Catholic Church

By Fr. Patrick Klekas, Crisis Magazine - Like many others who closely followed last year’s USCCB meetings, I felt powerless in the face of these deliberations. However… I was particularly stuck by the comments from Bishop Daly of Spokane who gave voice to good faith-filled families. He said: These families, that continue to encourage their sons and daughters to priestly and religious vocations, they do have a concern about what is happening here this week. It is a concern that we as the body of bishops, who leading them as their shepherds, need to take very seriously … so that they will want to continue to provide and to encourage those vocations.

By Dorothy Cummings McLean, LifeSiteNews - Students of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family have written a letter to express their “immense concern” over the potential loss of the institute's “identity” with the adoption of new statutes, the firing of key faculty, and the elimination of courses central to the legacy of John Paul II. The institute was re-purposed by Pope Francis in 2017.

By James Kalb, Crisis Magazine - The Church is presented with an opportunity. She is still what she has always been, and as long as she presents what she is, people will continue to find in her what they are missing. As Peter asked, “Where else is there to go?”… Then I noticed that then-Father Joseph Ratzinger said the same thing fifty years ago in a short radio address he presented on Christmas Day in 1969. He told his listeners: Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new.

By George Weigel, The Catholic World Report - Despite the global media addiction to the “liberal/conservative” trope for analyzing the Second Vatican Council and the debates following it, the really consequential division after the Council (which, as several conciliar theologians’ diaries attest, began to open up during the Council’s third and fourth periods) was between two groups of previously-allied reformist theologians, one group of which seemed determined to embrace intellectual modernity. .....