Religion

For the Church to welcome and nourish its people, God needs to run the show.

Close to one in five American Catholics is vulnerable to President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” regime. Paul Moses reports on how this monstrous policy will wound the U.S. Church.

Chicago Catholicism is distinctive and one of its own is now the pope. What might Robert Prevost's South Side upbringing teach us about the man who would become Leo XIV?

People have never stopped seeking God, transcendence, spirit, or community. They’re just not finding any of those things in church.

The signature achievement of Pope Francis was to reignite the spirit of Vatican II. Pope Leo's signature achievement may be to lead the Church into a ‘post-post-conciliar’ era.

Our increased access to papal personality does not give us increased insight into the papal future.

Through his papacy, Pope Francis fostered creative development in the liturgy while remaining faithful to tradition.

… ‘Yes’ when asked to do a service,” he told Vatican News at that time. “With this spirit, … doubt Francis’s “closest collaborator” in the Vatican during the past two years.  The time … that it went mostly unnoticed even by the Vatican press corps. Yet only a handful of …

In all of his novels, Anthony Giardina gives us the actual size of desire: exhausting, exhilarating, unknown and unknowable.

To be Augustinian is to be shaped by a deep sense of both interiority and community. That sense will likely be at the heart of Leo XIV's papacy.

Pope Leo XIV’s choice of papal name is profoundly significant. What might the new pontiff have to say about the social and technological challenges facing us in the 2020s?

Pope Leo met the global Church at Catholic Theological Union.

Paula Fredriksen’s 'Ancient Christianities' looks to explore the tangled root system underlying Christianity—not a story of a series of individual men, but of broad social movements.

Bishop Mark Seitz discusses what the Church can do to reverse a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States.

A visit to the Simonopetra Monastery reveals the challenging work of monastic living: What does it mean to "empty" ourselves?

John Rodden writes on a relative entrusted with a momentous task: organizing the burial of Pope Francis.

"From where I was standing, the pope was a tiny white speck. That was okay. Having been granted eyes that could really see, I was finally using them in Rome."

Theologian David Tracy was absorbed by the sheer ineffability of God—and by the absolute need to speak of God nonetheless.

"In this holy chaos, my first feeling was joy. I didn’t know what this new pope portended for the life of the Church, and it didn’t matter."

It’s tempting just to treat the conclave as a political event; it’s also tempting just to focus on the workings of the Holy Spirit.

Whatever his institutional goals, the next pope will succeed if he heeds the voice of the voiceless. Like Francis, he need only connect.

It's time for Catholics to embrace parish-level commitments to environmental justice by getting our hands dirty—literally.

Pope Francis’s whole life can be described as striving to live in accord with the beatitudes.

Pope Francis will be remembered for going to the peripheries of the Church and the world. What did his papacy mean for marginalized communities?

The first cinephile pope’s preoccupation with film has something to tell us about his worldview.

The fearlessness of Pope Francis explains the extraordinary devotion so many felt toward him—and the antipathy of the powerful few.

Not many poets can make silence resound as richly as Nate Klug can.

Gareth Gore's "Opus" offers a compelling outsider's take on Opus Dei, an organization more often talked about than understood.

How can we continue to imagine eschatological glimpses of hope, particularly when the events of the Passion continue happening in this world?

The risk of nuclear war is higher now than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Catholic principles of just peace can move us back from the brink.

The clergy sex-abuse scandal would hang over a future papal conclave.

Lent is a season of reflection—but also a season to prepare for the work ahead, to sweep aside everything that has not worked and find new ways through the desert.

The leaked Trump administration group chat exemplified how Christian leaders use empty religious gestures as window dressing for war-making.

"We took a vote among our members and decided to hold a prayerful demonstration in front of the DHS headquarters on Ash Wednesday."

The final twist in 'Conclave' is hardly sensationalistic: it raises real questions about how the Church accommodates people outside binaries of sex and gender.

“As Francis has magnificently shown us, a pope serves the People of God with a total self-giving, ad vitam: in sickness or in health, strong or frail, able-bodied or wheelchair-bound, clear in voice or raspy and breathless.”

Trump is bad enough without the thought that his rogue regime has been sent by God as some kind of punishment.

The God who sees the plight of migrants in the borderlands is the same God who spoke to Moses in Exodus.

Twenty-five years ago, John Paul II’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land expressed hope for justice for both Israelis and Palestinians.