It’s a rare occasion when the word “unprecedented” can be used for a Church whose history extends over two millennia. Yet something unprecedented happened in the Polish village of Markowa on September 10, when an […]
I wish all those who find themselves concerned, depressed, befuddled, or angry at the present state of the Church could have spent July 3-21 in that city of saints, Cracow, along with my students and […]
“Pope Francis has just given the Vatican his Ratzinger,” declared one July 2 headline; “Pope Francis Finds His Ratzinger,” announced another, four days later. Both quickie assessments of Argentinian Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández’s appointment as […]
The latest self-inflicted blow to the Vatican’s China policy came in mid-July, when the Holy See announced that Pope Francis had “recognized” Bishop Joseph Shen Bin as Bishop of Shanghai — despite the fact that […]
Westerplatte, a narrow peninsula framing the Bay of Gdańsk, was the scene of one of the first battles of World War II in Europe. On Sept. 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on […]
In mid-May, I spent two intense days in Lisbon, where a new Portuguese edition of my Letters to a Young Catholic was being prepared as a catechetical resource for World Youth Day-2023. In and around […]
Pope Benedict XVI often said that, in today’s skeptical and cynical world, the saints make a more persuasive case for the truth of Christianity than the most sophisticated arguments. One has to wonder, then, why […]
One of the worst of contemporary hymn-texts bids us to “Sing a new Church into being.” Not only does this injunction debase the noble hymn-tune “Nettleton;” it teaches a pseudo-Christian hubris that is contrary to […]
The first words of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church — one of the council’s two most important texts — signaled a decisive development in Catholic self-understanding. Rather than begin its reflection […]
It would not be quite accurate to describe the Working Document for the October 2023 Synod (its Instrumentum Laboris, or IL) as “disappointing.” No one who has followed the “synodal process” underway since 2021 could […]
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