – US bishops respond to George Floyd killing...
Why the height of Mount Everest may change soon...
Head back to Mass prepared to unmask your heart and sanitize your soul...
“Unorthodox” and the modern myth of origins...
Unorthodox, a mini-series that debuted on Netflix a few weeks ago, is the story of a young woman who escapes from her oppressive Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and finds freedom with a group of welcoming friends in Berlin. I offer this description with tongue pretty firmly in cheek, because, though it represents a fairly accurate summary of the narrative, it also hints at the oversimplification that makes this admittedly compelling and well-acted drama more than a little problematic.
What role has prayer played in driving down COVID-19 deaths?
The incredible story of the U.S. Army’s earth-shaking, off-road land trains...
The pastoral costs of the lockdown will, I fear, be enormous. But our Lord can bring good out of any evil...
This morning, in an effort to shift my thoughts away from the epidemic and the lockdown, I thought I’d look back a few months, to remember what I was writing before this unhappy subject began to dominate our consciousness. I came across a column I’d written in February, “Want a Liturgical Renewal? Start with Repentance.” Immediately my mind flashed back to an excellent column that I had read just a few minutes earlier...
Till we have faces...
I miss the human face, don’t you? Isn’t it interesting how that is? Did you think you would ever miss the human face? Who would ever have guessed it? What is about the face that is so important? I suppose it’s the mouth and the cheeks and the chin. It really is difficult to communicate with other people who do not have a mouth or cheeks or a chin. What is it exactly? Obviously, it is difficult to communicate with someone who has no mouth or an obstructed mouth.
Working by hand helps us reconnect with our humanity...
We have lost something today, but we can get it back. Our very humanity calls for living and working in our bodies, with natural things, regularly. This means all of us. We have been separated from our own humanity, from our proper homeland, and we are suffering, even if we have never known anything else. I say we can ‘get it back’—not because we ourselves have necessarily had it before, but because it is our birthright. Our own ancestors had it; we need it; and we can still do it, even if differently, and by fits and starts.
Extraordinary evangelization in extraordinary times...
Father McGivney died amid a 19th-century pandemic that may have been caused by a coronavirus...
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