This has been a tumultuous week in America. January 6, 2021 will remain etched in the annals of American history as a day of shame and revulsion. Americans, and indeed the world, witnessed scenes of lawlessness and anarchy unprecedented in the history of the nation. Motivated by the conviction to overturn what they...
Pope Francis has weighed in on the violence at the US Capitol on Wednesday, January 6. This violence has been condoned or even incited by some of Francis’s critics within the Church, many of whom see loyalty to outgoing President Donald Trump as a greater moral imperative than loyalty to the Successor of...
“Today, in many countries, hyperbole, extremism and polarization have become political tools. Employing a strategy of ridicule, suspicion and relentless criticism, in a variety of ways one denies the right of others to exist or to have an opinion. Their share of the truth and their values are rejected and, as a result,...
It’s been a stressful few days in the United States, to say the least. On Thursday morning, I participated in an online briefing hosted by the UK-based Religion Media Centre. The purpose was to inform UK-based religion reporters about the religious angle of the Wednesday protests and riots in Washington. I was asked...
Dear Readers, Thank you very much for helping us have a successful 2020. I know it was been a difficult year for many of us, but this year brought the launch of our new podcast (actually two podcasts), some fantastic writing, and we more than doubled our readership over the previous year. As we...
Today for the first time since 1814, the U.S. Capitol was violently seized. Although its hours-long occupation by rioters was nowhere near as catastrophic as that event (though one was fatally shot), this attack has the dishonor of having been perpetrated by U.S. citizens rather than a foreign enemy at war. These men...
Last week I reported that Atlanta-based businessman and Catholic philanthropist Frank J. Hanna III both owns the company that publishes the venerable Official Catholic Directory and runs a foundation that—by virtue of its listing in the directory and a Form 990 exemption from the IRS—enables him to hide charitable donations from public scrutiny....
A few weeks ago my wife and I joined the millions of people who watched Netflix’s new original series, The Queen’s Gambit. While I wasn’t sold on it at first, by the final episode I was completely invested. Although religion isn’t featured prominently in the series, the story is clearly rooted in a...
My Christmas was odd, and not just because of lockdown. After three weeks launching Let Us Dream, Pope Francis’s remarkable book on the pandemic that I helped him put together, I was quoted in a UK tabloid news site forecasting his impending resignation. I spent Christmas Eve trying to put out the fires...
Perhaps last week’s news that EWTN had reshuffled its radio lineup, dismissing several longtime on-air voices including Gloria Purvis (who was outspoken this year about the US Church’s failure to address racism) and Fr. Larry Richards (who has been a staunch defender of Pope Francis), shouldn’t be surprising. After all, in recent months,...
A reflection on the Sunday readings for January 3, 2021 — the Epiphany of the Lord Is your Christmas tree still up? Have you taken down your Christmas decorations yet? When I was a child back in India, our tradition was not to put away the manger scene, the Christmas star, and all the...
“It is Our desire that then, every year, this commemoration be repeated as a hope and as a promise, at the beginning of the calendar which measures and outlines the path of human life in time, that Peace with its just and beneficent equilibrium may dominate the development of events to come. We...
There is a picture by the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich called “The Mother of the World.” First executed in 1924 and then painted again in 1937, the image shows a haloed woman enthroned on some sort of mountaintop, wearing a blue mantle with a veil or hood that covers the upper half of...
We sat in the car, my husband and I, still stunned, trying to eat a quick dinner before we drove to the hospital. I was avoiding looking at the medical building we had left earlier, the one with the unfamiliar doctor’s office where I’d heard the terrible words: “I’m so sorry, I see...
Yesterday, I posted about the most widely-read articles on Where Peter Is over the past year. Today—as promised—I am highlighting many of the articles that I believe exemplify the amazing work of our brilliant and faith-filled contributors. To be completely frank, I wasn’t certain how to put this list together. As I began...
Following in the footsteps of many other media outlets (including America, where my article on the division caused by papal critics was the most read in the month of August), we present to you a year-end roundup of our top stories of 2020. The articles listed below were the most widely-read of the...
In recent months we’ve heard dramatic warnings from figures in Catholic media regarding an alleged plan for post-COVID global change called “the Great Reset.” Some of these warnings are based upon reasonable concerns, while others are examples of outright conspiracy-mongering. C.C. Pecknold, without getting into conspiracy-theory territory, argues in First Things that the...
Editor’s note (December 30): Sadly, the Senate of Argentina voted 38-29 earlier today to legalize abortion on demand in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. Please pray for the people of Argentina and for our society. May we experience a conversion of heart so that our culture learns to recognize and respect the value...
Each year at Christmas, I have a difficult time reconciling the hard realities that must have surrounded Jesus’ birth and how it has been romanticized over the centuries. The Annunciation, the Visitation, Joseph’s dilemma, Quirinius’s census, Mary and Joseph’s travel to Jerusalem just before childbirth, the birth of Jesus in a stable, Jesus...
“Driven by religious reasons, the Church has always condemned the various systems of marxist socialism, and still condemns them today as it is its duty and permanent right to preserve men from currents of thought and influences that endanger their eternal salvation. But the Church cannot ignore or pretend not to see that...
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