Recently, the Archdiocese of Catania in Italy announced that there will be a three-year ban on godparents at baptisms because 99% of those selected by area families have been found unsuitable for the role. What is that role?

The Catholic Church thinks a lot about the past, the present, and the future. It’s not always clear which of the three is the focus of thought in a secularized society that rejects God.

President Joe Biden visited with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday, Oct. 29. The meeting was eagerly anticipated, partly because Catholics and others wondered what the two leaders might say, or not say, about Biden’s pro-abortion policies: Does his support of policies promoting access to procedures that kill unborn babies preclude him from reception of holy Communion? Should he even get to meet the Holy Father?

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, tracking incidents of destruction to Church-related sites around the U.S., reported on Oct. 14 that there had been 100 acts of vandalism since May 2020, including several in the Diocese of Brooklyn. This is more than a crime statistic.

The very first Catholic diocese in the United States of America was the Diocese of Baltimore, established in 1789. This diocese would encompass the entire new nation. In 1808, Baltimore was raised to the level of an archdiocese and four other dioceses were created: Boston, Bardstown, Philadelphia, and New York.

Eighteen years ago, the Most Rev. Nicholas DiMarzio was appointed by His Holiness, Pope Saint John Paul II, as the bishop of Brooklyn. In those 18  years, the world, the city, and the Church have changed much, but the Diocese of Brooklyn has had a steady hand guiding it.

The 20th Century spiritual writer, Thomas Merton, was reflecting once on an experience that he had shortly after entering the monastery. Father Louis (as Thomas Merton was called in religious life) describes a particularly powerful experience he had one day while shopping for the abbey:

This past week, Pope Francis participated in another apostolic journey, this time to Hungary and Slovakia. These apostolic journeys of the pontiff are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of the Church and have proven to be a powerful means of transmitting the closeness of the Holy See to the Church worldwide, as well as an effective means of spreading the Gospel.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has sued Texas to shut down a pro-life law, the Texas Heartbeat Act, which prohibits women from receiving an abortion after the baby’s heartbeat is detected.