The news was heard far back: Pope Francis was to reform the Roman Curia! From the beginning of his pontificate, the reformation project appears to be primordial in his to-do list. Rightly so, because in the last years of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, the need for reform became more evident by controversies one after another.
There are striking parallels between the Russian disinformation campaign that continues to foul the global communications space in the third month of the war on Ukraine and the hysterical screeds of pro-abortion American politicians after a draft Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case leaked.
As of May 15, Catholic journalists around the world will be able to count one of their number among the saints, as Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite killed at the Dachau concentration camp in 1942, is canonized in St. Peter’s Square.
I’ve been thinking about Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” and its relationship to a deceased Russian Orthodox priest.
Pope Francis is undoubtedly grieved by the carnage in Ukraine. And when the Catholic Church’s chief ecumenical officer, Cardinal Kurt Koch, tells journalists he shares the papal conviction that religious justifications of aggression are “blasphemy” — a wicked use of the things of God — we may be sure that this, too, is Francis’s view of things.
In the golden age of the Catholic episcopate — the days of great Church Fathers like Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo in the early and mid-first millennium — bishops were not infrequently in contact with each other, encouraging, consulting, and, when necessary, correcting.
In both the Roman and Byzantine liturgical calendars, Lent 2022 has coincided with a brutal war in Ukraine. That war was launched by Russia’s Vladimir Putin for an ignoble, imperial cause.
On May 13, 1982, Pope John Paul II flew to Portugal on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving for his life having been spared the year before
Every war is a defeat for humanity, because men and women endowed with reason should be able to resolve their differences without mass violence.
Even the Bible contains stories of falsehoods. We can find one in the gospel of Matthew against the truth of the resurrection. Accordingly, the guards of the sepulcher where the body of Jesus was laid reported to the chief priests who assembled with the elders and took counsel.
