Within the past twenty-four hours, Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, has fallen to the militant Islamist theocratic group the Taliban amidst the ongoing withdrawal of US forces from that country. The US overthrew a previous Taliban-led government in 2001 and...
Today, August 14th, brings us the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe, one of the two “martyrs of Auschwitz” along with St. Edith Stein. Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan who was interned in the infamous death camp for publishing anti-Nazi...
When I heard that Pope Francis had promulgated a motu proprio reimposing restrictions on the celebration of the 1962 Missal (or the Vetus Ordo), my first thought was this was greatly needed and long overdue. My second thought was that...
A few days ago Religion News Service (RNS) ran an article by Jack Jenkins on Douglas Lucia, the Bishop of Syracuse, New York. Lucia has denounced something called the “doctrine of discovery,” and has called on the US bishops to...
For much of my life, I’ve dealt with a persistent unease about the sex into which I was born. This wasn’t something I asked for, although it also hasn’t made me as miserable as some might assume. My unease has...
On May 27, the CBC reported that the bodies of 215 First Nations children had been discovered buried under the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The school was run by the Catholic religious order the Missionary Oblates...
Readers of Where Peter Is are probably aware by now of the controversies surrounding the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which is currently considering putting into place a national policy on the reception of communion by political figures...
During these first eight years of Pope Francis’s time on the Chair of Peter, one theme that has come up again and again is the periphery. Francis made “going to the peripheries” a priority—perhaps even the priority—of his pontificate very...
On March 23, the American public television network PBS aired the premiere of Flannery, a 90-minute documentary movie about the American Catholic novelist, short story writer, and essayist Flannery O’Connor. Flannery was part of the American Masters series of biographical...
Plato, one of the main philosophical influences on Catholic theology, believed in the existence of what are called the “transcendentals.” In Plato’s philosophical system, the transcendentals are “properties co-extensive with being”: abstract concepts around which existence and the material world...
In August of last year, I wrote a reflection on chronic illness, chronic pain, and the way world leaders, including Pope Francis and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, deal with these afflictions. Since I wrote this reflection, the subject...
Book review of Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States by Massimo Faggioli. Massimo Faggioli’s new book Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States, published by Bayard Press on the day of Biden’s inauguration, is the first book-length...
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