I think it’s time to begin again with Pope Francis. If this week in the Church has shown anything, it’s that many Catholics simply don’t get Pope Francis. Particularly in the US — although clear cracks have appeared in Germany,...
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’s election to the pontificate, we are remembering some of our favorite teaching moments from the past decade. Mike Lewis “Everyone is in need of reassurance, and if we, who have touched ‘the...
Our Holy Father Francis has written two exhortations, Evangelii Gaudium (2013) and Gaudete et Exultate (2018), that warn against two of the most pervasive and corrosive heresies in the 2,000 years of the Church: Neo-Pelagianism and Gnosticism. The pope, sensing...
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis discusses how “spiritual worldliness” can creep into the Church. He writes: This worldliness can be fuelled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is...
In Pope Francis’s 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, he expressed his desire for a renewed missionary impulse throughout the entire Church. Francis called for the Church to become more mission-oriented by making “ordinary pastoral activity on every level more inclusive...
What do you do when you find yourself in disagreement with a Church teaching or objecting to a discipline that the Church legitimately imposes? Many Catholics find themselves in this place at some point in their life of faith. Some...
In this morning’s General Audience address, Pope Francis began a new catechesis series on St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians. In just a few words, he returned to some familiar themes: inculturation of the Gospel, trust, discernment, prayer, and rigidity....
“Christ is our peace,” says St. Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians (2:14), but peace eludes us. Our quest to uproot injustice inevitably reveals more deep-seated injustices even while new ones continue to crop up. The problem is sin....
The lack of the unity in the Church in recent years has given rise to more than just a penchant for irrational scientific beliefs and moral dogmatism. It has also allowed the sin of vainglory to flourish and find new...
We are who we are because of the radical gift of God’s love as revealed in faith. Our identity as Catholic Christians can only be understood in the context of this gift. Everything else is ancillary. As Pope Francis says...
Back in January the Lord put on my mind and heart an idea for a theological essay that he wanted me to write. I don’t say that lightly here. Never before has something burned within me until I wrote it...
What will our world look like when this experiment in liberalism comes to an end? I am not asking this hypothetically. The reality is that once-democratic societies around the globe are increasingly eschewing the principles of liberalism in order to...
Popular Posts