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Where Peter Is

Which Pope said this?

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 (…)...

The Task of the Sculptor

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...

The Liturgical Reform: Council, Consilium, and Papacy

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...

Seeking a Via Media on Christian Unity

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...

Tolkien on Loyalty to the Church

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...

Which Pope said this?

“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,...

Fiducia Supplicans and answering “What happens next?”

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...

Give this Sunday over to the word of God

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...

Papal compromise or capitulation?

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...