The martyrs of the Sacrament of Confession…

On Jan. 30, after finishing celebrating Sunday morning Masses, I was startled by a text message from a friend, a cloistered Dominican nun, with news that one of her spiritual brothers in the Order of Preachers had been murdered hearing confessions the previous night in Vietnam. Father Giuse Tran Ngoc Thanh, 40, ordained in 2018…

4 reasons why Vatican II is spent, and why it is good to regard it as spent…

I don’t deny the validity of Vatican II, of course, or its immense importance. I’ve read every document and wholeheartedly affirm every line. I’ve even read all the “post-conciliar” documents, and Karol Wojtyla’s Sources of Renewal besides. I’ve written many essays and given many talks on the Council. I’ve even made a fresh translation of […]

The enduring legacy of John Paul II’s 1982 visit to legacy…

In 2022, the Church in Britain marks an important milestone in its long history: This May, it will be 40 years since the first visit of a pope to Britain. And it almost didn’t happen. There had been months of preparation, much debate and discussion in the media, elaborate rehearsals by choirs and cathedrals and […]

Synodality: A coming tribulation?

The largest probabilities remain: (a) That the overwhelming majority of highly-committed Catholics will (based on long experience) distrust the process; (b) That those who are fashionably dissident will take the opportunity to remake the Church in their own image; (c) That nearly every expressed concern will be translated by professional ecclesiastics into high-sounding phrases which […]

Bishops’ gambit: Will Francis’ changes to canon law hand the USCCB a win?

The pope’s changes Tuesday to the Church’s canon law could signal a shift in a long-rumbling dispute between the Vatican and the U.S. bishops, and possibly even a rare Roman climbdown, as bishops and the Vatican remain at loggerheads over a set of draft guidelines for the formation of seminarians. The new canonical norms modify […]

Take ‘The Big Here Quiz’ to see how much you know about the place you live…

Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect…