Catholics filled with righteous anger over the vile behavior of the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, and Catholics determined to help reform the Church in order to cleanse the Church and prevent similar wickedness in the future, have something to learn from Rabbi Fackenheim. In our case, the lesson must be: Don’t give the Evil One victories.
If you attend any major Catholic gathering throughout the United States, chances are that talks are offered in the two predominant languages in which most Catholics worship in the country, namely English and Spanish.
My sacramental theology class during formation included so much information about the matter, form, minister and recipient of each sacrament. It was wonderful for someone like me, a “cradle Catholic” who does not recall learning all these essential facts.
TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: You don’t want to be around me at breakfast. I am not a chipper morning person, and it’s best to leave me to the coffee and the newspaper – and I mean newspaper, not online edition – until I become fit for human company.
WITH HIS BIGGEST GRIN, my toddler came to show me the water balloon he was gifted from a friendly mom at my neighborhood playground.
CATHOLICS IN THE United States have excelled in developing amazing structures and resources for pastoral leadership formation at all levels in seminaries, houses of formation, colleges and universities, pastoral institutes, online programs and catechetical formation initiatives, among others.
JULY 25 WAS THE 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical on the integrity of love and the appropriate means of family planning. Issued during the cultural meltdown of the 1960s, and in a year when irrationality stalked the entire Western world, Humanae Vitae instantly became the most vilified act of the papal magisterium in history. And to what should have been their shame, entire national episcopates distanced themselves from Pope Paul’s teaching by a variety of stratagems, many of which exhibited some degree of theological confusion and some were downright cowardly.
ACCOMPANYING MY mother to the public market in Haiti one day when I was eight years old, I saw a man wearing a cassock crossing the street.
Growing up in today’s society, it is not uncommon to hear clichés being taught to children, such as, “Do what makes you happy,” or, “Follow your heart.” While it is true that we ought to do what makes us happy and do what we believe to be right, those phrases leave out an important fact: without God, you cannot be happy.
When the great Tom Wolfe died on May 14 – he of the white suits, the spats, and the prose style as exuberant as his wardrobe – I, like millions of others, remembered the many moments of pleasure I had gotten from his work.
