Pardon the Latin-rooted neologism, but if “patricide” works for murdering your father and “regicide” for taking out a king, why not “ecclesiacide” for trying to kill an entire Church?

This Mother’s Day, if your parish adds anything to Mass, let it be words of love. Prayers that celebrate motherhood as a calling.

Once you hold the host in your hands, and realize that the gift of the Eucharistic presence came from what looked like absence, you realize the paradox of every powerful love.

The Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion by helping God’s people embrace the mysteries of faith in love.

I had a couple of lengthy and, I thought, productive e-mail exchanges with one of the authors of a recent Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay” before its publication. I reprise those exchanges here.

It’s good to remember this Holy Week that we are empowered to get up and continue the journey because Christ got up from his three falls.

The entire purpose of Lent is to prepare us for the glory of Easter and its revelation of the destiny that God first intended for humanity “in the beginning”: the destiny that Christ made possible after the Fall through the paschal mystery of his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. As the Church concludes its Lenten journey, perhaps we might ponder three great themes that shape the spiritual rhythms of this noble penitential season.

If every crisis contains within itself an opportunity, though, the new Donatism offers Rome an opportunity for some essential clarifications.

For many years, John Allen was the best Anglophone Vaticanista ever, a man of great kindness who graciously helped everyone on that beat who had the sense to counsel with him.

Forty-seven years ago, Pope John Paul II issued his first encyclical, “Redemptor hominis” (“The Redeemer of Man”).