Pope Francis and war, ideas and realities
“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...
Author: Nathan Turowsky
Tokyo Abp. Responds to Assassination of Former PM Abe: “Violence Destroys Democracy”
Shinzo Abe, the former longtime Prime Minster of Japan, about whom I’ve written in ambivalent terms for Where Peter Is in the past, died earlier today after being shot at a campaign rally for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The...
Cardinal-designate McElroy and intrinsic evil
Cardinal-designate Robert W. McElroy, Bishop of San Diego, is not a man known for playing his cards close to his chest when it comes to his perspective on moral theology. He has been referred to “as a firebrand or as...
Thomas and the Super-Thomists
Looking over the websites of Newman Guide-approved Catholic liberal arts colleges that a younger friend of mine was weighing going to a few years back, I noticed a pattern. While this pattern was stronger at some colleges than at others,...
Opening the Sense Gates with the Liturgy
The Mahayana Buddhist scripture Vimalakirti Nirdesa, also known as the Vimalakirti Sutra, contains one of the most radical ascetic statements in any religion’s canonical texts. The main figure of the text, Vimalakirti, is feigning illness so that he can preach...
Remorse, Repatriation, Restitution
We live in an apology-averse, perhaps even a remorse-averse age. Even churchmen, when accused of severe wrongdoing, are as likely to spin, deny, or counteraccuse as they are to express repentance or seek atonement. That being the case, it is...
The Trads and the Tyrant
Note: This essay will discuss the political takes of figures to whom I don’t particularly want to direct web traffic. Google “[figure’s name] putin” and most of it will come up. Conservative Catholicism has a long history of receptivity to...
Validity of Form, Sacramental Grace, and the Specter of Feeneyism
When in 2020 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an instruction that the plural pronoun “we” was not to be used in the baptismal formula because it implies that the baptizand is baptized not by Christ but...
The Pharisees’ Woes, Humanity’s Woes
A reflection on the readings for February 13, 2022 — The Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Today’s Gospel gives us Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, an analogue of the more famous equivalent or parallel passage in Matthew. Luke’s “take” on...
Liability and the Incentive against Repentance
In a way, the recently released German report on sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which faults Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for mishandling four abuse cases during his brief tenure as archbishop there in the late 1970s...
Fr. Grande, Abp. Romero, and Friendships Across Ideologies
Rutilio Grande, SJ, who is being beatified today along with Franciscan Fr. Cosme Spessotto, 70-year-old sacristan Manuel Solórzano, and teenager Nelson Rutilio Lemus, the latter two of whom were murdered alongside him, is best known as a personal friend of...
Pachamama 1.0
Before the much-publicized uproar over the Amazon Synod, and before white Catholics were scandalized about perceived pagan imagery and idolatrous devotion creeping into the faith, there was another controversial figure in European Catholic circles – Our Lady of Guadalupe, the...
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