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Category: Commentary

Imagisterium, revisited

Just wanted to share that there is a new post on my (erratically updated) substack blog, Mike Lewis Extra. After a couple of days of online debates with death penalty advocates who inexplicably also argue that Catholic teaching supports the...

Stop Moving Pastors!

There is a damaging lack of stability in the US Catholic Church. The changing of pastors has become a ritual of parish life. Every six years or so, awkward announcements are made, goodbyes are said, and the parish priest heads off...

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,...

Francis the Pacifist

When is it good to kill another human being? The only correct answer, the one offered by the Church, is “never.” As Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for...

The Pope’s Clear Position on Ukraine

Wars make strange bedfellows, and their first casualty is truth. War is always the hour of darkness, when disorder reigns, brute power sets the rules, and the innocent are crushed; when human appetites — lust, greed, rage, revenge — are...

A Catholic media tragedy

Yesterday brought devastating news for the Church and Catholic journalism, when Catholic News Service (CNS) announced that they will be shutting down their Washington, DC and New York bureaus at the end of the year, and that all of its...

Being Pro-Life post-Roe

In Let Us Dream, Pope Francis cuts through the partisanship and the ideologies in our world to offer a simple diagnosis of the sickness responsible for the decay and moral rot that infects our culture. He calls this illness the...

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...