“A foolish consistency,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” People and institutions of all sorts channel their inner Emerson all the time, invoking iron-clad principles when they’re convenient but finding loopholes when they’re not.
Being Catholic and a major party’s nominee for President of the United States has always been controversial. It has only occurred four times — including this year — and the reason for controversy has changed.
No political theme song could have been more appropriate for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign than Frank Sinatra’s classic cover of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s exuberant “High Hopes.”
When Father Brian S. Lewis celebrates Mass these days, it’s being filmed and uploaded to YouTube so that those who are self-isolating because of the increased spread of the coronavirus can worship along with him and his masked congregation at St. Jude the Apostle Catholic Church in Lewes.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett is the third Supreme Court nomination by President Donald Trump and the sixth Catholic on the nation’s highest judicial panel. At age 48, she is the fifth woman to serve on the Supreme Court, but the first with school-age children.
The annual Ignatian Family Teach-in for Justice, the largest Catholic social justice gathering in the United States, is known for dispensing sharp opinions.
They came in tweets, news releases and Instagram posts from old friends, women religious and brother bishops in various languages congratulating Washington’s Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory.
Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio joined African American priests in Diocese of Brooklyn to celebrate the naming of Cardinal-designate Wilton Gregory, who currently serves as archbishop of Washington. He will be the first African American cardinal in the United States.
When it comes to matters of racial justice, there’s not a need for the church to say more, but a need for the church to do more, retired Bishop Edward K. Braxton of Belleville, Illinois, told pilgrims gathered at the Catholic Enrichment Center in Louisville.
On a day of history for the U.S. Catholic Church, Washington Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory — who four hours earlier had learned Pope Francis had named him a cardinal — celebrated his first Mass as a cardinal-designate Oct. 25 at Holy Angels Church in Avenue in Southern Maryland.
