“Clericalism” has been a favorite buzzword of Pope Francis almost since the inception of his pontificate. He wields it like a Swiss army knife, applying it to every problem he doesn’t have a sufficient alternative explanation for. (There’s also not a little irony in his use of the term, but that’s par for the course.) Most recently, he…
We heard recently from two disparate Catholic authors who surprisingly agree about the current condition of the Catholic Church. One of the authors is Ross Douthat, self-described conservative Catholic and author of To Change the Church (subtitled “Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism”), a recent book that explores “what exactly constitutes the Catholic core.”…
Summer Theology Program 2019 St. Thomas’ Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians August 12–16 in Wausau, Wisconsin Hosted by the St. Albert the Great Center for Scholastic Studies, in collaboration with The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, and the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. The annual…
When news broke earlier this week about the formation of a new “super dicastery” for evangelization that will supersede the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I expected to see more commentary on it. As an American covering things coming out of Rome from 6,000 miles away, I’m less aware of the nuances and…
As a Millennial who was weaned on the Novus Ordo Missae, I have been inescapably molded by its main architect, Abp. Annibale Bugnini. Yet there is so much that I didn’t know about Bugnini and his revolution of the liturgy. I didn’t know, growing up, that a man infamously alleged to have been a Freemason…
Now that more and more Catholics are becoming aware of the many differences between the traditional rite of baptism that the Church used for well over a thousand years and its efficient, community-friendly, exorcism-free replacement at the hands of Paul VI, devout men and women have much reason to lament benefits of which they or…
Well, time sure is flying. It’s already the 24th of April, Lent is in the books, and Easter Sunday has come and gone. It’ll be Pentecost before we know it. And the warm-up to the pan-Amazonian synod — the one expected to take clerical celibacy out at the knees — is starting in just over…
This week, in a new report out of New York, we’re hearing that the Boy Scouts of America have the names of “thousands” of alleged child sex abusers taken from the ranks of their leadership. Does this sound familiar? The victims’ rights attorney, Jeff Anderson, called it a system of denial and cover-ups. He claims…
At the Solemn Mass on Easter Sunday at the FSSP parish in Philadelphia, the transitional deacon made a fascinating observation in his homily. The paschal joy, he said, too often remains on the level of emotion without apprehending the mystery of the Resurrection in its integrity. While it is true that there was a Baroque…
When news got out that Notre Dame was burning, I headed to Twitter. I arrived there as the first reports of the blaze that was soon to destroy much of the roof of the Notre Dame de Paris were still only beginning to roll in: early enough for me to initially assume that the few…
Just after I arrived home yesterday from Easter Mass, and gathered my children for an obligatory Easter photo to send to their grandparents. As I finished texting the photos to my mom and dad, I opened my social media feeds to find that another terrorist attack had claimed the lives of hundreds, many of them…
