A sub-category of News.
From the release of his initial Testimony in August of 2018 to the present, I have followed Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s public statements with great interest and reported on them frequently. I wrote, for example, in September of 2019, when he was just beginning to examine the Second Vatican Council more thoroughly (both the historical…
Last week, on the morning of August 7th, Pope Francis, just before his regular Wednesday general audience, received a group of representatives from the Afghan Muslim community in Italy. He touched upon the “complicated and dramatic history [in Afghanistan], marked by a succession of wars and blood-stained conflicts, which have made it very difficult for…
The Holy Father has issued a letter recommending to all Catholics, and to seminarians and priests especially, the reading of imaginative literature. He suggests that literature should be a part of every seminary’s curriculum, something that I have long believed in; and we do seem to agree on some of the reasons for it. For…
A special opportunity for Catholic women that will offer solace for their souls amid the noise of the modern world is approaching. A Return to Tradition: Women’s Conference is scheduled for August 23-24 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Littleton, Colorado. This is the third year for the grassroots conference presented by…
Clichés are sometimes unavoidable (hindsight is 20/20), but then so is history—it provides clarity when obfuscation is the order of the day. It seems fitting to say that in some respects we have been here before. Earlier, it was with one who some say was a pioneer and in some respects a forerunner to 45—Patrick…
Ordinarily, do untrained and unprepared people “rise to the occasion” when faced with enormous challenges? In great fiction, they often do. In real life? Well, that’s another story. People who work in fields where error can result in death (e.g., soldiers, law enforcement, firemen, pilots, emergency doctors) will all tell you that “people don’t rise…
I get little solace from the idea that some future pope will come along and undo the Francis papacy. Not that I don’t think it could happen. But what is the point of a religion that changes from time to time depending on who is pope? What got me to this point is the scandal…
Often in the Gospels, when Christ associates Himself with the Father in such a way that He suggests that He, too, is divine, some scribe or Pharisee, that is, an expert on the Law and Prophets, get up in His face and interrogates Him. This is what happens in the Gospel reading from Luke 10:23-37…
There was a time when the opening lines of Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven” would have been widely known. Today, as I discovered on a recent trip to England to film a documentary on Thompson, the poem and the poet are almost entirely forgotten. Nowhere was this crass disregard for one of England’s…
I don’t get angry for fun. I wouldn’t say I get angry easily. When it comes to Pope Francis, I don’t delve deeply into Church politics. I know enough to know it’s consistently bad; I only try to have a general idea of the biggest doings. I tend to wonder how the hierarchy can be…
