There is No Vocations Crisis All across the country parishes are merging, Masses are split between different times at multiple sites, vocations directors are expressing alarm, bishops are restructuring diocesan ministries, and there are thousands of parishes without a resident priest.1 Every fact in that list is true, but the story that we tell...
“The God who loves us all, unconditionally.” From the first words Pope Leo XIV spoke as pope. Before any doctrine, before any policy, before a single question about who belongs and who doesn’t. Simply that. Unconditionally. I was born a nothing, then baptized a Catholic. Only because I happened to be born in...
Paragraph 89 is perhaps my favorite passage from Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. It’s at the end of a short section titled “An examen for the Church,” where Pope Leo makes the case that the Church must live out its own social doctrine “within its own structures” in order to be faithful to...
Father Joseph Thermadom, CSC, is India’s first deaf Catholic priest, the third in Asia, and only the 26th in the world. Born in Thrissur, Kerala, India, and raised in Mumbai, he spent more than a decade in seminary formation in the United States and across India. He was ordained on May 2, 2024,...
“We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe.” – Tim Keller This August, Pope Leo XIV is asking us to join him in praying for evangelization in cities. This request reflects the difficulty of sharing the Gospel in densely populated areas, where neighbors...
On May 19, 1977, Salvadoran security forces occupied the town of Aguilares, expelled the Jesuits who were ministering there, and took over the parish church — turning it into a barracks. They opened fire on the tabernacle and scattered the consecrated hosts across the floor. Soon afterward, Archbishop Óscar Romero tried to enter...
Over the past years, the billionaire Peter Thiel has written and spoken widely – at a four-lecture series in San Francisco in 2025; in an interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times; perhaps most prominently at an invitation-only conference in Rome, mere blocks from the Vatican, and most recently through a...
Lumen Gentium, Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, says that the Church is “the universal sacrament of salvation” established for all people to encounter Christ and experience His liberating love. But many Catholics today feel a sense of homelessness in their own Church. We believe that Catholicism ought to have something urgent...
Synodality did not begin in 2021. It began in Jerusalem, around AD 49. Synodality, I keep reading, is confusing, maybe even undefinable. I recently sat through three days of it in practice, and nobody seemed confused. On July 6, Catholic News Service reported that the bishops representing North America in the synodal process...
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenal wrote a phrase destined to outlive the empire that inspired it: panem et circenses — “bread and circuses.” In his Satire X, he denounced how a citizenry that had once been the protagonist of public life had ultimately surrendered its political freedom...
“At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’” (Lk 10:21) I have always appreciated...
One of the stranger developments surrounding the illicit Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) episcopal consecrations on July 1 was the sudden outbreak of agreement among Catholics across the spectrum that the Society had gone too far — they had committed a schismatic act and had incurred automatic excommunication from the Catholic Church....
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