Today in a small village in Poland Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, the Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, beatified an entire family. Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their children, massacred by the Nazis on March 24, 1944—the day...
Yesterday Pope Francis released a remarkable letter to the priests of the Diocese of Rome, of which he is the diocesan bishop in addition to his numerous other responsibilities and powers over the Church outside central Italy. He warns against...
James Joyce, the noted Irish writer of the early twentieth century, has a character in his novel Finnegans Wake who is referred to as “HCE.” I am not going to attempt to analyze Finnegans Wake here; anybody familiar with the...
Bishop Robert Barron’s essay on World Youth Day, which he published on the website for his Word on Fire ministry on Thursday, July 13, is an excellent example of a concerning trend in writing on serious religious and moral subjects....
The month of June in American Catholicism these days is always a hoot and a half. Engaged couples often schedule their weddings for late spring or early summer, families with young children have them suddenly at home for summer vacation,...
Mira il tuo popolo, bella Signora, che pien di giubilo oggi ti onora; anch’io festevole, corro ai tuoi piè. O Santa Vergine, prega per me. I spent about half of May traveling in the Central Mediterranean, the part of the...
There is often a double standard in many Catholic spaces in how gay and straight Catholics are perceived to engage in sexual sin. Many commentators seem to treat being or identifying as gay as being inherently unchaste or as presenting...
I have written several times for Where Peter Is about issues facing Indigenous communities, including regarding the so-called “doctrine of discovery” and, in collaboration with my close friend Meredith Dawson, regarding related problems that emerged during Pope Francis’s visit to...
Lent invites us to conversion, and the call to conversation can be painful. Worse, it can be embarrassing, especially when it comes from an unlikely source. I’ve recently experienced this myself, regarding a vice I barely even knew I had,...
Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, is not someone whose political views are at all ambiguous or subject to much dispute. He has dissented from a USCCB legal brief in support of labor unions, delivered speeches to organizations of Catholic...
Certain political and ideological currents within the Catholic Church treat almost any contemporary exercise of magisterial teaching as cause for pessimism, suspicion, and worry. In this way of thinking any new teaching that isn’t a straightforward reiteration of previous teaching...
In the world of improv comedy, there is a practice called “yes-and.” In an improv session, if something strange or shocking or difficult to understand is mooted, the next person in the session does not resist or attempt to backpedal...
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