A sub-category of News.
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…
Fear of Judgment Is the Way of the Saints Over and over in the Eastern Rite is supplication made for “a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.” The Apostle warns, we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the proper things of the body,…
On December 8, 2017, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone celebrated Frank La Rocca’s Mass of the Americas for the very first time in the Cathedral of Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco. Thousands of Hispanic Catholics came on the Saturday before Our Lady of Guadalupe’s great feast day, participating in a 12-mile pilgrimage through the…
I distinctly remember sitting in my driveway in my old Hyundai Tucson—stick shift, I might add—about a decade ago, cogitating on all things divine, trying to sort out what I believed about religion. I won’t go into the full story here, but I am a “revert,” which is to say I was baptized as an…
