Now billed as “The Slap Seen ’round the World,” the video footage of the Holy Father’s encounter with an apparently over-zealous admirer at St. Peter’s Square on New Year’s Eve has gone viral. In a pontificate that has seen the Catholic world become deeply polarized over the style, personality, and actions of the Church’s current [...]

I found Charles Coulombe’s latest column for Crisis (“Can the Catechism Get It Wrong?”) of particular interest, coming as it did a few days after Pope Francis’s visit to Japan—the first such visit in 38 years—where his remarks about nuclear weapons apparently exceeded anything his predecessors had said on the subject. Before Francis, the Vatican’s [...]

Bishop Richard J. Malone of the Diocese of Buffalo is “retiring” a couple of years early. After seven years of allegedly allowing priests accused of statutory rape and unwanted touching to remain in ministry, after concealing hundreds of pages of damning litigation documents from the public, after being secretly recorded calling an active parish priest [...]

In the wake of the amusements surrounding the Vatican’s Amazon Synod, Pope Francis made an important statement at the conference of the International Association of Penal Law on November 15. Thereat the Holy Father declared: “We should be introducing—we were thinking—in the Catechism of the Catholic Church the sin against ecology, ecological sin against the [...]

Nobody was under any illusions about the stakes at the Synod on the Amazon. Ostensibly, the synod was convened to help the Pope address concerns about the Amazon in consultation with Amazonian church authorities. It was evident from the very beginning, however, that the synod would serve instead as a staging-ground for progressively-minded bishops to [...]

The faithful laity had reason to be wary of the Amazon synod before it even began—if only because a well-known ally of liberation theologians like Cláudio Cardinal Hummes was appointed first to the pre-synodal council and then as relator general of the synod itself. And yet, at least outside Latin America, such concerns have focused [...]

“These liberation theologians are promoting the idea that the Indians who still live in a primitive way are very happy, living in paradise,” said Macuxi tribal chief Jonas Marcolino Macuxí, referring to bishops at the pan-Amazon synod. “But that’s not true.” He’s right. The myth of the noble savage is alive and well at the [...]

The raid by Vatican police on the Holy See’s Secretariat of State and its Financial Information Authority on October 1, followed by the alleged dismissal of five Vatican employees, made headlines around the world. An official statement from the Holy See issued on the same day declared that the Vatican chief prosecutor Gian Piero Milano [...]

The Synod of Bishops on the Amazon is off to an ominous start. Each day, as more bizarre, jarring, and revolutionary developments emerge, I keep coming back to a line from Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor: “When the cardinals elected Bergoglio they did not know what a Pandora’s box they were opening.” Shortly before the synod started, [...]

The Holy Father has spilled a great deal of ink impressing upon the First World its duty to welcome economic migrants. Now he’s turned to spilling bronze. The Vatican has become the new home of a lumpy brown mass depicting a crowd of emaciated figures evidently waiting for their chance at a better life. Many [...]

Analytical psychology provided a virtually limitless opportunity for Carl Jung to play with the canonical vocabulary, expanding it to describe what he thought to be wider realms of human consciousness. An example of his creativity was his concept of Synchronizität. This “synchronicity” described what he perceived to be “meaningful coincidences,” by which he meant events [...]

The cracks in the Axis powers became clear when the Armistice of Cassibile was announced on September 8, 1943, after the Italian government broke with the Nazis and joined the Western Allies. The National Socialists under the codename Unternehmen Alarich tried to take over the Italian zones of occupation in southern France and the Balkans [...]

Pope Francis boldly declared last week that he’s unafraid of “pseudo-schismatics”: a clique of (mostly American) rigorist prelates and journalists whom Francis regards as a kind of loyal opposition to his papacy. But why should he have been afraid to begin with? A pseudo-schismatic is, by definition, not a schismatic. Pontiffs need no more fear [...]

Recent clashes between former Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and supporters of Pope Francis are a sort of microcosm for the divisions that turn the faithful against each other around the world. Writing in the August 30 issue of Foreign Policy, Mattia Ferraresi opines: It is a tale of two Catholic churches. One is [...]

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 [...]

“The Vatican’s new document on gender will be used to oppress and harm LGBT people. It perpetuates false stereotypes that encourage hatred, bigotry, and violence.” This statement from New Ways Ministry was tweeted by Fr. James Martin in reaction to an important new Vatican statement by Pope Francis’s Congregation for Catholic Education. Issued during Pride [...]

Thanks to Pope Francis, the Vatican now joins the growing list of the world’s sanctuary cities. If you’re a clergyman wanted by civil authorities or Church authorities in your native land, the Vatican will offer you a safe haven and, quite possibly, a cushy job. When Monsignor Battista Ricca got in trouble over a string [...]

Sæva indignatio. Few writers in the history of English letters could express “savage indignation” at human folly as did Jonathan Swift who wrote those words for his own epitaph. Our times give ample opportunity to empathize with him, and that is never more so than when clerics get together in large numbers. Bishops have many [...]

Recently I heard of an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist who, during visits to a nursing home, was offering the Holy Sacrament to everyone, regardless of religious affiliation. She claimed that Jesus loves and welcomes everyone, and offering the Eucharist to any and all is an extension of that love. When some friends disagreed with [...]