A comprehensive investigation into the L’Arche movement demonstrates that Jean Vanier fostered a psychologically crippling and spiritually depraved environment.
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.
Joseph Ratzinger was a brilliant theologian whose anti-progressive views became inseparable from his persona. Few committed Catholics will be indifferent about him.
From 2019: The imaginary encounter between Ratzinger and Bergoglio is imaginative, and emotionally satisfying. But we need to remember that it never happened.
His 2019 essay departs not only from the current pope’s analysis of the sex-abuse crisis, but also from that of almost everyone else who has studied it.
In 2002, the recently deceased Archbishop Rembert Weakland resigned amid a sex scandal. The end of his ecclesiastical career was the start of a spiritual journey.
In the United States, there is a growing gap between Catholic academia and the institutional Church, one that hinders our ability to understand the sex-abuse crisis.
The acquittal of Cardinal George Pell doesn’t bring an end to the ‘Pell matter,’ since his release means different things to different constituencies in the church.
Lies and deception have compromised the integrity of the mission of L’Arche. But it has also responded with humility and integrity, and begun the work of healing.
The Catholic Church in Canada has not escaped the abuse crisis. But Canadian activists and church leaders are moving toward transparency and increased awareness.
A new book on Francis by noted papal biographer Austen Ivereigh promised to be more critical. And yet in important ways, it again lets Francis off the hook.
At their general assembly meeting next week, the bishops have the opportunity restore trust in the wake of the abuse crisis. Here are some specific recommendations.
The church’s deplorable record on sexual abuse has provoked condemnation on both the left and the right. Why wasn’t Justice Kavanaugh subjected to similar scrutiny?
Why won’t the pope require bishops around the world to adopt the standards of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? It signed the treaty, but won’t comply.
In dealing with bishops who engage in sexual misconduct, the USCCB seems to think that bishops can police themselves, without lay input. We need a better system.
Msgr. Anthony Figueiredo has released excerpts from letters with Theodore McCarrick, revealing more details about informal sanctions imposed by Pope Benedict XVI.
The church is a liminal space I’m lingering in: a space of transition, of walking along boundaries, of being neither in nor out, of neither staying nor leaving.
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.
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.
The first Kenyan film ever officially screened at Cannes, ‘Rafiki’ was banned in Kenya for “legitimizing homosexuality” against the country’s dominant beliefs.
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.
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.
The history of the Children's Crusade deepens my understanding of the present: yes, the “little ones” suffer, but they retain a sense of dignity, even hope.
