[Updated below] We’re a little more than two weeks into 2022, and the battle for the soul of the US Church continues to escalate. Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, whose anti-vaccine activism I have written about in the past for WPI, recently tweeted his support for a priest of the Archdiocese of...
A reflection on the readings for Sunday, January 16, 2022 — The Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Today we heard from the Gospel of John. It is important for us to know that, unlike Matthew and Luke, John does not have an infancy narrative or provide the genealogy of Jesus. Instead, John begins his...
“It follows that our indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings. We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with...
Earlier this week, the USCCB tweeted a graphic featuring “seven attitudes we can all adopt as we continue our synodal journey together,” which many on social media criticized for various reasons. Some criticized its apparent “corporatese.” Others argued that the seven attitudes were unfamiliar or did not correspond with their notions of authentically...
Undoubtedly, Pope Francis is the pontiff who has most explicitly expressed the Catholic Church’s commitment to the environment and to the protection of our planet’s natural resources. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI certainly expressed the need to build a “human ecology.” However, it was Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si’, who...
On January 8, 2022, Crisis Magazine published an article by Mary Cuff, “The Beauty of Austerity.” In her article, Ms. Cuff presents St. Maravillas de Jesús, the Spanish Discalced Carmelite and Foundress, as the model and patron saint of resistance to the “increasing pressure to update the Carmelite traditions and Rule for ‘modern...
Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape — Evangelii Gaudium, 53 During today’s General Audience address, Pope Francis spoke...
When I was about ten years old, I started writing a series of short plays about “Big G” and His Son. They were cute and funny, but more importantly, they were my young self’s attempts to express my faith in terms and a format that made sense to me. My works included plenty...
In the writings of scholastic and early-modern theologians, we can distinguish four main categories of non-Christians able to be saved: catechumens, babies who die before baptism, people who lived before Jesus, and people who have never heard of Jesus. As we will see, in each case, they believed salvation was possible. Catechumens St....
A reflection on the readings for Sunday, January 9, 2022 — The Baptism of the Lord Each week, I pray with the Sunday Scriptures when I begin to prepare my homily. I’m always amazed when the Holy Spirit surprises me by showing me a small detail in the Scriptures that contains a powerful...
“To defend the true tradition of the Church today means to defend the Council (…) We must remain faithful to the today of the Church, not the yesterday or tomorrow. And this today of the Church is the documents of Vatican II, without reservations that amputate them and without arbitrariness that distorts them....
This interview was originally published by the Catholic news website Exaudi. The author has granted permission for republication with slight modifications on Where Peter Is. Interview with writer Austen Ivereigh on Synodality This is Enrique Soros’s interview with Austen Ivereigh, the well-known Catholic journalist, writer, and commentator. He lives in the United Kingdom...
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