“Amongst the many benefits to be expected from it will be the great benefit of drawing the minds of men to liberty, fraternity, and equality of right; not such as the Freemasons absurdly imagine, but such as Jesus Christ obtained for the human race and St. Francis aspired to. (…) The fraternity whose...
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. First of all, we must understand the perspective from which it is written:...
What did Archbishop Viganò mean when he declared in a recent interview that “Trump is fighting pedophilia and pedosatanism”? Even for Viganò, whose descent into conspiratorial and apocalyptic thinking should by now be obvious to everyone, this is a jarring and confusing claim. Trump has not made fighting pedophilia any more of a...
Critics of Pope Francis often accuse him of disrespecting the traditions of the Church and rejecting the core values that make the Church what it is. Sometimes, they view Pope Francis’s openness to other cultures as proof that he wants to dilute Catholic identity into a syncretistic mesh and desires a new “one-world...
I offer here a sketch of someone caught in the eddies of our time. A sketch because it is not complete; I am still in the midst of confusion and uncertainty. But something of an outline is taking shape, and Where Peter Is is providing that form, however hazy it still is to...
Pope Francis’s third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship, is a gift to the Church and to the human race. Building on previous social encyclicals, including his own Laudato Si’ (2015) and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009), it covers a wide range of themes, including the injustice of capital punishment,...
A reflection on the Mass readings for the Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. At my parish, I am currently leading an eight-week series on St. John of the Cross. John’s poems are all brilliant, but the ones that are the most beloved, The Spiritual Canticle, The Dark Night, and The Living Flame of...
Today, Pope Francis stepped out onto the virtual TED stage for a second time. In his first TED talk, given in April 2017, the pope made his famous call for a “Revolution Of Tenderness.” This time, his talk was entitled “Our moral imperative to act on climate change — and 3 steps we...
“”He who has the goods of this world and sees his brother in need and closes his heart to him, how does the love of God abide in him?” Everyone knows that the Fathers of the Church laid down the duty of the rich toward the poor in no uncertain terms. As St....
“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 I find rather offensive. I’m not the first one to notice this. So...
The pandemic has revealed how inadequate our virtual lifestyles are for sustaining strong communities. Yes, the lockdowns, capacity limits, and other precautions were necessitated by a charity towards others in our society, especially the elderly and other vulnerable populations, and surely many lives were saved thanks to these measures. But even though the...
On Sunday, Pope Francis promulgated his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship. His timely assessment of the state of our world touches on issues including war, extreme inequality and economic disparity, environmental degradation, and the fractured global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. His entire encyclical centers on love for our...
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