In All Things
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Human pastoral quote machine Pope Francis was at it again today in Rome, prying open doors and trying to let more people in. Today's mildly rebuked pharisees are the self-appointed pastoral border guards who hold up a hand in consternation instead of offering one in welcome when the less-than-perfect among us seek to gate crash at the house of the lord. "There is always a temptation," Pope Francis warned, "to try and take possession of the Lord." The pope spoke of an unofficial "8th"...
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Cambridge, MA. As one might expect, the news on religion and tolerance remains mixed. On the one hand, I think it fair to say that more and more people in every culture and religion are learning to live with differences and respect their neighbors’ faiths. This need not translate into doctrines of the equality of all religions, nor need it reduce to relativistic instincts, but at least we can say that religious people are learning, everywhere, that tolerance, respect, and even...
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On economic life, Pope Francis sees his responsibility in clear terms:
The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them. The Pope appeals for disinterested solidarity and for a return to person-centred ethics in the world of finance and economics. (5/16/213)
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In a forceful speech at the National Defense University today, President Barack Obama sought to interrupt the possibility of an America trapped in a “perpetual war” footing in its struggle against homegrown and international terrorism. Calling for a comprehensive anti-terror strategy that would reduce the use of military force and protect soft power foreign aid packages, the president sought a better balance between security and civil liberties, including protecting the human rights even of...
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In an hour-long speech Thursday afternoon, President Barack Obama laid out his policies toward global terrorism. He touched on revoking the war powers passed in the wake of 9/11, on drone warfare as a method of defense, on the potentially negative impact of an unending state of war on U.S. civil liberties, and on the need to close the prison for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo.
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America associate editor Kerry Weber recently spoke to a group of young adults on a "Charis retreat" for young adults in New York City. Listen to an actual young adult talk to other actual young adults! It's a great, lively, and spirited talk that involves car chases.
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On Monday May 20th, Secretary of State John Kerry released the annual Religious Freedom Report for 2012. It was grim reading. An Annual report on the state of religious freedom around the world is required by Congress' International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It follows recommendations submitted to the State Department by the independent United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
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Today the Catholic Book Club begins its discussion of Tenth of December by George Saunders. Thanks to those who have already posted questions on the Catholic Book Club page. Thanks, too, to George Saunders, who graciously answered our questions about his book and about the art of fiction. Here, again, are some...
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The Gosnell trial unmasked the horrific violence of abortion and the terrible exploitation of poor women that often comes with it. It reminded us of what abortion is…the destruction of babies before, and now in some documented cases, after they are born.
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Speaking on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the chairman of the USCCB's Committee on International Justice and Peace said the Obama administration's policy of targeted killings by drones raise “serious moral questions,” including concerns related to discrimination, imminence of threat, proportionality and probability of success. Bishop Richard E.
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No matter how upset an author may be by a review of his or her book, the conventional wisdom is not to write a letter in response. The letter will only draw more attention to the critical review, and the author is likely to come across as petty and defensive.
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Almost two years after its Advent 2011 introduction, the new Missal is still generating unhappiness among U.S. Catholic priests, according to a new survey which found "widespread skepticism" about the litrugy revisions. According to the study, 59 percent of the 1,500 priests surveyed "do not like" the new text. By a nearly identical margin (57 percent to 36 percent), the survey found that priests do not like the more formal style of language, with over one-third (35 percent) strongly...
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I have read and re-read Dr Stacie Beck’s article, "Just Economics." I still wonder who these Catholic “social justice advocates” are whom Dr. Beck is criticizing. She names only a fourth grade religion text.
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As the conflict in Syria reached new depths of depravity this week, the Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Joseph III Younan, expressed his frustration with Western powers in an interview with Doreen Abi Raad of Catholic New Service in Beirut. Describing the morale of Syria's Christians as "very, very low," he charged that the worsening conditions in Syria were the result of Western nations carrying...
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From the May 18, 1963 edition of America, a playful poem on the reaction to Pope John XXIII's encyclical, Pacem In Terris. The author, John Cogley, was an editor at Commonweal and an adviser to the Kennedy presidential campaign.
"How To Read an Encyclical"
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Unwilling to live with the horror of burning children, a consequence of U.S. napalm bombings in Vietnam, a group of Catholic peace activists decided to make a bold attempt to end the war—or at least slow down its buildup. On May 17, 1968, two women and seven men, including two priests (Dan and Phil Berrigan), entered the Selective Service Office in Catonsville, Md., seized nearly 400 1-A draft files and burned them in a nearby parking lot with homemade napalm. Martin Sheen has called the...
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The most common question I’m asked as a Jesuit (besides “What’s a Jesuit?”) is: Can you teach me how to pray? While many people have less time for organized religion, they are more hungry for contact with God. Plus, whether they’re religious, spiritual but not religious, or spiritual and religious, most people tend to think that they don’t pray “right.” People sometimes think that everyone else has a lock on prayer. All everyone else does, they think, is close their eyes...
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The Holy See issued the following statement this morning on the dispostion of Scotland's Cardinal Keith O'Brien, who retired abruptly after admitting in March that his "sexual conduct" had "fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal":
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Responding to the announcement of a breakthrough in human cloning technology, Boston's Cardinal Seán O’Malley, OFM Cap., in his role as chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wote that human cloning for any purpose is inconsistent with the moral responsibility to “treat each member of the human family as a unique gift of God, as a person with his or her...
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I am been thinking about Pope Francis’ canonization of the 800 martyrs of Otranto, Italy on Sunday, the 800+ people killed when they refused to convert when confronted by an Ottoman Turkish invader. I am not a historian of this material by any means, so for the moment, Wikipedia may be allowed to set the scene: “Antonio Primaldo and his companion martyrs, also known as the Martyrs of Otranto, were 813 inhabitants of the Salentine...
