The Sacred and the Mundane
What is the “sacred”? Too often, we see it as the opposite of the mundane or common. This view is incorrect and can damage our understanding of the Faith. A setting apart In a previous essay for WPI, I explained...
Author: Malcolm Schluenderfritz
To Restore Eucharistic Coherence, Fight for Social Justice
The long anticipated Bishops’ statement on the Eucharist has finally arrived, and the Catholic internet is already full of more-or-less predictable reactions. Unfortunately, many of these reactions are driven more by politics than by the Catholic Faith. Political controversy tends...
Laudato Si and the Unity of All Things
In Laudato Si, Pope Francis writes: It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. Time and space are not independent of one another, and not even atoms or subatomic particles can be considered in isolation. Just as the different...
The Love of God in the Shared Burden of Community
“As members of one and the same mystical body of Christ, Christians are bound to one another and must bear one another’s burdens.” — Pope Francis, To the Ecumenical Delegation of the Lutheran Church of Finland (17 January 2020) Bearing...
Pope Francis and the Poetic Vision of Social Justice
Pope Francis recently gave an address to the Fourth World Meeting of Popular Movements, an address which has garnered a certain amount of attention, in part due to his remarks about the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd....
Liturgical Just So Stories – Latin
Is Latin a “Sacred Language”? The “Iconostasis of the West”? A unifying, universal language? Or are we being fed a bunch of “Just So” stories? What attitudes might these “Just So” stories be inculcating? The Use of Latin While Latin...
John Paul I and Francis: Kindred Spirits
On October 13, Pope Francis gave his approval for the beatification of Pope John Paul I, who is best known for having one of the shortest pontificates in history: just 33 days. We have to look back to 1605 to...
Is Pope Francis a Marxist?
Pope Francis is sometimes accused of being a “Marxist.” In particular, the following paragraphs from Fratelli Tutti drew some criticism (emphasis added): 119. In the first Christian centuries, a number of thinkers developed a universal vision in their reflections on...
Fools, Heretics, Dinosaurs, and Pope Francis
The book entitled The Fool and the Heretic is a dialogue between authors Todd Charles Wood and Darrel R. Falk, the “Fool” and the “Heretic,” respectively. Their discussion is moderated by Rob Barrett from the Colossian Forum, an organization that...
The Traditions that Make Void the Commands of God
Can traditions be harmful to the spiritual life? If so, what makes them harmful? Even more importantly, how could a tradition become harmful if it was once beneficial? As Catholics, we are called to hold fast to a certain tradition....
The Antidote to Self-absorbed Promethean Neopelagianism
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis discusses how “spiritual worldliness” can creep into the Church. He writes: This worldliness can be fuelled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is...
Is the “new Mass” too much like a meal?
A particular theme stood out among the comments on my recent article. Some critics claimed that the Vatican II liturgy downplayed sacrificial symbolism in the liturgy in favor of meal symbolism, and so is inferior to the older forms of...
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