Brother Charles thus reminds us that the first step in evangelizing is to have Jesus inside one’s heart; it is to “fall head over heels” for him. If this does not happen, we can hardly show it with our lives. Instead, we risk talking about ourselves, the group to which we belong (…)...
What does it mean to walk the path of Christ as a flawed person? We see over and over that God calls flawed humans to enact His word. What kind of perfection can God create with flawed servants such as us? What does it mean that we are part of God’s plan, that...
Editor’s note: This is a long-form essay in five parts, all published simultaneously below. The word count is around 12,400. Part 1 The liturgical path of the Church after Vatican II Introduction The Second Vatican Council, a watershed in the life of the Catholic Church, famously generated a number of significant reforms, particularly...
We’re coming towards the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It has passed with less remark at the Vatican than it usually does, likely because of how much else is on the Church’s and the world’s plate right now: the wars in Ukraine and in Israel-Palestine, multiple natural disasters and...
From 1963 to 1967 (during the Second Vatican Council and immediately following it), J.R.R. Tolkien wrote several letters to his son Michael. In them, Tolkien, who personally disliked many of the changes then being made to Church discipline and practice, explains why and how to be loyal to the Church in a time...
This slipped through the cracks at Where Peter Is when it happened last week, as things sometimes do, but on January 14, Pope Francis gave an interview on an Italian talk show in which he answered, among other things, questions about Fiducia supplicans and its reception. His answers show a great deal of...
A reflection on the readings of January 21, 2024 — The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (and the Sunday of the Word of God) The Book of Jonah is an odd little story, four short chapters that barely take up two pages in my Bible. He was perhaps the most reluctant of the...
“These are loves in which chastity has been missing: a virtue not to be confused with sexual abstinence – chastity is something different from sexual abstinence – but rather must be connected with the will never to possess the other. To love is to respect the other, to seek his or her happiness,...
Eve Tushnet has written a challenging and thought-provoking reflection on Fiducia Supplicans at Church Life Journal. Tushnet, one of very few public figures who identifies as “an openly gay, orthodox Catholic,” has thought and written extensively on the place of LGBT persons in the Church for years. Moving beyond the never-ending arguments in...
This upcoming Sunday, January 21, 2024, will be the Sunday of the Word of God! Established by Pope Francis in 2019, the third Sunday of Ordinary Time has been set aside so that it can be “given over entirely to the word of God, so as to appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in...
Pope Francis, in a recent interview, said that “I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.” There will no doubt be a lot of discussion about this, but I would like to add my viewpoint on the matter because it is a viewpoint that I have never seen mentioned in...
It is not new for Catholics to grumble about a perceived lack of “backbone” from the pope. The failure of the pope to remove bishops who have gone rogue, to defrock priests deemed heretical, or to excommunicate openly schismatic leaders can be frustrating for many of us. It’s not uncommon for onlookers to...
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