Vatican City — In his latest apostolic exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis calls for “authentic” inculturation in the Amazon, so as to allow for the creation of a Church which truly bears the features of the region and the culture of its people. In the Pope’s latest document, published 12 February, Francis sets out...
1. The title “Querida Amazonia” is Portuguese / Spanish for “Dear Amazon”–as in somebody’s female beloved, or the salutation of a letter. Oftentimes (not always), a papal document with a title in a vernacular language is meant to speak to an immediate, specific socioeconomic or political problem–see Pius XI’s anti-fascist encyclicals Non abbiamo...
In an effort to counter the anti-Catholicism of nativists in the 19th century, the Church hierarchy in the United States made great efforts to assimilate waves of Catholic immigrants into the culture. Organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic Daughters of the Americas showcased the positive union of American and...
“What’s at the root of this temptation is to think that, given so many problems and deficiencies, the best answer would be to reorganize things, make changes and especially “patches”, that would order and synchronize the life of the Church by adapting it to the logic of a particular group. Through this path,...
“Jesus invites us not to be afraid to live in the world even if in it one sometimes runs into conditions of conflict and sin. In face of violence, of injustice, of oppression, a Christian can’t close himself in himself or hide in the security of his enclosure. The Church also can’t close...
“The Church well knows that it is difficult to mount an effective legal defence of life in pluralistic democracies, because of the presence of strong cultural currents with differing outlooks. At the same time, certain that moral truth cannot fail to make its presence deeply felt in every conscience, the Church encourages political...
The Church in the West is struggling to hand on the faith to the next generation. Parents themselves may find it difficult to remain in the faith. The abuse crisis has shattered trust in the Church, even while the Church struggles for relevance against the temptations and challenges of secular culture. But the...
ROME — The continuity between Saint John Paul II and Pope Francis is seen clearly by many, and examples of this have been discussed on this website many times (See here, here, and here). However, some seek to peg the legacy of John Paul II as somehow opposed to the pontificate of Francis....
One of the criticisms I heard about my article on the papal hand-slapping controversy was that I was trying to excuse Pope Francis of his wrongdoing. Of course, I was very clear in my article that the Pope had not reacted well, and that he had apologized, so this criticism doesn’t really stick....
In the first few centuries of Christian history, Christians found themselves persecuted simply because they were Christian. While there are debates about the number of Christians that were actually tortured or killed, the fact remains that early Christians were tortured and killed, and Christian apologists wrote to authorities — from local governors to...
This is, by my count, the fourth piece we’ve posted on the controversy regarding From the Depths of Our Hearts, a matter that should have been settled on January 14 by the official statement of the pope emeritus, but continues due to the determination of Pope Francis’s critics to keep the issue alive....
“I have never understood the expression non-negotiable values. Values are values, and that is it. I can’t say that, of the fingers of a hand, there is one less useful than the rest. Whereby I do not understand in what sense there may be negotiable values. I wrote in the exhortation ‘Evangelii Gaudium’...
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