I’ve often thought about the benefits of a seminary program where aspiring priests would be required to spend a semester helping a family get ready for Sunday Mass every week. If nothing else, the experience would hopefully help our clergy...
In a 1969 German radio broadcast, Father Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, predicted where he believed the Church was headed. Ratzinger envisioned that the Church of the future generations would lose political power and social acceptance. He said:...
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....
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...
211. In a pluralistic society, dialogue is the best way to realize what ought always to be affirmed and respected apart from any ephemeral consensus. Such dialogue needs to be enriched and illumined by clear thinking, rational arguments, a variety...
GameStop made headlines this week when its stock price skyrocketed, shocking the investment community. After some hedge fund giants placed bets that the company’s stock price would fall (by short-selling the stock), their bets had abysmal results as retail investors...
Earlier this month, Adam Rasmussen responded to Fr. Chad Ripperger’s theory of Church authority, summarizing it as an approach in which “any magisterial statements that do not define dogmas … may be questioned if they seem to contradict earlier statements.”...
The recent news of Pope Francis’s surprise motu proprio Spiritus Domini inflamed old debates about feminism and women’s ordination. Responses in Catholic media have ranged from rather bland “nothing to see here” commentary focused on the historical development of the...
An experienced Vatican journalist texted me when the Pope’s World Communications Day message was released over the weekend. She was bowled over by it and wanted to know if I knew who had had a hand in it (I didn’t)....
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...
Nine years ago I helped found a pro-life pregnancy center and discovered, in the process, that doing so successfully was very slow going. Through that experience, I gained a very useful personal insight: because saving lives is something worth doing,...
Following the 1976 US presidential election, conservative political fundraisers Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and Terry Dolan saw an opportunity: according to one poll, 70% of “evangelical Christians”—fifty to sixty million people— had not voted.[1] Jimmy Carter snagged the Oval Office...
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