Even now, in 2019, the First Vatican Council (1869-70) haunts us still. It has, in many ways, paralyzed Catholics and kept them from thinking more radically about what is needed in this dark hour. It […]
Expectations for the ongoing Summit in Rome on sex abuse in the Church are rather low, not without good reason. Personally, I am not expecting much of the pope and bishops, and will not be […]
My involvement with the ecumenical movement began just over thirty years, as a high-school student. In 1991 I was in Australia at the seventh general assembly of the World Council of Churches, just in time […]
Nearly two decades ago, in another country, and on the eve of a prominent and much-watched episcopal appointment, I wrote a lengthy wish-list (for a small upstart Catholic journal that seems to have disappeared) outlining […]
Among some Catholics today, “synodality” is regarded as an ill-defined term perhaps signifying nothing but the covert dismantling of Catholic structures and teaching. Raymond Cardinal Burke, for instance, recently said in an interview with LifeSiteNews […]
It is cheering news that John Henry Newman’s canonization now appears to be at hand since a second miracle attributed to his intercession has been accepted. Whenever I am asked how I became Catholic (Newman […]
Last year at the Eastern Churches Seminar at Notre Dame College in Ohio, I gave a lecture entitled “If My Saints Are True, Are Yours False?” I looked at some of the complicated issues that […]
Earlier this summer I wrote about what I had learned from my students during a week-long theology camp devoted to discovering the beauty of traditional Christian iconography from the Byzantine tradition. One difficulty in coming […]
For nearly 30 of my 46 years on this planet, I have been regularly inundated with stories about sex abuse in the Catholic Church in Canada. I wasn’t even Catholic yet when the first major […]
John W. O’Malley’s new history of the First Vatican Council provides an impartial and detailed account that offers both historical context and insight into the […]
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