Category: News

Above: Jorge Bergoglio as Cardinal.  Text of a talk given to the Latin Mass Society in London on November 24th, 2023. Mr. Sire’s audio of this talk can be heard here. When Joseph Shaw proposed this talk to me in early September, I suggested the title “Pope Francis: how much lower can we sink?”, but…

Experience is everything, the saying goes. Well, almost everything. The difficult thing is how many spiritual directors and pastors have to give directions on things of which they often know very little, most of all marriage and family life. As Hubert van Zeller notes (in We Sing While There’s Voice Left), “neither books nor sermons,…

My uncle, a Catholic priest, and I stood by an Irish strand in the shoe-box-sized village of Castlegregory on a July evening in 1992. We were watching my cousin Brendan play pick-up soccer with a dozen or so teens beneath an incensed Irish sky of salt, seaweed, and burnt sod. It was the first night…

We might be tempted to ask rhetorically if there was ever a time in the Church when divisions in factions, disagreements between groups was ever so bad as now? On the 2nd Sunday of Advent we hear from Paul’s letter to the Romans. There had been sizeable Jewish community in Rome because of both 2nd…