This COVID-19 crisis is the kind of emergency that in the last two centuries has amplified the advantage the institutional papacy has over local churches.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI didn’t turn his back on Vatican II: he endorsed its core ideas, emphasizing the person of Christ and our role as Christ’s body.
Francis’s post-synodal exhortation ‘Querida Amazonia’ is unique in more ways than one. It throws his one major structural reform into considerable turmoil.
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.
The Religious Left has been here all along, engaging in protests and helping the vulnerable, a coalition of coalitions not tied to a single faith or set of policies.
Physical objects carry meaning for us, but their accumulation can be a kind of spiritual error. Reconciling this contradiction leads us to richer, deeper lives.
The Shakers, who arrived in America in 1774, are a religious community facing extinction. Their decline means nothing less than the end of an idea of heaven.
COVID-19 has profoundly affected our daily lives. Catch up with some of Commonweal’s best writing on the political and spiritual ramifications of the virus.
