As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the election of Jorge Bergoglio to the Holy See of Rome, I’d like to look back on some of the major contributions of his pontificate to date. I’ve identified seven: dialogue and synodality,...
It’s been two years since Pope Francis released Fratelli Tutti, his remarkable encyclical on fraternity and social friendship. When Laudato Si’ came out in 2015, I wrote “Ten Quick Takeaways” for Commonweal magazine. Now I’ve decided to do the same thing for Fratelli Tutti. Why two years late?...
This morning, Pope Francis dedicated his entire Sunday Angelus address to the war in Ukraine, imploring Russian President Vladimir Putin to cease hostilities and calling for peace. Francis explained that he was doing so because “this terrible and inconceivable wound...
To think it was only a month ago that Francis’s announcement of an August consistory and his need to use a wheelchair due to a knee injury was fueling rumors that Pope Francis was planning to retire very soon. In...
Wars make strange bedfellows, and their first casualty is truth. War is always the hour of darkness, when disorder reigns, brute power sets the rules, and the innocent are crushed; when human appetites — lust, greed, rage, revenge — are...
Editor’s Note: This article is a translation of a column that originally appeared on El Heraldo de Mexico on March 21, 2022. The Roman Flavius Vegetius composed a work called “Epitoma rei militaris” around the year 390. In it, the...
During his Wednesday audience of March 16, 2022, Pope Francis commented that for all our talk of progress, “our imagination appears increasingly concentrated on the representation of a final catastrophe that will extinguish us…an eventual nuclear war… it seems that...
On Wednesday during his general audience, Pope Francis made an appeal for peace in Ukraine, and called for a day of prayer and fasting next week on Ash Wednesday: My heart aches greatly at the worsening situation in Ukraine. Despite...
I’m a little hesitant to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks for Where Peter Is. But I volunteered to do so, and so here I am. As a member of one of the youngest cohorts that...
Within the past twenty-four hours, Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, has fallen to the militant Islamist theocratic group the Taliban amidst the ongoing withdrawal of US forces from that country. The US overthrew a previous Taliban-led government in 2001 and...
While growing up in Canada, I vividly remember a moment that occurred during my elementary school’s lunch recess. Our prayer group, which met every Wednesday to say the Rosary, was just finishing up when a friend noticed a hung portrait...
This reflection is written against the backdrop of the release of Pope Francis’s third encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,“ on Oct 4, 2020, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. The focus of this encyclical is “fraternity” and “social friendship.” In his...
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