The Church is paralyzed today. Last November’s meeting of the USCCB, the recent papal motu proprio (which I discussed here), and now this month’s USCCB meeting have all demonstrated an exhaustion of episcopal imagination, which […]
I was on sabbatical last year, and as I finished three books, several international lectures, and a bunch of other projects, my superego relentlessly pursued me with the question: “Are you doing enough?” This wretched […]
Just over a year ago, in looking at a minor liturgical change announced by Pope Francis, I drew on the work of D.W. Winnicott to help better understand some of the papal language about the […]
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 […]
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