November 16, 2020
by Michael Warren Davis
“If you think that your priests and bishops are not saints, then be one for them.” — Robert Cardinal Sarah I know that many of our readers were irate over USCCB president Archbishop José Gomez’s statement on the 2020 election. Many of you were angry that he referred to Joe Biden as the second Catholic [...]
August 13, 2020
by Crisis Magazine
The Next Pope is available now from Sophia Institute Press. Photo credit: Vatican Pool/Getty Images
June 25, 2020
by Michael Warren Davis
“You ought to be a model of justice, a mirror of holiness, an exemplar of piety, a proclaimer of truth, a defender of the Faith, the terror of the wicked, the glory of the good, the rod of the mighty, the hammer of tyrants, the father of kings, the moderator of laws, the God of [...]
April 14, 2020
by Michael Morris
Trading in a sober view of our final ends for raw power has almost certainly been the Faustian transaction of our time. Then again, it truly is baked into the human experience, terminating with that infamous serpent who hoodwinked our first parents with his somatic wager to recast us as gods. The payout was anything [...]
March 19, 2020
by Michael Warren Davis
Few books have caused so much controversy even before they were published than did From the Depths of Our Hearts, a new defense of clerical celibacy in the Roman Church by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Robert Cardinal Sarah. On January 14, Benedict’s private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, told the Italian news agency ANSA that, [...]
March 16, 2020
by Sean Fitzpatrick
The #MeToo movement has finally reached Rome, and the wisdom of priestly celibacy is being hotly questioned. As it happens, H.G. Wells questioned it just as hotly nearly a century ago, and along many of the same lines. Though his denouncements of the Catholic Church and her priesthood have been largely forgotten, it is his [...]
November 12, 2019
by Joseph Pearce
One of the most encouraging developments in the Church in recent years has been the emergence of good, solid prelates from Africa. One thinks of Cardinal Arinze, whom many had thought might become the first African pope, and now there is the indomitable Robert Cardinal Sarah, whose forthright and courageous stance against much of the [...]
November 4, 2019
by Michael Warren Davis
In 1577, St. John of the Cross was taken prisoner by a group of Carmelites from Toledo who were opposed to the reforms of the Order he was undertaking with St. Teresa of Ávila. For eight or nine months, he was held in a six-by-ten-foot cell. The ceiling was so low that John (not a [...]
September 3, 2019
by Michael Warren Davis
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was roundly mocked last week for saying that Millennials are, in fact, the Greatest Generation. And rightly so. By and large, my generation is a waste of its fathers’ seed and a drain on their resources. Culturally, we’re vapid. Socially, we’re maladjusted. Spiritually, we’re lost. Politically, we’re just plain silly. Had Ms. Ocasio-Cortez [...]
February 4, 2019
by David G. Bonagura Jr.
Pope Francis and his pontificate go on trial February 21-24 when the heads of the world’s bishops’ conferences gather for a summit on “The Protection of Minors in the Church” after the fallout from clergy sexual abuse and its episcopal cover-up. Catholics worldwide are demanding real, structural reform that will prevent such scandals from ever [...]
January 2, 2018
by K. E. Colombini
“A wind there was, rude and boisterous, that shook the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the [...]
July 22, 2016
by L. Joseph Hebert
“Education,” according to Plato’s Socrates, “is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be”—it is not the putting of knowledge into the soul “as though [one] were putting sight into blind eyes.” Rather, education is the art of turning souls around so that our natural human powers, directed toward “what really is,” [...]
July 19, 2016
by Christian Browne
It has been said that Rome thinks in centuries. In the present age, however, it seems that Rome reacts in days. So Cardinal Sarah learned following a July 5 address on the liturgy, as the Vatican issued a clarification meant to quash speculation about the possibility of new enactments from Rome that would affect liturgical norms [...]
July 11, 2016
by Fr. James V. Schall
It is very important that we return as soon as possible to a common orientation, of priests and the faithful turned together in the same direction—eastward or at least towards the apse—to the Lord who comes. ∼ Robert Cardinal Sarah, Prefect, Congregation for the Divine Worship, London, July 5, 2016. Symbols mean something. A nephew of [...]
November 23, 2015
by Fr. James V. Schall
“Those who want to eradicate poverty make the Son of God a liar. They are mistaken and lying.” ∼ Robert Cardinal Sarah “The economic problem … has been solved already: we know how to provide enough and do not require any hostile, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem and, in a [...]
November 10, 2015
by Stephen Beale
Europe is the Faith—so Hilaire Belloc declared in 1920. Nearly a century later, the faith burns as bright as it did then, but it is Africa, not Europe, that is carrying the torch of orthodoxy. Such is the unavoidable take-away from last month’s synod on the family. With prominent Western traditionalists like Cardinal Raymond Burke [...]
November 2, 2015
by Regis Martin
Among the entitlements that apply to every Catholic, there is one whose violation in recent years has become all too frequent, and that is the right to remain secure in the faith we received in baptism. How else are we to confront our persecutors? Unless we are made to feel, on the strength of a [...]
August 6, 2015
by Samuel Gregg
No-one would describe the New York Times as especially sympathetic to orthodox Christianity. The Grey Lady’s established aversion to anything but all-but-completely secularized versions of the Christian faith didn’t, however, stop it from recently publishing a widely-read article underscoring the on-going brutal persecution of Christians in the Middle East. If the Times is perturbed about [...]
June 22, 2015
by Christian Browne
It was my intention to offer a fulsome commentary and critique of Laudato Si. However, as I commenced my third and closest reading of the document, I found myself overwhelmed by its voluminous nature, meandering and mixture of solid proclamation of Christian teaching with incoherent detours into all manner of political controversy. My principal concerns [...]