This Easter, due to the suspension of parish activity in the current crisis, will be much different than any most of us have ever experienced. Without in-person access to sacramental liturgy, many families are seeking ways to pray and worship...
Initially, this installment of “Loneliness Today” was going to be about either the loneliness faced by parish priests (who, in the age of COVID-19, I’m sure miss public celebrations of the Mass just as much as we do) or the...
Many parents are wondering right now: how do I talk to my child about a global pandemic? We parents are still trying to wrap our minds around this situation ourselves. We may be trying to balance working from home, attempting...
Over the last several decades, those in the pro-life community have fought tooth and nail for the rights of unborn children. We are convicted of their inherent dignity and value. The energy and passion that swells in the pro-life movement...
I didn’t originally plan to write about the phenomenon of social distancing in this series; indeed, I wasn’t even aware that the term existed when I began writing these essays about loneliness. However, three months into the “Loneliness Today” series,...
When Pope Francis promulgated the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia in 2016, much of its teaching was widely ignored in favor of what would become years of arguing over a single footnote that potentially opens the sacraments to some Catholics who...
We have come to the final part of this reflection. In the first five installments, we examined the tendencies that constitute what Pope Leo XIII called Americanism. While we should not conclude that holding only one or two of these...
In the late 19th century, Pope Leo XIII saw in the American Church a tendency to value the active life over receptivity to the Holy Spirit. In his 1899 letter to the faithful in America, Testem benevolentiae, Leo identified this...
Related to the problem of liberty, noted Pope Leo XIII, is the Americanist view that “all external guidance [that] is set aside for those souls who are striving after Christian perfection as being superfluous or, indeed, not useful in any...
In his late nineteenth-century letter to Catholics in the United States, Testem benevolentiae, Pope Leo XIII condemned the heresy of Americanism. Although few American Catholics know about this heresy, many of those who have heard of Americanism believe it is...
In this installment of the “Loneliness Today” series, I would like to talk about loneliness among disabled people.[1] This is a topic that a few regular commenters have brought up in the comment sections on previous essays in this series;...
This is the second installment of our series on the New Americanism. To read part one, click here. The heresy of Americanism was condemned in Testem benevolentiae, Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 letter to James Cardinal Gibbons, then Archbishop of Baltimore....
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