Someone has to say it publicly: The Catholic Church in the United States does not understand the Holy Father and is doing itself great harm. This sentence isn’t entirely original. It’s the inverse of the opening line of a June...
A few days ago, an article entitled “Where Peter Actually Is” by Fr. Ambrose Dobrozsi appeared on the website of the new-ish Catholic magazine The Lamp. In his article, Fr. Dobrozsi attempts to put forth a balanced view of the...
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...
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith sent a letter to Fr. Charles Curran, dated Sept. 17, 1985, regarding his dissent from Church teaching on contraception. The Congregation explained that “the authorities of the church cannot allow the present...
“O nata lux de lumine, Jesu redemptor saeculi.” These were the words that emanated from my Sony boombox as a child. I did not know what the choir was singing, I had no understanding of the language, but the heavenly...
Last week, I wrote about a group of US bishops, with the help of friendly media outlets, that has tried to convince Catholics that their initiatives, decisions, and public positions were in step with the pope’s message, even though they...
We’ve finally reached the point where it’s become impossible to ignore the dissonance between Pope Francis and the leadership of the US Catholic bishops. For years, many leading US bishops—aided by a cadre of allies in Catholic media—have been bound...
A friend of mine once said that apologetics is a mental disease. Obviously, this is an exaggeration; there is a long and noble tradition of Christian apologetics, and many great thinkers have produced apologia on behalf of the Faith. Still,...
Recently, Larry Chapp published an article entitled “The undermining of John Paul II in the name of Veritatis Splendor continues” at Catholic World Report, replying to my recent article on Amoris Laetitia and Veritatis Splendor. This response is intended to clarify the...
It is wrong to assume, as critics of this website often insist, that we hang on every word of Pope Francis and consider every utterance of the pope to be divine law. The contributors to WPI have repeatedly tried to...
“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...
It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to discover the breadth of Catholic social doctrine, a rich body of teaching that I’d somehow never been introduced to in all my years as a practicing Catholic. (The title of Mark Shea’s...
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