Those of us in Rome in those electric days could not fail to have been impressed by the enthusiasm that greeted the 267th bishop of Rome. Yet it struck me then, as it strikes me now, that there are potential downsides to the Petrocentrism — the tight focus on the papacy and the pope as the index of “all things Catholic” — that has been on display throughout the Catholic world for some time now.
Why are so many U.S. colleges and universities in crisis? Drew Gilpin Faust, an accomplished Civil War historian, gave the answer, perhaps unwittingly, at her 2007 inauguration as the 28th president of Harvard University.
Rhetorical restraint is not prominent in D.C. these days. Given the volatile personalities involved and the escalatory effects of social media, one hesitates to declare that the apogee of apoplexy has been reached — or ever will be.
In the Passionist public chapel at the Immaculate Conception Monastery in Jamaica, there’s an extraordinary crucifix — a gift of the German bishops of Bavaria to Father Fabian Flynn, CP, who helped restore a broken Europe, particularly Germany and Hungary, after World War II.
Within a few hours of the election of Pope Leo XIV and his masterful presentation of himself to the Church and the world from the central loggia of the Vatican basilica, I received an email from an old friend, a member of a prominent Catholic family in Nicaragua:
The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics were less than 1% of the population of Japan. Today, 80 years later, Catholics are still less than 1% of the Japanese population, although Japan — with a below-replacement-level birth rate for decades — is in demographic free fall.
Christian conviction continues to warp European high culture and erode European civil liberties. A vast immigration from North Africa and the Middle East has created immense social problems that feckless politicians seem incapable of addressing.
During the March 2013 interregnum following the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, and in the conclave itself, proponents of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, as Benedict’s successor described him as an orthodox, tough-minded, courageous reformer who would clean the Vatican’s Augean stables while maintaining the theological and pastoral line that had guided the Church since John Paul II’s election in 1978: dynamic orthodoxy in service to a revitalized proclamation of the Gospel, in a world badly needing the witness and charity of a Church of missionary disciples.
In a few days, it will be one year since Rita Hayden peacefully returned to the house of the Father. She passed on May 6, 2024, which is the month dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary (or Pompei).
Last Christmas, I borrowed a thought from the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander and suggested in this space that the wood of the manger anticipates the wood of the Cross: that Christmas points to Easter, but only by traversing the Via Crucis to Calvary.
