The pope will visit a section of Romania with a large ethnic Hungarian population—and a Marian shrine that has attracted allies of the autocratic, anti-migrant Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.
While the church continues to shut down parishes in the Rust Belt, a new wave of immigrants is contributing to an urgent demand for more pews in the South and West.
In many corners of the church, women are not treated with equal dignity and worth. Too often, the structures of the Catholic Church show little openness to meaningful transformation. But our church’s lack of insight, and the breakdown of our own self-monitoring systems, are curable.
Christians are slowly returning to help rebuild northern Iraq, but many remain fearful of an ISIS resurgence and feel abandoned by the national government.
Jesus understands not only our bodily suffering, but also our spiritual suffering, in these feelings of abandonment. He was like us in all things, except sin. And he experienced all that we did.
The church has a single focus today—the death of Christ—but her Christ still lives, still suffers in her members and still feeds her with his flesh. We pause in time. Christ does not.