Rome’s Aventine Hill has seen a lot.

Legend has it that a dispute over the hill led to the fratricidal conflict between the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus. During the Roman Republic the Aventine was a working class neighborhood, high above the city’s most important port. In imperial Rome the Aventine was gentrified, becoming the neighborhood-of-choice for knights and senators. Later still, great palaces were built on the Aventine, which offers an unparalleled city vista.

The post-synodal apostolic exhortation “Querida Amazonia” [Beloved Amazon] did not accept or endorse the 2019 Amazonian synod’s proposal that viri probati — mature married men — be ordained priests in that region. So until the German Church’s “synodal path” comes up with a similar proposal, a period of pause has been created in which some non-hysterical reflection on the priesthood and celibacy can take place throughout the world Church. Several points might be usefully pondered in the course of that conversation.

I am writing this article on Feb. 11, the Feast of our Lady of Lourdes, which our late Holy Father, Pope St. John Paul II designated as “The World Day of the Sick.” 

Her fiction may occasionally get the chop in politically correct 21st-century American high schools. But as Benjamin Alexander writes in the preface to a new collection of her letters, Flannery O’Connor’s place in the pantheon of American short story writers seems safe, up there with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. (I’d be tempted to drop Hemingway from the canon, but that’s a matter for another day.)

Seventy-five years ago, on Jan. 27, 1945, the infantrymen of the Red Army’s 322nd Rifle Division were bludgeoning their way into the Third Reich when they discovered the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps.

by Father John J. O’Connor, VF, SLL

Annually, on the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, the Church celebrates the World Day of the Sick. It is a day first instituted by John St. Paul II in 1993 to raise awareness for those who are sick among us and to offer them the healing grace of Christ’s redemptive work.

Immediately after news broke on January 12 that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal Robert Sarah had written a book on the crisis of the priesthood in the 21st-century Church, online hysteria erupted — which rather underscored the prudence of a New Year’s resolution I had recommended to concerned Catholics in a January 1 column: “Resolve to limit your exposure to the Catholic blogosphere.”

by Father Charles P. Keeney

Those who donate to the Propagation of the Faith may be familiar with the Mass intention forms that accompany the thank you letters sent from our office. Have you ever wondered who says those Masses, or where they are said?

by John L. Allen Jr. When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, I was something of a baseball nerd, which is how I fell hard in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Bear in mind, this was a full two decades after “Dem Bums” had pulled up stakes and left for the West […]

by Father Ronan Murphy

The life of Jesus began with Mary. Therefore, it was appropriate to begin the New Year with a feast of Mary, the Mother of God. Since Mary is the Mother of God, she is the Mother of joy. “Do not be afraid, for behold I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people, for today in the city of David, a Savior has been born to you who is Christ the Lord,” (Lk 2:11). So, the traditional greeting on the first day of the Year is one of joy: Happy New Year!