Like all human institutions, the Church has often failed. But it is more than its failures—and much more than the endless quarrels over Vatican II or sexual morality.
In a new collection of essays, Colm Tóibín brings his trademark doggedness to matters of faith, from the politicking of Pope Francis to Marilynne Robinson’s fiction.
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.
To understand and address the structural sin of racism, we should look to Pope John Paul II’s explanation of social sin. Only solidarity can help us overcome it.
In 2003, Pope John Paul II sent an envoy to persuade George W. Bush not to invade Iraq. As tensions with Iran continue to mount, it’s a story worth revisiting.
The Catholic Church now has a stronger theology of women deacons than it did during the fraught time of Paul VI. But now political conditions are less auspicious.
Seminaries still have a role to play, and should not be abolished. But they should no longer be factories for clericalism, elitism, and misogyny, as they often are.
One hundred years after the restoration of national sovereignty, Poland is failing to preserve the values forged in its struggles against totalitarianism.
We need to move beyond our inherited clericalism. The idea that the laity have no agency in the church is not magisterial teaching; it is not, in fact, true
The parallel legitimacy of the non-reformed and reformed liturgies has caused and perpetuated confusion and division in the church. How did this happen?
Who is behind the poster campaign to smear the pope in Rome? His conservative opponents within the church, or his nationalist and far-right political foes?
One of the most important contributions Pope Francis is making to the church concerns his efforts to exercise the kind of pastoral magisterium Pope John hoped for.
The prospect of a Trump presidency has sent shivers up the spines of most officials in the Vatican, though Americans who work in the Curia feel differently.
Francis has made it clear he wants to renew the John Paul II Institute by developing the guidelines in "Amoris Laetitia," which traditionalists have criticized.
Has the pope picked predominantly “progressive” prelates as the latest cardinal-electors? Or is it that the so-called "center" has shifted since John Paul II?
A phrase that many people in the last pontificate ridiculed as an unthinking, trendy-lefty capitulation to religious syncretism is fully back in vogue in the Church.
