Vatican II was a time of rising expectations for theology, for how much it could transform the Church and the world. Have those expectations been betrayed?
From 2015: For those listening carefully in the House chamber, Pope Francis will have presented some quandaries that they are more ready to ignore than to engage.
From 2020: Pope Francis addresses the English-speaking world as the coronavirus pandemic now reaches the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
From 2016: Francis offers a practical approach to the challenges of married love that gives us a surprisingly moving exhortation to a courageous way of life.
What seems like a never-ending state of crisis has paralyzed Catholicism. This is not the Church of mercy that Francis has been talking about for the past ten years.
“Benedict really cared about the job he had to do, and in resigning demonstrated that the responsible use of power sometimes requires a willingness to give it up.”
Pope Francis has made it plain that he doesn’t like “casuistry.” But this form of moral reasoning can be made consistent with Francis' teaching on God’s grace.
From 2019: The imaginary encounter between Ratzinger and Bergoglio is imaginative, and emotionally satisfying. But we need to remember that it never happened.
This month, the U.S. bishops met to elect new leadership. The gathering came at a time when the Church may be on its way to becoming a post-episcopal institution.
A synodal report from the American bishops reflects fears that the Church has become too “judgmental.” But a Church that does not judge cannot bear moral witness.
“Here in the overlap of the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II and of the Cuban missile crisis, the latter has largely overshadowed the former.”
Opening instituted ministries to women begins a new reckoning with an ecclesiology that has for a long time divided the Church too simply into clergy and laity.
Pope Francis’s motu proprio, ‘Traditionis custodes,’ stirred controversy in the Church. Commonweal writers help unpack its motives and potential consequences.
The German synod expresses a different Catholic culture, one rooted in Vatican II, but without the qualms about the compatibility between modernity and faith.
The defense of ‘Traditionis custodes’ often relies on an oversimplified view of traditionalists, one that diverges from Pope Francis’s typical emphasis on dialogue.
Indifference toward the migrant crisis has lately become even more tinged with hostility to migrants themselves—and opposition to the right to migrate at all.
