A reflection on the readings of Sunday, August 27, 2023 — The 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time Friends, Jesus is Lord. What an audacious statement to make in Caesarea Philippi! A city known for its temple to the Pan God and dedicated to Tiberius Caesar, who is considered to be the Lord. The majority...
A reflection on the readings of Sunday, August 27, 2023 — The 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time Over a decade ago, I was blessed to be present as a young priest in St. Peter’s Square on March 12 as white smoke billowed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Then, as now, I...
This week, someone sent me a link to Scott Hahn’s Facebook page, where the prominent Catholic professor, author, and speaker shared Bishop Joseph Strickland’s latest pastoral letter, writing, “I am grateful for Bishop Strickland’s inspiring words.” Later, another reader mentioned the fact that Hahn is scheduled to speak in Strickland’s diocese of Tyler,...
[God] has constituted the Church the guardian and the teacher of the whole of the truth concerning religion and moral conduct; to her therefore should the faithful show obedience and subject their minds and hearts so as to be kept unharmed and free from error and moral corruption, and so that they shall...
Last month, we celebrated the feast of Saint Bonaventure. This saint is one of my favorites, and also apparently a favorite of Archbishop Fernandez, who did his doctoral work on this Doctor of the Church. I am quite encouraged that our new prefect of the DDF has shown such interest in Bonaventure’s thought....
I work with homeless and at-risk youth. I’ve been doing it for 42 years, the first few decades in or around New York City but for the last 20 years in Vermont. I’m an executive director, a role which entails much time and energy attending to budgeting, fundraising, and strategic planning. But I...
Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire has taken the trouble to respond to my Commonweal article on World Youth Day in Lisbon, which we were both at, in order to dispel my “confusions” over the distinction between evangelization and proselytism, and what Pope Francis means by those two terms. Barron says that...
The correct answer to the unconditional question “Who is like God?” is the unconditional response “No one is like God!” Only God is truly infinite. Only God exists essentially. Only God is absolutely perfect. All finite substances have real essential powers, but every finite nature presupposes a divine Nature who possesses these powers...
In our first article in this series on Union and Communion, we considered the state of peaceful integrity in which God created the human race, and in our last article we studied how that integrity was lost through our disobedience. Before going on to the consequences of our fractured integrity, I want to...
In a Pope Francis Generation first, this interview was recorded in-person at my house. (If you’re watching on Youtube, you’ll see that we recorded this conversation in my wife, Kristina’s, art studio for her business, Painted Sanctuary.) For this episode, I talked with my good friend, Brian Armbrustmacher, about what it means to discern...
A Reflection on the Readings for August 20, 2023 — The 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time In today’s Gospel reading, we find Jesus as far away from Jerusalem as he’s ever been, at least when you look to his travels that are recorded in the four Gospels. With his disciples, Jesus had walked...
Last week at Where Peter Is, we published a lengthy essay in four parts by theologian Robert Fastiggi, PhD, on the magisterial authority of the 2018 revision to no. 2267 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) on the death penalty. In his essay, Dr. Fastiggi provides a comprehensive and convincing argument that Pope Francis’s teaching...
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