Overcoming the Crisis of a Church Divided, by Robert Royal

By Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, June 2, 2025

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

The word I hear most from Catholics as we approach the end of the first month under our American-born pope is “relief.” Serious tensions had accumulated within the Church under Pope Francis, who sometimes seemed to be deliberately – or haphazardly – exacerbating divisions. Openness, dialogue, and listening towards liberals well beyond the borders of the Faith, but exclusion, peremptory fiats, and ignoring of traditional Catholics. And yet, the progressives, too, felt dissatisfied: Francis died without allowing deaconesses (let alone women priests), pulled away the football after repeatedly teeing it up in front of the LGBT+ crowd, dithered over the runaway German “synodal” way. And in the end, he even kicked the can down the road for his own synodal path by removing the “hot-button” issues from consideration by assigning them to ten “study groups” (reports due this month) and scheduling an “ecclesial assembly” (whatever that is) three years from now, when he almost certainly knew he would not be around. ….

Continue reading >>>>>>>>>>