The Russian Path That Wasn’t Taken

I’ve been thinking about Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” and its relationship to a deceased Russian Orthodox priest.

The Pope & the Moscow Patriarch

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.

The Fraternal Correction

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.

A Wartime Meditation

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.

Salem and the Smoke of Satan

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

Is There Ever A ‘Just War’?

Every war is a defeat for humanity, because men and women endowed with reason should be able to resolve their differences without mass violence.

Msgr. Jonas Achacoso

Lies Against the Truth Of the Resurrection

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.

Russian Orthodox Awakening

For years, the two leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church with whom Pope Francis met by videoconference on March 16 — Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, and Metropolitan Hilarion, the Church’s chief ecumenical officer — have worked to buttress Vladimir Putin’s efforts to reconstitute a simulacrum of the Soviet Union in the name of a Russkiy mir (“Russian world”).

Archbishop Viganó Is Wrong on Ukraine

One of the minor characters in Evelyn Waugh’s World War II trilogy, “Sword of Honor,” is the commander of a super-secret military intelligence unit, Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole: a conspiracy theorist constantly connecting dots that no rational person would imagine connecting or even think connectable.

Most Needed: An Ecumenical Reset

In the early 1990s, I met Kirill, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, when the man christened Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev was chief ecumenical officer of the Russian Orthodox Church.