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Category: Commentary

A New Pacem in Terris

Fratelli Tutti, the newly-published encyclical, must be read carefully to be properly understood. We must avoid the risk of trivialization that focuses on two or three points and reduces the document to little more than a series of pious intentions....

The inanity of CTRL-F criticism

“This document has 43,000 words. 43,000 words. So that’s a lot. This is—I believe this is his longest encyclical. I didn’t compare it, but it feels like the longest. And I’m going to throw something up on the screen that...

Fraternity: A dirty word?

In his new encyclical Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis warns about how the word solidarity, “is not always well received; in certain situations, it has become a dirty word, a word that dare not be said.” (#116). I believe something similar...

Vatican II and “weaponized ambiguity”

It has become common among critics of the Second Vatican Council to use the expression “weaponized ambiguity” to describe certain conciliar teachings. This expression assumes that language in the Vatican II documents is ambiguous, in the sense that teachings can...

Conscience and the Sunday Obligation

When the pandemic hit the United States earlier this year, bishops across the country made the necessary but unprecedented decision to dispense the faithful from their traditional obligation to attend Mass every Sunday. Six months later, we are slowly beginning...

The Appeal and Danger of Integralism

In the past five years or so, discussion of Catholic political currents, especially online, has increasingly included an ideology called integralism. Prominent and influential jurists and law professors such as Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule have increasingly begun describing themselves as integralists;...

Fr. Michel Rodrigue: When will no mean no?

Following up on this week’s article by Emmett O’Regan discussing the enormously popular website Countdown to the Kingdom, which promotes the dubious apocalyptic messages of unapproved prophets and visionaries, there is breaking news regarding one of their featured visionaries, Fr....