Maybe Pell’s time is prison has not been a martyrdom, or even a monstrous injustice, but an expiation that is helping to bring about an overdue pastoral conversion.
A video made by the Archdiocese of Bucharest in anticipation of Pope Francis’s visit to Romania kindles a spirit too often lacking in the American church: joy.
The recent UN report on the rapid loss of biodiversity failed to arouse our concern. But endangered ecosystems reflect our gravely sinful habits of consumption.
Pro-life and pro-choice activists have seized on Alabama’s new abortion law to energize their supporters. But abortion demands more than performative politics.
The medieval Franciscan philosopher and theologian Duns Scotus is barely studied today. But the church would be enriched by a renewed engagement with his works.
By the time I arrived at Harvard, the school was secular, yet haunted by faith. I’d been a practicing Christian for years, but had never been baptized.
Jacopo Tintoretto has been considered by many, including John Ruskin and Henry James, to be the greatest artist of the Italian Renaissance. His work astounds.
Is all flesh really beloved by God? Or is Christianity just another sect, with a new elite kind of flesh that belongs, unambiguously, to no one except its members?
The late Fr. Ted Hesburgh transformed the University of Notre Dame into a leading institution. A new book tendentiously ignores key aspects of his life and work.
By framing clerical abuse as a matter of sacrilege, Benedict reinforces the disastrous playbook that has guided the church’s response to the crisis for decades.
Prolifers are supposed to believe that the right choice is not always the apparently expedient one. Their capitulation to Donald Trump damages their credibility.
In our divided era, aggressive secularism and Catholic neo-integralism are not the only two options available. A new Vatican document revisits religious freedom.
Despite his full, long life, the death of Jean Vanier is still sad. And as Christians, we must not skip grief nor automatically reach for a happy narrative.
French thinker Étienne Balibar argues that the modern nation-state has become a religion that is now collapsing under the weight of its contradictions.
Like most human institutions, the church has long avoided telling the truth about much of its past. But that doesn’t mean its understanding of human life is false.
A new book describes everything one could wish to know about Hell: fire, brimstone, and boiling oil, but also the history of the idea across religions.
It will take time and care, but I know Notre-Dame will have its Alleluia moment. I pray there will also be one for the church that inspired its creation.
Poet, editor, translator, and human-rights activist Carolyn Forché speaks about Óscar Romero, Liberation Theology, and the Catholic Church in El Salvador.
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.
The Equality Bill, designed to bolster LGBTQ protections, provoked fierce opposition from the USCCB. But fears of infringement on religious liberty are unfounded.
The only adequate response to the clergy sex-abuse crisis is a paschal response: death to one way of being and resurrection to a truly new way of life.
Despite its ‘motivated blindness,’ which allowed the abuse crisis to metastasize in the church over decades, the Vatican finally takes steps toward systemic change.
Contrary to the narrative put forward by major news outlets, the resignation of the all-female board at ‘Women-Church-World’ was not caused by clericalism.
Some Catholics have critiqued the Document on Human Fraternity for its theology of religion, but little attention has been paid to its reception in the Arab world.
Augusto Del Noce argued that the true fault line of contemporary history ran between those who affirmed man’s religious dimension and those who denied it
Pope Francis is a highly original and supple thinker, with a breadth of knowledge accumulated over five decades. A new book fleshes out his intellectual journey.
Some Catholic moral theologians have recently expressed doubts about the fidelity of scholars in the field to the magisterium. But such doubts are unfounded.
