In my updated post about the Notre Dame fire, I mentioned Fr. Jean-Marc Fournier, the French priest (and chaplain to the Paris Fire Dept.) who went into the burning cathedral to rescue both the Crown of Thorns, which was housed there, and the Blessed Sacrament. He gave a television interview (see the video) in French,…
Last night, I was having a chat with a Catholic friend. We were discussing something I had tweeted a couple of days ago: I still can’t figure out how they haven’t figured out how problematic these optics are. https://t.co/4IEVLCfzDb — Steve Skojec (@SteveSkojec) April 15, 2019 “It honestly baffles me,” my friend says. “I am…
Image via @princess_redd / Twitter Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has been burning for hours. It appears there will not be much left of France’s most iconic Catholic church by tomorrow morning. The blaze, which has already consumed the cathedral’s spire and collapsed the roof, was reported to have begun with a small fire, possibly…
Yesterday, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI broke his post-pontificate “silence” yet again in a 6,000-word essay about the crisis of clerical sex abuse in the Church, and his perspective on its origins. The letter was, he says, written in response to the February summit in Rome in which the heads of the world’s episcopal conferences came…
Martha Alegria Reichman is the widow of the late Alejandro Vallardes, who served as the Honduran ambassador to the Holy See for over two decades. She recently published a book about Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the leader of the pope’s council of cardinal-advisers and a figure increasingly associated with scandal. The book, entitled Sacred…
As had been widely speculated, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta was appointed Thursday to succeed Cardinal Donald Wuerl as the archbishop of Washington. The archdiocese has fallen under heavy scrutiny after its two most recent bishops have become emblematic of the clerical sex abuse crisis — Theodore McCarrick for his alleged abuse of priests, seminarians, and…
Asked by a journalist during the in-flight press conference home from Morocco about the potential consequences of his visit “for the future, for world peace, for coexistence in the dialogue between cultures,” Pope Francis responded: I will say that now there are flowers, the fruits will come later, but the flowers are promising. I am…
When I was about 16 years old, I remember lying in my bed and hearing the muffled conversation of my parents in the next room. All of my five younger siblings were asleep, and whatever it was that my parents were talking about, whatever stresses were upon them in that moment, I felt this overwhelming…
An interesting thing has been happening in the world of online Catholic commentary over the past year. Where we once stood among only a scant few outlets crying out about the corruption at the highest levels of the Church, we are quickly seeing a rising chorus of voices following our lead. Everywhere you look, Catholics…
I often struggle to listen to talks that commonly come in at an hour or more in length, because it’s difficult to set aside that much uninterrupted time to listen. But what follows here is a great — and blessedly short! (roughly 17 minutes) — talk by traditionalist priest, psychologist, and exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger…
As I said in a comment earlier this morning, what we are trying to provide here with our articles on the status of the papacy is clarity in the midst of escalating confusion. Just as Amoris Laetitia muddied the waters on sin and marriage, the thesis that Benedict is still the pope muddies our understanding…
