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Last fall, the Archdiocese of Boston released an ambitious plan designed to stem the decline it has experienced—in priests, Mass attendance, and treasure—since the 2002 wave of sexual-abuse scandals.
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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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In 2010, parishioners of St. Nicholas Parish in suburban Chicago met to discuss the diaconate. A parishioner had expressed a desire to become a deacon, so the staff, the parish council, and several parishioners began to study the issue.
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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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Catholics have been arguing about the Second Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a century.
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No reforming project exercised the pope and bishops at Vatican II (1962–65) more than collegiality—the doctrine that the church is governed by the college of bishops, with and under the pope. The Catholic Church had for centuries been known as a...
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who’s guarding the guards? It’s a question that exasperated members of a credibility-challenged organization have long asked about their leaders. How can we trust that the people who got us into a bad situation can get...
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Anyone who followed media coverage of the papal conclave that elected the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, couldn’t help noticing that the same breathless questions were raised again and again by commentators assessing the future...
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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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In the memorable opening lines of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the bishops proclaimed their solidarity with “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age.” One...
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Of the many virtues associated with St. Francis of Assisi, humility was the first to occur to me as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio stood before the multitude for the first time as Pope Francis. Popes are expected to be larger-than-life figures, but...
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There has recently been much talk about whether Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is faithful to the principles of Catholic social thought—or is instead a libertarian rejection of the church’s commitment to the poor. In response to the Ryan budget, the chairs...
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A Latin-American pope! From Chile to Mexico—and among U.S. Latinos—there was a collective gasp of surprise and excitement over the news of the conclave’s election of Argentina’s Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis.
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
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“Woman has always been unfairly discriminated against by man,” commencement speaker Henry Edmunds told the Philadelphia High School for Girls class of 1905. Edmunds was president of the city's Board of Public Education and a booster of progessive...
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With regret and some trepidation, Commonweal and many other prolife Catholic commentators and organizations, including the Catholic Health Association, disagreed with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops about the health-care-reform bill that...
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Marc Ouellet, primate of Canada and archbishop of Quebec City, has a new job. Two, actually. Last month, Pope Benedict named him prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
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The last four popes all participated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) either as bishop or peritus (theological adviser), and it is clear that their legacies will be distinctively tied to that epochal event.
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Much is being made of rumors that the Vatican will soon issue a decree mandating that the priest celebrate the Mass ad orientem (“toward the East” and, presumably, with his back to the people). I would like to support that, but only if we take the...
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In the Catholic media today, it is becoming harder all the time to keep a free space for public opinion inside the church. A fictional letter from a hierarch may help to illustrate the pressures. He is writing to the editor of an independent...
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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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On February 11, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would step down at the end of the month. His reasons? Age and infirmity. His doctors have advised him not to leave Europe. But perhaps stress contributed to his decision. These are difficult times...
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I have been a religious sister for more than thirty years, part of a community that has been active in this country for over a century, and whose work centers on teaching and health care. Our order belongs to an umbrella organization, the Leadership...
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The Vatican's decision to speed Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood aroused great elation—and a backlash among Catholics who see the rush as unseemly. There is an obvious remedy that could bring contending Catholics together and send...
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Cardinal Francis George, OMI, archbishop of Chicago, was president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2008 to 2011.
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Not all religions have imposed moral precepts upon their adherents, but all those known as “world religions” have made such a firm connection between their practice and the practice of the moral virtues. Living a morally upright life is, in the...
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It has been fifty years since John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council with a clear signal that the long era of what some call “Constantinianism”—in which the church could depend on civil authorities to help defend the faith—was over.
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One of the most embarrassing experiences of my life occurred at a colloquium in London organized by the Sisters of Sion.
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CORRECTION
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Is sexual activity morally right or wrong? Most people would say, “It all depends.” The church says it depends on whether you are alone or with someone, whether you and that someone are of different sexes and married, whether you can responsibly...
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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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St. Pius X, in his encyclical Vehementer (1902), wrote: “By its very nature the church is a society of unequals; it is composed of two categories of persons: the pastors and the flocks.
