Essay

The Church recently celebrated the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God — a wonderful way to begin the New Year. Some might be inclined to fault the Church for placing this solemnity on New Year’s […]

A month has already gone by since Pope Francis set foot on Kenya soil, on his first apostolic visit to the African continent, a visit which also took him to Uganda and the Central African […]

“Actually,” you say, after reading the above title, “I never thought of celebrating Christmas as an act of defiance.” But I suggest that perhaps you should. “Why?” you ask. Why what? “Why is celebrating Christmas […]

Biblical scholars generally agree that Luke’s Gospel was written at least a generation later than Paul’s first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Yet whatever the dating, and irrespective of scholarly disputes about whether “Luke,” […]

Like many of the faithful who live in the Western hemisphere, my imagination has often been drawn far to the east, where our Lord lived, died, and rose again. This is especially true around Christmas, […]

The readings for the third Sunday of Advent put me in mind of one of the most significant themes in Catholic theology, namely, the play between nature and grace. St. Luke tells us that people […]

Chatting with a British bishop who’d said the famous Catholic writer  Hilaire Belloc sometimes came to his home when he was a child to visit his father, a friend, I asked the obvious question: What was […]

For the third year in a row the most read article on the CWR site was about radical Islamic attacks on innocents. In 2013 it was the account by nuns in Syria about the violence […]

Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, is not something, I suggest, that can be switched on and off. Magisterium is either, according to objective (not subjective) criteria, engaged, or it isn’t. There are, […]