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Kermit Gosnell found guilty on three out of four counts of first degree murder, making him death penalty eligible, and mutiple other counts in his 200+ count criminal indictment.
Here is JD Mullane, News Columnist for the Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer, and his blow by blow account on Twitter as the jury verdicts rolled in just a short time ago
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From Francis X. Rocca at CNS:
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Francis warned against "gentrification of the heart" as a consequence of comfortable living, and called on the faithful to "touch the flesh of Christ" by caring for the needy.
The pope's words came in a homily during Mass in St. Peter's Square May 12, when he canonized the first Colombian saint, as well as a Mexican nun and some 800 Italians...
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From the May 11, 1963 issue of America:
If our Protestant brethren still wondered whether our hierarchy is a monolithic bloc, the activity and comments of our bishops during and after Fr. Hans Küng's recent lecture tour must have proved something to them. Cardinal Cushing, Cardinal Ritter and Archbishop Alter, for example, listened to what the Tübingen theologian had to say; there were others who let it be known they didn't want him around...
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Today’s technology can do amazing things: phones take photos; cars park themselves. Yet, researchers still have not developed a device that can definitively pin down the origins of a famous image on a piece of cloth. The Shroud of Turin continues to puzzle many believers and scientists alike, and even major investigations have failed to provide a conclusion that satisfies everyone. From CNS:
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The De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco has a formidable ethnological collection. Especially notable is the justly world famous Jolika collection of New Guinea art and a strong collection of Meso-American murals. Currently, on exhibtion are some fifty items from the Vatican Ethnological Museum (which occupies a separate wing of the Vatican Museum). It is the first large exhibition from the Vatican Museum to travel outside of Europe.
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For the first time in years, the Guantánamo prison is part of the national conversation. When President Barack Obama started his second term in January, the prison barely received a mention. But a massive hunger strike, started just two weeks later and now involving at least 100 of the 166 prisoners, has attracted wide public attention and concern.
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The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering the issue of same-sex marriage. Like many people, I have been following whatever news and commentary I can find. One thing has struck me by its total absence: While there is much discussion about the civil (and human) rights of adults, there has been no discussion at all concerning the rights of future children who may be born or adopted into new forms of legally sanctioned family structure.
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I have been on pilgrimage this spring and traveled with boon companions. I’ve kept late nights with Dorothy Day, toted Thomas Merton on the train, chuckled with Flannery O’Connor over her tales of kindred freaks, and got lost with Walker Percy in the cosmos. They’ve come with me across the country, tucked in my over-packed bag—from Boston to Austin, Florida to Minnesota, Manhattan to the Bronx.
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As one brother recovers in a prison hospital from wounds he received briefly eluding capture, the remains of the other Tsarnaev brother linger in limbo. His now quasi- and unhappily famous uncle Ruslan Tsami is trying to arrange his burial with the assistance of Peter Stefan, a funeral home director in Worcester, Massachusetts. Stefan has the body ready for burial, but he has no where to take it.
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Barack Obama has changed. About six years ago I stood two feet away from him in the St. Peter’s College, Jersey City Gym, which he had rented for a campaign rally, and watched him deal one by one with the crowd that squeezed around him and told myself that maybe this was the one we had been waiting for who might restore to America the character that George W. Bush had drained away.
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In the May 4, 1963 issue of America the editors surveyed the impact of John XXIII's encyclical on war and peace:
Initial reactions to Pope John's encyclical Pacem in Terris quickly revealed areas in which its practical impact can be expected to make itself felt.
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In the midst of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, a successful novelist, Bill Gorton, demands that his friend, Jake Barnes—the novel’s narrator—give him “irony and pity” one morning in a friendly repartee. Jake Barnes has been trying to write fiction, and Bill Gorton is razzing him: “Give me irony and pity, irony and pity.” If you want to be a writer, you must be able to generate irony and pity abundantly and with alacrity. Finally, toward the end of the exchange, Bill...
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Thirty years ago today, May 3, 1983, the Catholic bishops in the United States published their landmark pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” a political and moral analysis of U.S. nuclear policies during the cold war. Writing as “pastors, not politicians,” the bishops rejected nuclear war and...
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Pope Francis is the first Jesuit pope. But he is not the first Jesuit cardinal, archbishop or bishop. How many Jesuit cardinals, archbishops and bishops have there been in Jesuit history, and how many are there now? Today we learned that Michael Charles Barber, S.J., was appointed bishop of Oakland, California. Will there be more?
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From the USCCB:
POPE NAMES JESUIT TO HEAD DIOCESE OF OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
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May is the month in which the church honors Mary; by happy coincidence, it is also the month when secular culture honors mothers. According to the Bible, Mary’s role in salvation history is small but mighty. Through the agency of the Holy Spirit, she conceives the Messiah, gives birth to Jesus and raises him to adulthood. She appears at a few key moments in Christ’s ministry—searching frantically for him and finding him teaching in the temple; urging him to assist the hapless hosts at Cana;...
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On May Day there were riots in Greece in protest of the ruinous austerity imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Eurostat, the official European statistics agency, announced Tuesday that unemployment had hit a new high of 19 million. Youth unemployment on a continent-wide basis is now at 25 per cent. The austerity imposed by the European Union has ruined countless lives, driven pensioners into grinding poverty and halted or reversed the life-plans of millions of...
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I didn’t know a great deal about Joseph P. Kennedy before I began reading about him, and from the little I knew he seemed an unsavory character. He had made a large fortune, some of it possibly from bootlegging; he was the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain from 1938 to 1940 and supported appeasement of Nazi Germany; he had his eldest daughter lobotomized; he was said to have used his money to buy his son’s election to the presidency; he was a notorious womanizer.