Catholic Church

By Jane Clark Scharl, Crisis Magazine - It’s hard to believe. One year out, and we hardly seem closer to any real solutions… New revelations of abuse continue to trickle in—though sometimes, as with Bishop Michael Bransfield, it’s more of a deluge. All in all, things have unfolded roughly the way many faithful Catholics feared they would. There were tears; there were vague statements of regret; and there were synods and meetings at the Vatican. Donald Cardinal Wuerl stepped down as Archbishop of Washington, though he remains comfortably ensconced in the powerful Congregation for Bishops.

By Phil Lawler, LifeSiteNews - Why did President Lincoln maneuver the Confederacy into the bombardment of Fort Sumter? Because he saw that war was imminent, and he wanted the South to take the first shots. Similarly, the most "progressive" Catholics recognize that they cannot engineer the radical changes they want without precipitating a split in the Church. So they want orthodox Catholics to break away first, leaving them free to enact their own revolutionary agenda.

By George Weigel, First Things - The eminent sociologist Peter Rossi was a world-class punster whose scholarly accomplishments fed a sometimes-whimsical view of the human condition—in which, Rossi memorably observed, “there are many ironies in the fire.”… That’s certainly true of the interaction between Catholicism and cultural, social, and political modernity over the last 250 years. The multiple ironies in that complex relationship, and their surprising results, are explored in my new book, The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform, in which I turn the conventional telling of this tale inside-out and upside-down.

By Jonathan B. Coe, Crisis Magazine - Bad bishops are hardly a novelty in the history of the Church. Historians estimate that, when the Arian heresy rocked Christendom in the fourth century, four out of five bishoprics succumbed to apostasy. When Henry VIII ordered England’s bishops to swear the oath of succession, all of them complied—all, save one. For his refusal to abandon his allegiance to the Pope, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester was martyred by Henry in 1535 and canonized by Pius XI four centuries later, almost to the day.