Recently, I was presented with a sincere argument asserting that the morality of the real-life Mark Hamill is unassailable due to the fact that he once portrayed the righteous Luke Skywalker. I mention this only to illustrate the point that …
Category: Moral Teaching
If You Had All the Time in the World, How Would You Attack the Church?
The recent Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church, accusing Pope Francis of heresy, precipitated a large number of commentaries. A common response was to cite ecclesiastical law for the proposition that “no one judges the pope” and …
Guilty or Not Guilty? Withhold Judgment in Abuse Cases
We are in the midst of the Easter season: He is Risen, alleluia, alleluia! We read in the book of the Apocalypse that Jesus Christ is “the first and the last” (22:13). Indeed, He is first in the eternal sense, …
Cardinal Cupich’s Selective Justice?
From an April 6 letter, written by Cardinal Blase Cupich, posted at the Archdiocese of Chicago’s website: Dear Parishioners of San José Luis Sánchez del Río, Last August, I informed you of the accusation against your pastor, Fr. Gary Graf, …
The Trial of Dr. Halliday Sutherland
At Christmas in 2013, I traveled from my home in Sydney, Australia to visit my mother in Britain. One morning, I was up early and decided to sort through a tea chest containing my belongings in the cellar below the …
Adelphopoiesis: The Myth of the “Gay” Byzantine Marriage Rite
The Church is in the midst of a battle between warring ideologies in the secular and ecclesiastical courts. One combatant is a certain confederation of groups that push for the normalization of homosexuality in the Church and the redefining of …
The Best Possible End to the McCarrick Affair
While the Vatican’s decision to laicize Theodore McCarrick was a valuable step, it is not, and cannot be, the end of the affair. Mr. McCarrick was the elephant in the room at the recently concluded Vatican summit. We still don’t …
Prominent Sex Abuse Whistleblower on the Summit: ‘This Cannot Be the Catholic Response’
During the press conference for the Vatican Summit on Sex Abuse, early Monday, Cardinal Blase Cupich was asked by CNN’s Delia Gallagher to address whether “part of the problem is that priests, bishops and Cardinals are, themselves, engaged in illicit …
Pope Francis’s Parade of Embarrassing Friendships
The least we can say is that the figure of Pope Bergoglio is embarrassing. Perhaps not so much for who he is as a person in himself – but then again… But more so for the people whom he obviously …
What the Lord of the Rings Teaches about Today’s Crisis in the Church
That The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest works of literature produced in the 20th century is universally acknowledged. The story is in many ways the embodiment of Chesterton’s famous quip that “fairy tales are more than …