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Several Orthodox friends have asked what I think of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. A few are, like me, former Roman Catholics. When I mentioned Joseph A. Komonchak’s comment in Commonweal (“Benedict’s Act of Humility”) that the pope’s resignation...
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John Wilson, Mary C. Boys, Peter Jeffery, Richard R. Gaillardetz, William L. Portier
[Editor's note: William L. Portier's and Richard R. Gaillardetz's are the final in a special series of stories we are posting as the cardinals gather for the conclave. All of the previous articles in this series appear below.]
William L...
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Around these parts, the “Year of the Priest” has been as much of a nonevent as the opening of Al Capone’s vault or spending New Year’s Eve with the Y2K bug. Although Pope Benedict XVI officially began the observance last June, it wasn’t until eight...
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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The aftershocks of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to certain elements of recent health-care legislation are still being felt in the church months later.
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Complaining about the liturgy is a favorite—and probably healthy—pastime of Catholics, lay and clerical alike. Few dispute the fact that the liturgical reforms of Vatican II have been implemented with mixed results. There is a widespread sense that...
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In the fall of 1965, I worked in the final session of the Second Vatican Council. A young priest and doctoral candidate, I was tasked with distributing documents and collecting votes and amendments from my assigned section of bishops.
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I am a child of Vatican II. Without it, I doubt I would be a Catholic today. Brought up as an Anglican, I would surely never have found my way into the church that in a special way stands in the tradition of St. Peter and St. Paul. To me, knowing...
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The Catholics of this country have fallen into habit with their religion, to the point that they no longer worry about knowing if it’s true or false, or if they really believe it or not; and this kind of mechanical faith accompanies them unto death.
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Dean R. Hoge, James D. Davidson
Recent studies point to a growing gap between the way American Catholic laypeople and priests understand their roles in the church. What is the nature of this divergence, and why has it developed?
In the years before Vatican II, most laypeople...
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Bernard P. Prusak, Joseph A. Komonchak, Peter Jeffery, Rita Ferrone
With the release of the document Summorum pontificum in July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI extended permission for the old Tridentine Mass to be celebrated as "an extraordinary form of the Roman rite." Commonweal asked four writers to respond to the pope'...
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum gives broad permission for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. The motu proprio also permits use of preconciliar liturgical rites for all the sacraments, with the exception of ordination.
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Beginning with founding editor Michael Williams (1924-38), Commonweal has enjoyed a great deal of continuity at the top of the masthead. Perhaps most remarkable in this regard was Edward S. Skillin, who joined the staff in 1933, bought the magazine...
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Stanley Hauerwas is the most immediately likable bombthrower I have ever met. I first encountered him and his essays during that part of the 1970s I spent in the newly hatched field of bioethics.
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Pope Benedict’s Summorum pontificum and its accompanying “Letter to the Bishops,” issued last month, will theoretically make the so-cal
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On October 11, 1963, Bishop Luigi Bettazzi addressed the Second Vatican Council on the need for collegiality. He was the newest bishop participant, having been consecrated only a week before, and, at thirty-nine, he was also one of the youngest.
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Soon after moving to central Minnesota in the summer of 2011, I visited one of the region’s landmarks, the Mall of America: a four-million-square-foot collection of more than five hundred stores that includes an amusement park, a hotel, and twelve...
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In our 2005 series of articles titled “What Next?”, Commonweal asked several writers to look at the challenges the then newly elected Benedict XVI was likely to face.
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What do the Roman Catholic Church and the American political system have in common? Both are divided into factions that neither trust nor understand each other, and both confront a crisis of governance.
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This article originally appeared in the February 26, 1965, issue of Commonweal.
It is difficult to write about something in flux as if it were something fixed; probably by the time this essay appears my view of what mattered in the past—even of...
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After Forty Years Vatican Council II’s Diverse Legacy Edited by Kenneth D. Whitehead St. Augustine’s Press, $20, 330 pp.
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The last pope to resign did so more than seven hundred years ago, which is a long time even by church standards.
