The Ascension is thus crucial in the Church’s response to the crisis of our time, which is the crisis in the very idea of the human person. That crisis comes into sharpest focus when we consider the loathsome practice that goes by the Orwellian moniker “natural organic reduction,” in which thermophile microbes reduce the mortal remains of men and women to compost, which can then be used like the compost you buy at Home Depot.
I was in Chicago on June 14 to attend Trinity Sunday’s vigil Mass at Rate Field, the home park of the Chicago White Sox, Pope Leo XIV’s favorite baseball team. More than a dozen priests and bishops, led by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, concelebrated a special Mass to mark the election of the first-ever American-born pope.
In its recent nondecision in St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Catholic School v. Drummond, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an obtuse Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that excluded St. Isidore’s from the state charter school program. Notre Dame Law Professor Richard Garnett, in a fine article at Law & Liberty, explains why they got it wrong.
In late May, Trump administration officials at the highest level, frustrated by what they regard as Vladimir Putin’s incomprehensible obstreperousness over his war on Ukraine, suggested that their patience was running out, after which the United States — which has not approved further military supplies for Ukraine in months — would leave the combatants to their own devices. “It’s not our war,” was the mantra of the day.
Holy Saturday in Breezy Point. What should have been the most joyous weekend on the Catholic calendar became one of heartbreak when a fire tore through St. Edmund Church.
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:
