This Wall Street Journal article points to another casualty in the economic slump: churches. Many are having to close their doors because they can’t make their mortgage payments: Since 2008, nearly 200 religious facilities have been foreclosed on by banks, up from eight during the previous two years and virtually none in the decade before … Read more
Contraception is the elephant in the living room of contemporary Catholicism: Everybody knows it’s there, but few people care to acknowledge the fact. Meanwhile, the accumulating pastoral damage that results from this state of collective denial is painfully real. Partly it arises from the circumstance that even churchgoing Catholics today live in a state of … Read more
The otherwise inexplicable cure of a French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease was accepted in early January by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and Pope Benedict XVI as the confirming miracle that clears the way for the beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1, Divine Mercy Sunday. John Paul II’s life … Read more
There is a curious and creepy fact I have noticed. It runs through things like Heinrich Himmler’s secret address given in October 1943 to SS troops carrying out the mass murder of Jews: I also want to mention a very difficult subject before you here, completely openly. It should be discussed amongst us, and yet, … Read more
Big news today in episcopal appointments: Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, Oregon, has just been tapped as coadjutor bishop of Santa Rosa, California. According to Whispers in the Loggia, the current bishop of Santa Rosa, Bishop Daniel Walsh, will turn 73 in October, meaning that Bishop Vasa could be taking over the reins of the … Read more
In his annual speech to the Roman Rota, the tribunal that handles annulments, Pope Benedict told priests they must do a better job preparing couples for marriage. The Associated Press reports that the pope said no one has the right to a church wedding and that every Catholic bride and groom should intend to live … Read more
Politico columnist Michael Kinsley has a piece about the recent miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II. He questions whether the French nun, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, really had Parkinson’s at all, and criticizes the Church’s position on embryonic stem cell research, which he believes has denied him his own miracle via science: Congratulations to Simon-Pierre. … Read more
We use so many metaphors for the Church: the Mystical Body of Christ, the People of God, the Ark of Salvation, the Bride of Christ. It’s all too easy for these vivid, poetic images to vanish from our minds, or ring bitterly hollow, when our confidence is shaken a bit by crises in our lives … Read more
Catholics once had an intuitive understanding of sacred space: To enter a church, especially in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, was to enter a different kind of environment, one of the hallmarks of which was a reverent silence. Some of that intuition remains. But much of it has been lost. Thus, within the past … Read more
Nicole Kidman and her country music star husband, Keith Urban, welcomed a second child into their family last month. If you didn’t know she was pregnant, don’t worry — she wasn’t. Nor did she and her husband adopt. Here’s the statement they released to TMZ: Our family is truly blessed, and just so thankful, to … Read more
When it comes to the death penalty, the Church teaches: Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, nonlethal … Read more
On New Year’s Day, three Church of England bishops were received into the Catholic Church. John Broadhurst, Keith Newton, and Andrew Burnham were joined by two retired bishops, David Silk and Edwin Barnes. All five had been ministering to those Anglican clergy and people who had stood apart from the liberal innovations in the Anglican … Read more
Back in the 1980s, I was involved with a group that produced a booklet looking at the future of the Church in Britain. We were assured — and repeated, without really thinking about it very deeply — that the downward trend of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and ordinations to the priesthood meant that there would be … Read more
Like the comic, I still think of Epiphany as January 6. And yes, to me, the words “Ascension” and “Thursday” go together. (Pretty funny, given that not only was I born after Vatican II, but I didn’t even come into the Church until 1996!) I was just marveling earlier today that I perhaps am a … Read more
Whether right or wrong or a bit of both, thoughtful foreign views of the American scene have a lot to contribute to our national self-understanding. Clifford Longley, a veteran columnist for the London weekly the Tablet, a journal of “progressive” Catholic opinion, is no de Tocqueville, but he’s an intelligent man who, despite his ingrained … Read more
To be honest, I forgot about yesterday’s feast. I had celebrated Christmas at the splendid little Gothic Church of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan — and a rousingly festive solemn Latin Mass it was, complete with lovingly sung polyphony. That parish has a shrine to the unborn, complete with a book where bereaved or penitent … Read more
To me, there’s nothing that quite says “Christmas” like schadenfreude — that grim satisfaction one takes in watching the suffering of others, especially other people whose ideas are evil. The Church father Tertullian used to write in lengthy detail of how the Romans who tortured Christians would undergo the same tortures themselves in hell, while … Read more
My Christmas present to readers of this electronic journal this year will be to tell you to go read the Church Fathers. I should mention that you are getting this advice already “used,” or at least secondhand. I already wrote a column saying the same thing in a different way in my (very) secular newspaper … Read more
This is the story of the rebirth of St. Jerome Catholic School as St. Jerome Catholic Classical School. St. Jerome’s parish, located in Hyattsvile, Maryland, is an unusual case to begin with: Last year, it had 50 percent more baptisms than funerals, and it has four men currently in formation for the priesthood. But the … Read more
The Druids are back. Some may remember the Druids from half-forgotten Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games, or from the description of them in Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, where they are portrayed as important religious leaders who engaged in and presided over human sacrifices. Recent archeological findings support the literary evidence of human sacrifice, but … Read more