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...
Today, as we honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States, we can be certain that Pope Francis is joining with us in spirit from the Vatican. Over the weekend, the Atlanta Hawks of the National...
Last summer, I had an opportunity to address the small Catholic campus ministry of Western Carolina University (WCU) on the topic of racism and my perspectives as a Black Catholic in the United States. Hoping to talk about the heartbreaking...
“There are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape, and old ambitions and desires (touching the very roots of fantasy) to which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation. Some are pardonable weaknesses or curiosities: such...
My Christmas was odd, and not just because of lockdown. After three weeks launching Let Us Dream, Pope Francis’s remarkable book on the pandemic that I helped him put together, I was quoted in a UK tabloid news site forecasting...
Perhaps last week’s news that EWTN had reshuffled its radio lineup, dismissing several longtime on-air voices including Gloria Purvis (who was outspoken this year about the US Church’s failure to address racism) and Fr. Larry Richards (who has been a...
There is a picture by the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich called “The Mother of the World.” First executed in 1924 and then painted again in 1937, the image shows a haloed woman enthroned on some sort of mountaintop, wearing a...
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