Jeanie Hannaman

By John M. Grondelski, The Catholic Thing - As (Pope Leo XIV's) predecessor, St. John Paul II (elected 47 years ago today), observed, culture lies upstream from both politics and economics. And our “blessed barrenness” is a cultural problem – both in the larger society and within the Catholic Church... "Neither in the man nor in the woman can affirmation of the value of the person be divorced from awareness and willing acceptance that he may become a father and she may become a mother. . . .If the possibility of parenthood is deliberately excluded from marital relations, the character of the relationship between the partners automatically changes. The change is away from unification in love and in the direction of mutual, or rather, bilateral “enjoyment."

By Kevin Wells, Crisis Magazine - Crisis editor Eric Sammons​ has made written ​and spoken pleas for laity calm in the aftermath of Pope Leo XIV’s odd ice-block blessing and refusal to condemn Cardinal ​Blase Cupich’s decision to award a pro-abortion politician with a lifetime achievement honor. ​Even on gasket-blowing days like yesterday, when the Chicago-native pontiff promoted his fellow Chicagoan Cupich to the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State​, Sammons’ call for calm is as wise as it is necessary... But why?... The Roman Catholic Church is facing a spiritual epidemic unlike any it has ever known; it is as large—and mostly unrecognized —as any crisis in today’s American Catholic Church .....

By Constance T. Hull, Catholic Exchange - In the spiritual life, the Lord calls us to mortification. There are entire programs, such as Exodus 90, designed to help Catholics learn more about the ascetical life in an age of hedonism and spiritually destructive abundance. These are all well and good. They serve an important purpose in helping us strip away that which keeps us from God. They lead to a necessary poverty that allows us to be filled by God. However, they are not the most effective means of growth; the saints understood that it is unwilled suffering that is the most effective.