As Pope Leo XIV wraps up his two-week vacation at Castel Gandolfo, Catholic commentators have continued to speculate on and debate his views and priorities. They are prognosticating on the kind of pope he will be and on the decisions he will make in the years ahead. A little more than two months...
Last week, Pope Leo celebrated a Holy Mass for the Care of Creation at the Laudato si’ Center at Castel Gandolfo; for those wishing to reflect upon the texts from the Mass, a Latin original from the Vatican website with comprehensive chapter-and-verse Scriptural references for the readings and antiphons (thank you, Crisis Magazine)...
“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Mt 16:18) are the weighty, great and solemn words that Jesus speaks to Simon, son of John, after his profession of faith. This profession of faith was not the product of the Bethsaida fisherman’s human logic or the expression of any...
Note: This is the third article in a three-part series on masculinity. It is perhaps strange that a woman authored these articles, although there is certainly no dearth of men writing and speaking about femininity, so perhaps it is not so strange after all. Sometimes someone with an outside perspective can speak truth into areas that are too close for us to fully perceive, and it is...
Ten years ago, Pope Francis wrote the first environmental encyclical letter in the history of the Catholic Church. As he was writing it, so many of us who were, and still are, concerned about the sickening state of our wonderful Earth home, waited with hopeful anticipation. And when it was finally completed and...
Editor’s Note: This week, John Bellocchio, a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of the late Theodore McCarrick as a young teenager in Hackensack, New Jersey, forwarded me an email he received from the Diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey. The official who sent the email apparently forgot to delete multiple emails between...
Through the Scriptures, Tradition, liturgies, and devotions, people can encounter the living Christ and experience his love, healing, and freedom. But what happens when the women and men in the Church who are tasked with teaching doctrine, preaching God’s word, or presiding over the sacraments, do so with carelessness or coercion? What harm...
There exist a number of widespread criticisms of, or points of discomfort with, real or perceived Catholic doctrine on what we might call humanitarian grounds. The Catholic vision of the cosmos comes across to many non-Catholics and even to some Catholics as a harsh, punitive world, in which God, while perhaps less arbitrary...
Today those of us in the United States celebrate the feast day of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, who was the first Native American to be declared a saint and is the patroness of the environment and ecology (in Canada, her feast day is celebrated on April 17th). Since this year is marked by the...
In the book of Leviticus, we read that priests were forbidden to touch a corpse; to do so rendered a person ritually unclean (Lev 21:1–3). The priest and the Levite in this parable, who may have regarded the victim as a corpse, were more concerned about ritual or liturgical purity than they were...
Today’s gospel reading raises some very important questions. And it gives us some very important answers. The questions are human, but the answers are divine. Here are the questions: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbor?” The answers are given by Jesus himself. These questions and their...
So, we can ask ourselves once more: “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” (Mt 8:27). The hymn from the Letter to the Colossians that we have heard seems to answer this very question: “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all...
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