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Beginning in Advent of this year, the language of the Mass will be very different. A new translation of the Roman Missal—the book of prayers used in the Mass—will be put into use in all Catholic churches in the English-speaking world. Some who have...
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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I’m tired of being nice about it, tired of being politically correct when this issue comes up. So I’ll be blunt. Someone just left my parish to join one that has an altar on wheels, and I’m angry about it.
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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1963: Vatican II allowed the use of “the mother tongue” in the liturgy, entrusting bishops conferences with overseeing translations, which Rome would then approve. Bishops conferences throughout the English-speaking world established the...
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I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic and pink, and it cost a dime. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived...
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When the German journalist Peter Sewald recently asked Pope Benedict XVI whether the Catholic Church was “opposed in principle to the use of condoms,” the pope replied that under some circumstances the use of a condom could be a “first step” toward...
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The Catholic Church is strenuously—some would say obsessively—opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. How persuasively is the church making its case? Is the church right to emphasize the issue in the uncompromising way some of its most...
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No figure in the Christian pantheon except Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist has inspired, provoked, or confounded the imagination of painters more than the Magdalene.
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Many years ago I started looking for a copy of Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Highlights of Vatican II, then long out of print. Copies were as rare and as prized as gold dust, but eventually I found one in Chicago, among the office bookshelves of a...
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We usually see the pictures hanging on our walls only out of the corner of an eye as we’re hurrying past them. But every once in a while, we pause, look up from our busyness, and find ourselves drawn to one of them.
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Behind the forty-day preparation for Easter known as Lent (the word actually means “springtime”) is the image of the desert. The Bible describes the forty-year desert sojourn of the Chosen People as preparation for entrance into the Promised Land....
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In 2005, a commentary on the Acts of the Apostles by Jaroslav Pelikan, the great historian of theology, appeared as the inaugural entry in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Brazos Press).
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While I took Lent and Easter more seriously than ever this year—in terms of prayer, Scriptural reading, reflection, and discipline—I didn’t go to Mass. In fact, I haven’t been since Christmas.
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In the earliest years of Christian teaching, dogma was proclaimed only when a denial of something (Jesus’ humanity or his divinity, for example) made it necessary. The articulated doctrine of the Trinity emerged slowly, from the more important...
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Although I hate to admit that I was ever unhappy in Africa, where I lived for twenty-six years, I have to confess that my first year as a Jesuit scholastic in Nigeria, over forty years ago, was not the easiest, either for me or for the fellow...
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One early morning not long ago I woke with a strange physical sense of myself as the product of eons, rather than my usual tired twenty-first-century self.
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Public expressions of grief, even at their most authentic, are a kind of performance.
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I went to a Catholic school where everyone went to daily Mass.
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MADE FOR MEAT
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Deftly, admiral, cast your flyInto the slow deep hover,Till the wise old trout mistake and die;Salt are the deeps that coverThe glittering fleets you led,White is your head.
—W. H. Auden
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I first met Gia, a young schoolgirl, one afternoon while walking with Moy Moy, our twenty-one-year-old daughter who has special needs. Gia was on her way home from classes. She approached us full of questions about why Moy was in a stroller, why she...
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I’ve changed my mind about the outcry against sex-selective abortion. Since the 1980s, when the issue emerged here in India and neighboring China, I’ve been skeptical of feminist objections to aborting baby girls on the basis of their sex.
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Che Guevara once wrote that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. For some—especially those over fifty—that remark will call up the illusions of the 1960s, when many a callow undergraduate succumbed to the charms of revolution...
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Taking their inspiration from the Qur’an, Muslims refer to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and a harder-to-define faith community, the Sabians, as “People of the Book.” These monotheistic neighbors of Muhammad (c.
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For a long time I’ve been bothered by the difference between the expressions “I’ve been lucky” and “I’ve been blessed”—and also by the similarities between them. Often the phrase “I’ve been blessed” feels true to me, and I have no doubt, as a...
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People have been explaining themselves, their relationship to the gods, and what life means with myths for thousands of years, before language began to be written down and ever since. One of the first epics to be recorded, the Babylonian tale of...
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It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of...
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I have often found that interreligious dialogue becomes most interesting when it gets stuck, and that was my experience in Korea last month. I was in the country at the invitation of Zen Master Jinje and the Chogye Order of Korean Zen Buddhists.
