Catholic Church

August 19, 2019

Big Families Will Be the Next Target in the Culture Wars, by Colin Brazier

By Colin Brazier, Catholic Herald - But we live in shrill times. There is an aud¬ibly angry lobby emerging which argues that the only way to help a planet with a population zooming towards ten billion is to make a personal decision to forgo childbearing at all… Many of these “birth-strikers” would be surprised to learn that there is nothing original in the pose they strike. In the 1970s, in the wake of a previous moral panic about family size (spawned, in part, by Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb), there was a similar spasm of childless-by-choice activism.

August 19, 2019

The Rise of the Nones, by Nathaniel Peters

By Nathaniel Peters, Public Discourse - Some might consider the rise of the Nones to be proof of the “secularization thesis”: that “modernity inevitably produces a decline of religion,” as Peter Berger put it. However, as Berger himself came to see over the course of decades, that thesis is false. Instead of secularism, modernity produces pluralism, “the coexistence in the same society of different worldviews and value systems. . . . The problem with modernity is not that God is dead, as some people hoped and other people feared. [Rather,] there are too many gods, which is a challenge, but a different one.”

August 19, 2019

Amazon Synod Theologian Pushes Leftist Ideology, by Stephen Wynne

By Stephen Wynne, Church Militant - Two months after the release of the Amazon Synod's working document, the neo-pagan views of one of its chief architects are coming into focus… Brazilian ex-priest Leonardo Boff has been identified as the theologian of reference for the synod's Instrumentum Laboris…. We have exceeded Earth's limits; it no longer has the bio-capacity nor the strength to produce and produce life as it used to. … In 1992, Boff left the priesthood and married a Marxist activist after being silenced by Joseph Ratzinger for promoting liberation theology. …But he continues to push his radical vision forward across the world.

August 19, 2019

God Wants a Repentant Church, Not a Relevant Church, by Jonathan B. Coe

By Jonathan B. Coe, Crisis Magazine - On a regular basis the faithful Catholic laity find themselves disconcerted and even outraged when priests and prelates display an inverted moral calculus. For example, as William Kilpatrick writes in a recent essay in this magazine, the Vatican has become a kind of sanctuary city for credibly accused homosexual predators while Pope Francis laments the presence of plastic in our oceans and excoriates those in the U.S. who want to build a wall to secure our borders.