Work is a Gift from God
Today is Labor Day in the United States, a day of rest for workers in this nation. The Church teaches that work is integral to human development — it is how people support families, save for the future, utilize their...
Category: Catholic Social Teaching
When pro-lifers fight, rather than unite
Like many Catholics who live in the Washington, DC area, I have attended the annual March for Life many times over the years. For those who haven’t been, it’s a massive annual pro-life rally held every year on January 22,...
Willing the Good: A survivor’s call for restorative justice
TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault and violence that may be triggering to survivors. The last three popes have called for the abolition of the death penalty. In 2018, Pope Francis revised the official teaching of the...
Responding to Charles Camosy’s open letter to the pope
Two weeks ago Charles Camosy, a professor of ethics at Fordham University, published an open letter to Pope Francis in which he asks the Holy Father to give defense of the unborn a “more central place” in his formal teaching....
The Seamless Garment must be properly understood
Back in 2007, during the time leading up to the referendum in Portugal that resulted in the legalization of abortion-on-demand up to the tenth week of gestation, members of the pro-life campaign hung up flyers that said: “10 weeks without...
Is Catholic teaching against the death penalty optional?
Readers of this website are aware that many Catholics who claim to be faithful to the Magisterium are nonetheless brazen in their open support for the death penalty. We’ve discussed Cardinal Raymond Burke’s declaration to an audience that the teaching...
Pope Francis: Human life demands we make space for it
Today, December 9, is the first anniversary of my mother’s death. She died on a Monday evening. Because December 8 fell on a Sunday last year, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception was observed that day. It was one of...
Pope Francis and Just War Tradition
Pope Francis, in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, comments upon the use and misuse of the just war tradition within Catholicism (FT 256-62). His main point is that “in recent decades every single war has been ostensibly ‘justified’” by its apologists,...
A throwaway culture is a culture of death
Members of the pro-life movement often describe policies that work to undermine the recognition of human dignity and to devalue human life as promoting the “culture of death.” This term was made popular by Pope St. John Paul II in...
Catholic teaching on euthanasia and end-of-life care
The Catholic Church espouses a consistent ethic of life that requires the legal protection of all human life from conception to natural death. Thus Pope Francis wrote, in his 2018 Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”): The...
Breakfast of Scandals: Chaput adds to Barr fiasco
William Barr, a Catholic, has generated controversy since he began his tenure as Attorney General of the United States in February 2019. Among other things, on July 25, 2019, he ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to execute five federal...
Being pro-life requires the faith to see “both/and”
Step back and admire the efficiency of John Hirschauer’s apologia pro Bill Barr that appeared online at National Review (“Bill Barr Tears the Seamless Garment”) this week. It is not entirely Hirschauer’s fault. Authors do not write headlines or subheads....
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