The Benedictine Monastery and the Franciscan Field Hospital Catholics aren’t Countercultural As Catholics, we’re called to resist the “culture of death” and the “throw-away culture.” Does this mean we are countercultural? Are we being called to oppose a culture, or...
Wilderness is a conflicted, multi-faceted idea. It is a place we escape to for quiet and solace but not somewhere to call home. It can be threatening and dangerous while offering refreshment and recreation. In the Catholic imagination, it is...
Foncebadón is the highest village on the Camino, where pilgrims climb the mountain trail west from León. The area is known as the Maragatería and by the 1990s its ruined villages had become emblematic of the new social problem of...
We have come to know and expect that whenever the pope writes or says anything of significance, he will earn the ire of professional provocateurs. Now, in the eighth year of Francis’s papacy, there’s a certain comforting predictability about the...
In his address to the US Congress in 2015, Pope Francis mentioned the prominent American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, describing him as “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for...
For the past couple of weeks I have taken up Pope Francis’s recent encouragement that we read his encyclical Laudato Si. I’m ashamed to say that I’d never read it before, but I decided that now is as good a...
Author’s Note: This article borrows heavily from my 2018 response to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s Oeconomicae et Pecnuniariae Quaestiones. This updated and rewritten article incorporates more recent ideas and examples. The conversation on Universal Basic Income...
In a recent piece for National Review, Francis X. Maier (a long-time advisor to recently retired Archbishop Charles J. Chaput) presents an argument against the “derisive and condescending” dismissal by Pope Francis’s supporters of his critics. Maier even suggests that...
The pope’s official response to the Amazon Synod was released on Wednesday. Entitled Querida Amazonia (“Beloved Amazon”), it is said to complement rather than supercede the synod’s own Final Document (my analysis of which you can read here) (QA 2)....
The final document of October’s synod of bishops on the Amazon has finally received an official English translation (here). Among its themes and proposals stands out its emphasis on caring for creation (ecology). News coverage of the synod was dominated...
The debate touched off by Senator Marco Rubio’s recent speech at the Catholic University of America reveals major fault lines within current Catholic thinking in the United States. What Rubio, who is Catholic, pointed out in his speech seemed straightforward...
In my last article about the Our Lady of the Amazon / Pachamama controversy, I tried to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the various claims about the identity of the enigmatic wooden carved figure. I reached the conclusion, supported by...
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