Lumen Gentium

Bishop Barron’s Pitiful (But Honest) Response to a Church in Crisis

Across the developed world, ignorant mobs and anarchists are tearing down statues of saints, defacing church monuments, and setting the churches on fire. Not to mention that in the developing world many Christians continue to suffer martyrdom by the thousands at the hands of secular and religious extremists. This has caused many people to finally … Read more

Why Vatican II’s Definition of Church Makes Sense

One of the most common criticisms of the Second Vatican Council is that it changed the teaching regarding the relationship between the idea of the Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church. Much of the debate among interpreters (and detractors) of Vatican II has centered around the phrase subsistit in, found in the conciliar … Read more

Extra Ecclesiam, Ecclesia

“All the way to heaven is heaven.”  ~ Catherine of Siena “You got any change, man?” I’d only made it a few blocks from the Denver Sheraton, and I’d already heard that request three times. “Sorry, I’m tapped out,” I mumbled. “That’s OK,” he replied with a smile as bright as his big orange Broncos … Read more

Divorced and Remarried are Called to Heroism…

The universal call to holiness is considered by many to be the most important development of the Second Vatican Council. The main location of this call is the fifth chapter of the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium: Thus it is evident to everyone, that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank … Read more

The Pope Gets Political

Evangelium Vitae – the “Gospel of Life” – is a warning and a plea to the people of the United States and other developed nations. The warning is that ours is fast becoming a culture of death. The plea is for us to join together in building a new culture of life. Pope John Paul … Read more

Georgetown’s Catholic Apologist for Islam

A non-Muslim activist lawyer has filed charges of discrimination against the Catholic University of America with the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights (OHR). The university is discriminating against Muslim students, he contends, by “forcing” them to conduct Islamic prayer services in rooms filled with crucifixes and other symbols of the Catholic faith. The … Read more

Unaccomodating

Two millennia into the Christian era, the niceness of Christians is on the way to becoming the biggest threat to Christianity. “I came to cast fire upon the earth,” Jesus famously said. The characteristic gesture of our religiosity may be the limp handshake of peace. “God doesn’t need ‘nice’ Christians,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput writes … Read more

Hiring and Firing Bishops

  Napoleon Bonaparte was a man who liked having things his way. To that end, you might say, he set about remaking the face of Europe. Another of the things he liked having his way was the Catholic Church, and to that end he set about remaking the hierarchy in France. In negotiating a concordat … Read more

Privatizing Religion

At a party back around Christmas, a man I hadn’t met before asked me what I do. I said I was a writer who, among other things, wrote fairly often about the situation of the Catholic laity in the Church. “Oh,” my new acquaintance responded innocently, “so are you a eucharistic minister in your parish?” … Read more

Can Non-Catholics Be Saved?

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

Listening to the Laity

  My last month’s column, on the subject of polarization in American Catholicism, touched off a lively and substantial discussion. My thanks to all who took part. I don’t propose to respond here to what was said, but simply to expand on an issue I raised originally but didn’t really develop.   Near the end … Read more

Why Vatican II?

One of the many peculiarities of contemporary Catholicism resides in the fact that so many people on the extreme left and extreme right of the Church are in basic agreement about the Second Vatican Council. In fundamental ways, they insist, Vatican II was a sharp break with the Catholic past. People on the left generally … Read more

Sins of Omission: Catholics, Marriage, and Politics

The California Supreme Court supremely violated the will of the people of that state when it overturned California’s eight-year-old Defense of Marriage Act. The court declared that homosexuals have a right to marry the person of their choice. The Catholic governor of California supported this ruling, as did several other prominent, publicly Catholic Californians. The … Read more

On Clericalism

Imagine a man who wakes up in the morning with a headache, fever, and chills. The symptoms persist and are there when he goes to bed that night. Next day, it’s the same thing again — headache, fever, chills. This continues day after day, week after week, over and over. Finally the poor man starts … Read more

Shrinking the Bishop’s Conference

When 250 or so American bishops travel to Baltimore in mid-November for a sentimental journey into the Catholic past, they may find more comfort in looking back than looking ahead. But look ahead they must. Their national organization, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), has come to a historic turning point.   Since the … Read more

Structures of Self-Deceit

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Garry Wills is a remarkably learned man. Graced with a powerful and confident mind and an elegant style, Wills is a forceful writer, with a clarity of conviction that is all too rare nowadays. Devoted to the rosary, the Mass, and the creed, he is deeply pious. But, above all, he … Read more

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