With its annual collection coming up this Sunday, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development is fighting back against the organized effort encouraging Catholics to ignore the collection. CCHD’s woes began last year, when its grants to ACORN were terminated following the allegations of voter fraud and embezzlement brought against them during the … Read more
The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church John L. Allen Jr., Doubleday, 480 pages, $28 According to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, at the conclusion of His time on earth Jesus entrusted to the apostles and those who would come after them a mandate that was, and still … Read more
Leaving aside the popes, the person who has served as the public face of the Church in the United States for the past two decades is a little, crippled, chronically ill, old Italian-American lady who chats with Jesus daily, used to speak in tongues, and leaps before she looks. As I write this, she is … Read more
You may want to sit down for this, but flamboyantly apostate Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong actually thrilled me with a prescient bit of insight into Scripture! How is this possible? Well, there is a basic principle at work in the universe called the Gomer Pyle Axiom of High and Low Expectations. It works … Read more
Vatican II’s “Declaration on Christian Education” was clear that parents “must be recognized as the primary and principal educators” of their children. Your school’s attitude toward this foundational principal of Catholic education is the single best measure of the faithfulness of your local Catholic school. Indeed, the school should not only welcome your involvement as … Read more
Msgr. William Stetson is the secretary of the pastoral provision, the structure provided by Pope John Paul II in 1980 to enable married former Episcopal priests to be ordained as Catholic priests. The pastoral provision also empowers the establishment of “personal parishes” — groups to which the Church grants special pastoral care (in this case, … Read more
There’s a terrific moment in the TV show House, in which the irascible and brilliant Dr. Greg House is explaining to a lapsed Catholic subordinate why he doesn’t believe in the afterlife. House, with all the self-lacerating irony that actor Hugh Laurie can impart to the character, says, “I would hate to think that all … Read more
“‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’” “‘Great bosh.’” — Brideshead Revisited You needn’t be quite so blithe as Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder to know that visual art has gone far astray in the past 100 years. While the works of individual geniuses still arrest us with their idiosyncratic beauty — … Read more
One thing you can give our media Chattering Classes: They are utterly consistent. After Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on a roomful of defenseless people in Fort Hood, it was absolutely assured that we would immediately be told that this outrage had nothing to do with his Islamic faith and that it was … Read more
Theology can be defined many ways, but two definitions are perhaps most significant. The first could be described as “God-talk”: It is logos (speech) with theos (God). In this way, prayer is seen as theology proper. In time, this led to a second definition — that theology involves the study of God. The early Christians, … Read more
At least since the lavish dinners of the decadent Roman Republic, rulers and those who aspired to rule have frequently made a point of conspicuous consumption. Now, this isn’t always despicable; we expect those who represent legitimate authority on earth to express the dignity of their office. Even in the vigorous early days of … Read more
I can’t help but like Kathy Shaidle, the scrappy author of a Canadian blog called Five Feet of Fury. I’ve always had a weakness for people who tell you exactly what they think and never bother to mince words, and Shaidle is all that. One of the most forthright critics of Canada’s Tyranny of Nice … Read more
We never know what curiosities former students will come up with. Eric Wind, an ex-student long interested in the history of Georgetown College, found for sale on eBay an old examination given at Georgetown in January 1929. (Let me note that this test was not Schall’s, as in January of 1929, he was but … Read more
I love to tango.As a single Catholic woman, this isn’t always easy. Argentine tango can be danced close — very close. Its intimacy and passion can sweep me into the romantic ozone layer, obscuring any sense of reality. It lures me into wanting more — more intimacy, more connectedness, more transcendence. So why do I … Read more
This past Monday I reported that the USCCB Department of Communications is listed as a “principal partner” on the “So We Might See” Web site. So We Might See is a coalition of religious groups that is petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to investigate “hate speech.” Since the page on the organization’s Web site displaying … Read more
Having worked through the Deadly Sins, the opposite neuroses, and the Virtues that stand in the Golden Mean between them, it’s time to help the gentle reader put this knowledge to use. As I warned you, there will be a quiz. Since it’s truth that sets us free, the key to attaining Humility is stark … Read more
For anyone who strongly identifies with traditional Christianity, the October 6-9 series on Fox News’s Hannity, with Sean Hannity interviewing Michael Moore, was rich in irony and vaguely distressing. The occasion was Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story. Two bright, likable, and deeply sincere married men of middle age passionately argued the … Read more
Years ago, I heard a Black Pentecostal pastor in Spokane talking about a time he and some other local non-denominational pastors had been asked by a family they knew to come and pray for their granny who, her family said, “had an evil spirit.” One of the pastors was of a more modern frame of … Read more
In an important article for the American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord describes the effort of “So We Might See” — “a national inter-faith coalition for media justice,” according to its Web site — to force a Federal Communications Commission investigation of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. The organization’s petition to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski and … Read more
Unam Sanctam is the sort of document that gives our Protestant brothers and sisters a real jolt, primarily because it looks at first blush as though it teaches that Catholics cannot have Protestant brothers and sisters. Written by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, this papal bull concludes with a shocking dogmatic definition: We declare, … Read more