Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, C’est la confiance (“It is confidence”), discusses at length an aspect of Theresian spirituality that is widely known but not widely examined. Thérèse is an enormously appealing saint, with there being...
Today Pope Francis has published his apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, a sequel of sorts to 2015’s encyclical Laudato Si’, focusing more narrowly on the issue of climate change. Given the rapid worsening of the problem since 2015, it was a given that Laudate Deum would be...
Today Pope Francis met with members of the Brazilian organization Família da Esperança, which cares for people in desperate situations like drug addiction and HIV/AIDS. His address to them can be read on the Vatican website. It touches on familiar...
The recent beatification of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma with Seven Children was significant in several ways.Not least among these was the fact that the seventh child was a stillbirth, dead in the moment he was born — indeed, for much...
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...
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