Cambridge historian Richard Rex has provocatively proposed that Catholicism today is embroiled in the third great crisis of its bimillennial history. The first crisis was the fierce, Church-dividing debate over “What is God?” That question […]
On April 11, 1963, John XXIII issued the encyclical Pacem in Terris, a powerful call for a world in which there were neither victims nor executioners that cemented the pontiff’s reputation as “Good Pope John.” […]
As the estimable Larry Chapp recently put it on his blog, Gaudium et Spes 22, “the deepest, most important, most contentious, most divisive, and most destructive debates [after Vatican II] surrounded moral theology, especially after […]
Once upon a time, before the Cuisinart of advanced educational thinking reduced history, geography, and civics to the tasteless gruel of “social studies,” humanity’s story was taught in a linear fashion, and under chapter headings […]
In the first chapter of Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy quoted an exasperated Congressman, John Steven McGroarty, who wrote an irritating constituent in these neatly acerbic terms: One of the countless drawbacks of being […]
To vary Oscar Wilde, the Church’s liturgical life often imitates art by being strikingly appropriate to a particular moment. That was certainly true on Monday of the Third Week of Lent, 2023 — a day […]
Shortly before Christmas 2022, it seemed likely that Dr. Heiner Wilmer, SCJ, bishop of Hildesheim and a prominent proponent of the German “Synodal Way,” would be named prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of […]
March 13 ought to have been a happy day in Rome. But the mood in and around Vatican City before, during and after the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’s election was more somber than festive […]
In its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), the Second Vatican Council firmly applied the brakes to “ultramontanism” — the overheated theory of papal supremacy that reduced local bishops to branch managers who simply […]
Pope Francis’s image of the Church as a “field hospital,” tending the wounded on today’s social and cultural battlefields, resonates with Catholics across the globe. The image evokes a Church living the Lord’s command in […]
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