A sub-category of News.
Most Catholics have never heard of Roy Campbell. He is forgotten. Neglected. Buried, so it seems, by the inexorable and merciless sands of time. Such neglect is nothing short of scandalous. There was a time, however, when he enjoyed fame and endured infamy, a time in which the very mention of his name would excite…
A few weeks ago, as I was leaving church, I fell into step with a fellow mom. She had missed most of the liturgy due to a young child who decided that he had simply had enough right around the Gospel. I have been in this situation myself many times, and I figured an encouraging…
“This book proved timely and necessary. There are so many questions and so much room for confusion in today’s situation. Embracing the steadfast hope of Mary on that first Saturday gives me a great solid foundation to stand on. Being able to see our history laid out so plainly is uplifting and hope filled. The…
The season of Advent and Christmas has always been one of the most intense moments of the liturgical year, as we remember the Incarnation of the Son of God who comes to save us. A beautiful testimony is that offered by the Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, who in a new book…
The excitement at Church Militant and the sizzling revelation from Tuchita’s DDF that nonbinaries can be godparents both obscured and underlined an important fact. Whatever party label we Catholics who aspire to be orthodox and practicing call ourselves by, we are all under attack—as individuals, as groups, indeed the entirety of the Church herself, of…
About a month ago, in Crisis, Kevin Wells suggested that one cause for Bishop Strickland’s dismissal was the ire of other bishops at his raising the issue of homosexuality in the priesthood at the USCCB conference in 2018. Regardless of whether that was a cause for his dismissal, the issue—for some it is not a…
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…
