In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the late Elie Wiesel, reflecting on the Holocaust, and his personal experience of it – being in the same World War II Nazi concentration camps where his mother, father and sister...
In The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, the main character Frodo undergoes a dramatic shift in his attitudes towards capital punishment. His story helps us understand the Church’s recent developments concerning the death penalty. Early in The Fellowship...
I have returned to the US, following several days in Lourdes. While there, I participated in the 27th annual St. Francis de Sales International Congress, along with around 250 other Catholic journalists and communications professionals, hailing from 30 countries (although...
This slipped through the cracks at Where Peter Is when it happened last week, as things sometimes do, but on January 14, Pope Francis gave an interview on an Italian talk show in which he answered, among other things, questions...
Many of the articles coming out against Fiducia Supplicans are interesting to read, but most of them seem to assume the point the author needs to prove in the first place — the fallacy of begging the question. Moreover, what they...
I have long admired Dr. John Joy’s work on the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. For instance, his doctoral dissertation On the Ordinary and Extraordinary Magisterium from Joseph Kleutgen to the Second Vatican Council published by Aschendorff Verlag is a work...
On December 18, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) promulgated the Declaration Fiducia Supplicans, which clarified questions surrounding informal blessings of couples in irregular situations and same-sex relationships. This document bears the signature of Pope Francis. A...
Since publishing my article on those who put forward dishonest critiques of Fiducia Supplicans, the new Vatican declaration on the pastoral meaning of blessings, I have received a handful of responses from people who say that they are honestly confused...
The negative responses to the Declaration Fiducia Supplicans keep coming, and they’re all over the map. And to be honest, it’s difficult to take some of them seriously. Chris Altieri of Catholic World Report didn’t need a full week to...
I think it’s time to begin again with Pope Francis. If this week in the Church has shown anything, it’s that many Catholics simply don’t get Pope Francis. Particularly in the US — although clear cracks have appeared in Germany,...
If you’ve been reading the headlines, whether in the progressive National Catholic Reporter, the extreme-right Lifesite, or nearly any news source in between, chances are you saw articles claiming Pope Francis has permitted priests to “bless same-sex unions” or “bless...
With each passing week, it seems the Tim Ballard scandal continues to grow. In the last few months, breaking stories drop with regularity — a new lawsuit, another alleged abuse victim comes forward, new details emerge about his alleged organizational...
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