I was moved by Father Christopher Heanue’s “The Heart of a Priest Changing Assignments” (in the June 5 edition of The Tablet). It is refreshing to hear the genuine reaction of a pastor who is changing assignments. As parishioners, sometimes, we forget that they too have sentiments.
Fifteen months ago, it looked as if Cardinal George Pell might spend his 80th birthday in prison. A malicious trolling expedition by the police department of the State of Victoria in his native Australia had led to the cardinal’s indictment on manifestly absurd charges of “historic sexual abuse.”
It was a two-week whirlwind that changed my life forever, that first visit of mine to Poland in June 1991. Looking back on it, I’m reminded of something H.L. Mencken wrote of a similarly transformative experience: “It was brain-fagging and back-breaking, but it was grand beyond compare — an adventure of the first chop, a razzle-dazzle superb and elegant, a circus in forty rings.” My first weeks in Poland were all of that and more.
When I first became Principal of St. Francis de Sales Parish school in 2013, I took a few days to read about our school patron saint, St. Francis de Sales, and was surprised to discover that he was the patron saint of journalists.
Two Summer Mission Appeals have already taken place, and with extremely positive results. Every year dozens of missionary priests, brothers, sisters, lay missionaries, and even some bishops come to every parish in our diocese and make presentations about their various ministries.
It’s now the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but for native Baltimoreans of a certain vintage (like me), it is, was, and always will be “the Old Cathedral:” the first of its kind in the United States.
In Canon Law, the power to impose sanctions is under the exercise of authority, which we call “potestas regiminis” or “potestas jurisdictionis.” In English, it is the power of governance, which is of divine origin; hence it is a sacred power. In ministerial terms, it is the exercise of the governing office of Christ or the “munus regendi.”
One of the adornments of American Catholicism turned 90 on May 21: Dr. Paul R. McHugh, longtime head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and a healer after the heart of the Divine Physician. Few scientists have made greater contributions to unraveling the mysteries of our complex inner lives than Paul McHugh.
Cardinal Ladaria’s letter includes statements that are not self-evidently clear, in part because they seem inconsistent with what the congregation he heads taught in its 2002 “Doctrinal Note,” entitled The Participation of Catholics in Political Life.
The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (often referenced by its Latin title, Gaudium et Spes) is typically regarded as the most “progressive” of the 16 documents of Vatican II: the conciliar text that bespoke a new Catholic embrace of modernity while aligning the Church with liberal democratic political forces throughout the world.