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My monsignor uncle, Fr. Jack, and Aunt Gert, his sister, were something of a cliché in the Irish-Catholic universe in which I grew up: the unmarried sister who serves the priest brother, in this case as his live-in cook.
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Part I
There is a conventional view of American Catholic thinking on questions of war and peace. It goes something like this: Throughout most of its history, the U.S. church had little to say on such questions. Critical impulses were subordinated to...
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Noticing that the words "Vatican II" evoked no response in her high school students, an Irish nun recently told me she asked them what Vatican II was. After some time and with much hesitation, one of them asked: "Would that be the pope’s summer...
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The sixty or so delegated observers at the Second Vatican Council, of whom I was one, were a privileged lot. Catholic bishops sometimes complained, and not always humorously, that we outranked them in terms of the council’s protocol.
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Whenever I read an article that advocates refusing the Eucharist to people whose public politics conflict with church teachings, it worries me. I find I have a lot of questions. Why, for instance, does the controversy seem to center only on one hot-...
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An amusing description recently appeared in the Times Literary Supplement regarding what talents and temperament an editor needs. “Rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability,” went the quip.
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If you work in bioethics, are of a certain age, and have a degree from the University of Virginia, colleagues are likely to assume you studied with James Childress, the legendary teacher who co-authored Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a...
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum, issued motu proprio (as an executive order), universally permits celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass according to the Roman liturgy that was in existence prior to the reform of 1970.
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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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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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Pope Benedict's resignation shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did. As an institutionalist who believes in the Roman Catholic Church as the carrier of truth in a sinful world, he would worry a great deal about the impact of his own...
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"The church is not the pope, and the pope is not the church,” theologian Joseph Komonchak reminds us (see “Benedict’s Act of Humility”). Amen to that.
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By resigning, Pope Benedict served the church well. He has spared it another prolonged period of mounting disarray. He has "humanized" the papacy, as Joseph Komonchak and others have pointed out.
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In the April 23, 2004, issue of Commonweal, Leslie Woodcock Tentler wrote on American Catholics and contraception:
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The candidate to be ordained deaconess is presented to the bishop.... As she bows her head the bishop imposes his hand...praying:
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John Rawls is widely recognized as the most important American political philosopher since the mid-century. His book A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) redefined its discipline and, in so doing, aroused controversy on every side.
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There are two major tendencies in interpretation of Vatican Council II. The first, which currently dominates the Vatican, is that the council was an occurrence, a meeting of the bishops of the world who enacted certain reforms and clarified...
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There are two major tendencies in interpretation of Vatican Council II. The first, which currently dominates the Vatican, is that the council was an occurrence, a meeting of the bishops of the world who enacted certain reforms and clarified...
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I think by now it's safe to say that altar girls are a positive part of Catholic life. Young women who serve the priest at Mass benefit from taking an active role in the liturgy, and the parish benefits from their service. There's nothing...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Many people have written about Chicago and Chicago childhoods. For example, my college classmate Stuart Dybek churns out short stories in which forlorn children scrape out their ethnic existences against the city's infinite western horizon and bone-...
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The years just before and after World War II saw breakthroughs in theology that had major impact on Vatican II. For centuries the church had been waging a defensive battle against the abuses of the Enlightenment, the challenges of the Reform, and...
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Cocktail in hand, I walked up to a group of three of my classmates at the gathering that marked the fiftieth anniversary of our ordination as priests. As I joined these men with whom I had spent six years of my youth, one of them, Frank, asked, “...
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There has been a lot of loose talk about the current crisis facing the Catholic Church and the Vatican in particular.
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Cardinal Avery Dulles (1918–2008) was probably the most respected Catholic theologian in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The author of twenty-four books and more than eight hundred articles, Dulles was widely known...
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One is tempted to begin, Parturiebant montes, so great were the fears on one side and the expectations on the other concerning Pope Benedict’s long-awaited motu proprio on the Tridentine Mass.
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I went to a Catholic school where everyone went to daily Mass.
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Grown-Up Men
