“Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded,” Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical on the environment “Laudato Si’.”
LIKE SHELBY FOOTE’S three-volume masterpiece, “The Civil War: A Narrative,” Francis Parkman’s seven-volume colossus, “France and England in North America,” is worth reading and re-reading for its literary elegance as well as its historical insight.
POPE FRANCIS ADDRESSED the question of why he called for a Jubilee Year of Mercy in his homily for First Vespers for Divine Mercy Sunday:
Québec, a flourishing Catholic region for centuries, is now Catholicism’s empty quarter in the western hemisphere. There is no more religiously arid place between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego; there may be no more religiously arid place on the planet. And it all happened in the blink of an eye.
Cardinal Robert Sarah caused a rumpus this summer by proposing that the Catholic Church return to the practice of priest and people praying in the same direction during the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
TEN YEARS AGO, I wrote a column called “The Health Benefits of Going to Church.” In it, I reviewed two studies that examined whether attendance at religious services could be beneficial for overall health.
U.S. Catholics generally know little about the Church’s history in our country. But whether you’re trying to fill gaps in your knowledge or just looking for a good read, let me recommend Russell Shaw’s “Catholics in America – Religious Identity and Cultural Assimilation from John Carroll to Flannery O’Connor” (Ignatius Press).
I’d like to suggest another, perhaps deeper, answer to the question of the EU’s current distress: to put it bluntly, the “democracy deficit” is a reflection of Europe’s “God-deficit.”
After decades of grumbling about the Washington Post’s gross ignorance about matters Catholic, it occurred to me that the problem is that the Post supports a competing religion: the Church of Me.
American Catholics for whom the noun, not the adjective, is determinative are thus faced with a brutal fact: our deeply wounded political culture has produced two impossible options in the 2016 Republican and Democratic tickets.
