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...
Whereas the lectionary readings for the two previous Sundays have contained dire warnings about what is in store for us all if we fail to adequately prepare for Christ’s coming, today’s readings leaven these warnings with joy, a foretaste of...
Advent, and thus the liturgical year, begins with a whole flurry of liturgical readings, spiritual devotions, and popular hymns referring to concepts like “captive Israel” and “the curse of the Law.” In the New Testament’s theological and cultural language these...
When I was in high school in South Jersey in the late 2000s, I had a classmate who thought that pie was the funniest thing in the world. It wasn’t that pie was his favorite food or that he liked...
Yahoo! News ran an interesting analysis of the US response to the synod on synodality on Tuesday. Every noun and adjective in that sentence other than “Tuesday” might typically raise eyebrows, but the article, by senior editor Peter Weber, did...
Francis of Assisi died seven hundred and ninety-six years ago yesterday (his feast day is observed the day after his death) in his hometown of long-term malaria that he probably contracted in the Holy Land or Egypt. The visit to...
The public has been advised that an outfit named the Catholic Identity Conference is organizing a press conference on October 1 in a DoubleTree Hotel ballroom in Pittsburgh that will unveil “articles of resistance against the Vatican and the Pontificate...
The work of theology, in addition to looking over what we know and what we can extrapolate from divine revelation or from the observable world around us, also inherently involves a certain amount of speculation. Sometimes our theological speculation involves...
The reporting on Pope Francis’s “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada late last month was, for the most part, extremely favorable in the Catholic press but somewhat more ambivalent in both Native American and secular Canadian outlets. At times the reportage almost...
“I believe it is time to rethink the concept of a ‘just war.’ A war may be just, there is the right to defend oneself. But we need to rethink the way that concept is used nowadays. I have said...
Popular Posts