Catholic Church

By Peter Jesserer Smith, National Catholic Register - “You could have heard a pin drop,” she said. “He just sobbed.”... As the Catholic Church reels from revelations about the role of bishops and chanceries in the cover-up of the sexual abuse of minors and adults, two central questions have been in the minds of many Catholics: Where have all the good priests gone, and where are all the bishops?...

By Allison Low, Catholic Stand - Do we have a healthy fear of the Lord? The very idea of “fearing” God often causes confusion because people think of fear in relation to snakes, spiders or heights, for example. But the “fear of the Lord” we are called to is not a servile fear or a cowering away. Rather, it is fear in the sense of awe and reverence, acknowledging the majesty of the God who loves us and calls us to love him in return.

By Nicholas Senz, First Things - To say one thing and mean its opposite is a special skill of the politician. No other creature is as practiced at leaving a certain impression without actually having said anything, and leaving plenty of room for deniability – and, of course, the kind of “clarification” that effectively becomes obfuscation.

By Fr. Mike Schmitz, Ascension Presents - Happiness is circumstantial. In fact, the word has the same root as the word “happenstance”. And yet, despite how fickle it is, many of us base our lives on the pursuit of happiness. Joy, on the other hand, is the abiding and pervasive sense of well-being. Fr. Mike explains that joy is, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “the gigantic secret of the Christian.” ....