“Brothers and sisters, let us guard ourselves and be attentive to the temptation of the Father of Lies and Division, the master of separation that, tricking us into searching for a given good or answer to a specific situation, ends up fragmenting the body of the Holy People of God. As an apostolic...
Every Catholic website worth its salt eventually reaches a point when it must weigh in on the never-ending debate over the Sign of Peace. Where Peter Is has now arrived at this point. I’m writing about this topic because yesterday, I saw a Tweet by Lizzie Reezay, a young woman with a popular...
Under Pope Francis, and in part as a reaction to his papacy, we are witnessing the flourishing of a Catholic fundamentalism that often borrows from its Protestant predecessors (see, for example, this article by Mark Silk for an overview of the subject). In this post, I will look at an idea drawn from...
“Today’s Gospel reading (cf. Mt 5:17-37) is on the “Sermon on the Mount” and deals with the subject of the fulfilment of the Law: how should I fulfil the Law, how can I do it? Jesus wants to help his listeners take the right approach to the prescriptions of the Commandments given to...
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 tendencies constitutes Americanism (a single tendency could apply to many other errors and...
“Behold the desert, place of life not of death, because to converse with the Lord in silence restores life to us.” Pope Francis, Ash Wednesday General Audience (Source: Zenit) In his weekly audience for Ash Wednesday this year, Pope Francis returned to the idea that silence is an essential part of Christian life, for...
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 tendency as part of the heresy of Americanism. In more contemporary language, the...
The most recent controversy involving CNA’s reporting of a meeting between Fr. James Martin and Pope Francis illustrates well just how much Martin has become a lightning rod, in social media and beyond, for his advocacy for and on behalf of LGBT Catholics. But why? It is superficial to think that the controversy...
There are, unfortunately, Catholics who think that defending Pope Francis involves tearing down his predecessors. Throughout his pontificate, they have portrayed almost everything Pope Francis has done as “finally correcting” the bad practices of his predecessors and ignoring the good that they accomplished. This is a problem because these Catholics fall into the...
The gospel reading today ends with Jesus summing up his great Sermon on the Mount by saying, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We can easily misunderstand what this passage means and leave feeling like Jesus is placing moral demands on us that simply are not possible. I’ve heard...
On Tuesday, February 18, 2020, JD Flynn wrote an essay in First Things arguing that Father James Martin, an American Jesuit known for his ministry and pastoral outreach to the LGBT community, presents “a vision of the human person at odds with Catholic teaching.” In the piece, Flynn quoted neither Father Martin nor...
“An authentic option for the poor and the abandoned, while motivating us to liberate them from material poverty and to defend their rights, also involves inviting them to a friendship with the Lord that can elevate and dignify them (…) Nor can we be content with a social message. If we devote our...
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