The Three Comings of Christ...
Fr. Victor Feltes
During this Advent season, we are called to contemplate three distinct comings of Christ. The first is his coming in the past, twenty centuries ago at the first Christmas. Answering the Prophet Isaiah’s plea, our Lord rent the heavens and came down for the sake of his servants by assuming a human nature. Through the Incarnation, God wrought an awesome deed we could not have hoped for, something unheard of from of old...

Pope Francis on First Sunday of Advent: ‘I’m Improving, but My Voice Still Doesn’t Work’...

There are many benefits to being a Catholic convert...
David Deavel
As an adult convert to the Catholic faith of long standing (I came into the Church in 1997 at the tender age of 23), I am very grateful for the completion of the faith first given to me in baptism in a Christian Reformed Church in 1978. For most of my life as a Catholic I have experienced both love and admiration from cradle Catholics. While I’m happy to take the love, sometimes the admiration makes me a bit nervous.

There’s an Advent lesson hidden in Thomas Cole’s series of paintings, “The Voyage of Life”...
Fr. Patrick Briscoe
“How I have walked ... day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!” wrote the American painter Thomas Cole. Advent is a kind of walking, like an artist, looking for what has not been seen before. As we begin a new liturgical year, we eagerly scan the horizon, looking for the new graces God will send. We walk familiar terrain, hoping to see what is new. And the lesson is that in Advent, there is always something new to see.

I do not regret acting on the assumption that the Pope would be above petty quarrels...
Phil Lawler
Like any journalist I hate to be beaten to a story, and this week Catholic World News (CWN) was late on a big one. Yet I have no regrets. If you’ll join me for a few minutes behind my editorial desk, I’ll explain why, and in the process, tell you something about CWN and about the Catholic world we cover. Last Saturday, when I read the first report on La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana...

Witnesses Testify to Torture by Nicaraguan Dictatorship at Hearing on Imprisoned Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez...

This Sunday, We Look at the Church and Say: ‘Come, Lord Jesus! Enough Is Enough’...
Tom Hoopes
Lord Jesus, please come. Enough is enough. We don’t understand what you’re doing. Are you avoiding us? Why? We need you here. Surely you have noticed! We make our own the urgent words of your prophets and evangelists on the First Sunday of Advent Year B. There, we see that you told us what it would be like, waiting for you. You were right. “It is like a man traveling abroad,” you say in Sunday’s Gospel. “You do not know when the lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning.” The Church expected you in the morning...

The Tsar, the rule of law, and the making of a legend...
Ed Condon
Last night, I made it to the movies to see the new Napoleon biopic. I’ll spare you a full amateur film review, though I thought it was by no means on a par with Ridley Scott’s great works but still pretty good. The French news magazine Le Point called the film “very anti-French and very pro-British.” I would say it definitely lived up to that promising review. One of the most interesting figures in Napoleonic history is Tsar Alexander I...

The Baby Indi Gregory tragedy (and the NHS itself) reminds us that doctors aren’t deities...
George Weigel
With the God of the Bible having largely disappeared from public consciousness in Great Britain, the closest thing to a replacement deity is the British National Health Service. Created after World War II, the NHS was the object of intense affection for decades and, as recently as this year, 72% of Britons polled said that the NHS was “crucial” to their society. This obsessive and often mawkish devotion to a false god has made a wholesale reform of the NHS — or, better, its replacement — virtually impossible. And the NHS is desperately in need of reform or replacement.

Germany’s Bishop Stefan Oster Warns: Growing Division from Synodal Way Is “Disaster for the Faithful in Germany” ...

Catholics ought to pray for the Holy Father’s recovery from illness — and in thanksgiving that he is not going to Dubai...

We Tried 8 Methods of Cooking Bacon and the Winner Was Hands Down the Best...

If your only tool is a hammer: A problem of focus...

Here’s How to Get the Special Nativity Scene Plenary Indulgence in December and January...

Pope Francis to Remove Cardinal Burke’s Salary and Vatican Apartment Over Perceived Church ‘Disunity’...

Becciu’s Nixon moment: In media blitz, cardinal insists he is not a crook...

Advent, an expectancy of love, and a separation from sin...