Synod 2015 hopes
The XIV Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family begins with Mass in St. Peter’s on October 4. No synod in modern Catholic history has drawn such worldwide press attention or...
View ArticleIssues beneath issues at Synod 2015
ROME. Since Pope Francis announced that two Synods would examine the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family and work to devise more evangelically dynamic responses to that crisis, a lot of...
View ArticlePius XII, co-conspirator in tyrannicide
ROME. The great Piazza San Pietro is a five minute walk from where I’m living during Synod-2015. About three-quarters of the Square is bounded the famous Bernini colonnades, which reach out from the...
View ArticleA blessed loss
ROME. During Synod-2015, I’ve been reading John Martin Robinson’s Cardinal Consalvi: 1757-1824, a biography of Pope Pius VII’s secretary of state, one of the most impressive churchmen of his day, or...
View ArticleThe saints and all of us
ROME. Amidst all the Sturm und Drang of Synod-2015, something genuinely new in the life of the Church began, and it shouldn’t escape our notice. For the first time in two millennia, an entry in the...
View ArticleThe Speaker and the social doctrine
TRIGGER WARNING: This column will speak well of Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and compare him favorably to two liberal icons. Over forty years of teaching and writing...
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The Speaker and the social doctrine
TRIGGER WARNING: This column will speak well of Paul Ryan, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and compare him favorably to two liberal icons. Congressman Paul Ryan on the campaign trail...
View ArticleJohn Paul II’s “beloved Krakow”
Several years ago, Father Raymond de Souza, one of my fellow faculty members at an annual Kraków-based summer seminar on Catholic social doctrine, made a trenchant observation about the city John Paul...
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The grittiness in Catholic faith
Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher. Source: wikicommons JERUSALEM. Walking through the narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem’s Old City on my first visit here in fifteen years, I was powerfully struck once...
View ArticleA Thanksgiving reflection on freedom and its enemies
Shortly after jihadist murderers killed over 130 people in Paris, seven of the terrorists blowing themselves up in the process, President Obama spoke to the nation and described the massacres as “an...
View ArticleSynod-2015, Revisited
As I write, just before Thanksgiving, it’s been over a month since Synod-2015 finished its work. Yet there is still no official translation of the Synod’s Final Report into the major world languages...
View ArticleBooks for Christmas
It’s been a good reading year and I highly recommend the following to the readers on your Christmas (not “holiday”) shopping list: God or Nothing, by Cardinal Robert Sarah (Ignatius Press): It was the...
View ArticleRemembering two great bishops
We American Catholics are, in the main, notoriously uninterested in our own history. So it likely escaped the notice of many that December 3 marked the bicentenary of the death of John Carroll, one of...
View ArticleChristmas and a world upside-down
Biblical scholars generally agree that Luke’s Gospel was written at least a generation later than Paul’s first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Yet whatever the dating, and irrespective of...
View ArticleLiberal racism bares its fangs
Given the politically-correct hysteria that typically surrounds any discussion of racism these days, I hesitate to use the term. But it’s hard to find another that fits certain reactions to Synod-2015...
View ArticleLooking toward November 8
To redeploy a phrase from President Ford, our “long national nightmare” – in this case, the semi-permanent presidential campaign – will be over in eleven months, or at least suspended for a year or so....
View ArticleDear Father: Please stop it.
In all the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council, is there any prescription more regularly violated than General Norm 22.3 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy? Which, in case you’ve...
View ArticleA Ukrainian Christmas-at-the-crossroads
When Ukraine celebrated Christmas two weeks ago, there were ample reasons for pessimism about that long-suffering country’s future. The national parliament is often dysfunctional, even by Washington...
View ArticleChina’s Population Crisis: An Evangelical Opportunity?
State-sponsored cruelty has been a staple of the human condition for millennia. But has there ever been a more wicked policy, with more disastrous social consequences, than the “one-child policy” China...
View ArticleAnger and citizenship
The Iowa caucuses are in the rear-view mirror, the New Hampshire primary looms on the horizon, and by most media accounts, the leitmotif of Campaign 2016 is “anger.” As in: a...
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