Midafternoon last Wednesday, on the eve of the Paschal Triduum, I got word that Fr. James Vincent Schall, S.J., had died. The news did not come as a complete surprise; a few days earlier I heard that he was going to be moved from a hospital in Los Gatos, California, to a hospice. My first … Read more
News is that Providence College, where I taught for 27 years, will be getting a new president in 2020. He won’t have troubles with money or buildings, whereas for re-establishing the Catholic faith as the school’s foundation, aim, and reason for existence, he will face, outside of the theology department, a nearly universal hostility from a … Read more
Catholic intelligence is not ordinarily focused on what a given pope might think, affirm, or write, however wise this source may prove to be. Catholicism has a many-faceted tradition that includes what is true while it carefully wrestles with what is not true. During the more recent pontificates of Popes Wojtyla and Ratzinger in particular, … Read more
“Something had given him leave to live in the present.” ~ Walker Percy A friend of mine sent me an email with this subject line: “A challenge for your blogging….” She included Elizabeth Scalia’s invitation to Catholics everywhere in the internet cosmos to write about “Why Do YOU Remain a Catholic”—an invitation itself prompted by … Read more