Pope Francis’s recent announcement that he will create 21 new cardinals on August 27, 16 of whom would vote in a conclave held after that date, set off the usual flurry of speculations about the shape of the next papal election. Much of that crystal ball-gazing was less than useful, based as it was on numerous myths about conclaves.
Given the rubbish about Ukraine spewed out by Russian trolls and regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans, this year’s annual Summer Reading List will focus on serious books that explain the background, including the religious dimension, of a conflict that will shape Europe’s future — and ours.
With a gracious assist from former Kansas governor Sam Brownback, I had the privilege of a personal tour of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Museum in Abilene this past March.
Tertullian, the first major Christian theologian to write in Latin, is thought to have coined the maxim Semen est sanguis Christianorum, typically (and rather freely) translated as “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
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.
