We live in an age of demagoguery, where would-be petty tyrants grasp at power from behind the stalking horses of “oppressed” or “powerless” surrogates. We must “help the kids” or “save the planet” or do something-or-other for the peripheral groups of people who live at the margins of society. (Or is that the marginalized groups…
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment Edward Feser & Joseph Bessette Ignatius Press, 2017 500 pages $21.20 Paperback Sometime in the mid-1990s in Colombia, Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos lured a 6-year-old boy into an isolated spot and sodomized and murdered him. There were bite marks and other evidence…
Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from the recently-published book The Old Evangelization by 1P5 author Eric Sammons, published by Catholic Answers Press. One day, back when I was a diocesan director of evangelization, I was meeting with a pastor and some of his staff about launching evangelization efforts in their parish. The pastor had a sincere…
Image: Statue of Saint Germaine Cousin by Alexandre Falguière – by Wikimedia Commons Germaine Cousin was a 16th-century shepherdess who lived from 1579 to 1601. Born with a lame right hand and the disease scrofula (a non-tuberculous infection of the lymph nodes of the neck), she projected quite an unsightly appearance. The only child of…
In the wake of the sudden and sad death of Cardinal Joachim Meisner, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has just revealed in a new 5 July interview that he spoke with Cardinal Meisner the night before he died. As the Passauer Neue Presse reports: Müller had…
Cardinal Joachim Meisner of Germany, one of the four stalwart cardinals who authored and signed their name to the dubia, has passed on to his eternal reward. He did not live to see the dubia answered. He did not, in fact, even live to see his request for an audience with Pope Francis to discuss the matter dignified with a…
Walking the Road to God: Why I Left Everything Behind and Took to the Streets to Save Souls Fr. Lawrence Carney Caritas Press, 2016 210 pages $5.99 Kindle; $14.95 Paperback Walking the Road to God is a moving account of the mission and dream of Fr. Lawrence Carney, a traditional priest serving now as chaplain to the…
I was recently asked by a number of people: “When ought one to point out liturgical abuses and endeavor to correct them?” My interlocutors had been confused by a number of partial truths. Let us, then, exclude several erroneous answers. “To correct an abuse, you need to have perfect charity and disinterested motives.” No man…
This past week has been incredibly busy for Church news. There is a definitive sense that the Francis agenda has shifted, once again, into a higher gear. We didn’t have the time to cover all the stories of relevance over the past week, so here’s a top-level recap of what’s been happening, sorted by day.…
Two years ago, when this story came out, I asked some friends and fellow journalists, “Is this the trigger-pull on Pell?” At the time, of course, his name wasn’t even being mentioned. But as the events unfolded that would later be referred to as “Vatileaks II,” media reports of new allegations of financial mismanagement at the Vatican left…
Rumors of Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s impending departure as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are nothing new. But last week, a new story hit the radar, largely-unnoticed in the English-speaking world. The Argentinian newspaper Clarín ran a report saying that Pope Francis planned to take advantage of the looming July 2 deadline on Müller’s five-year mandate…
