Quito, a whale spy, and ‘sensory Masses’ Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Hey everybody, Greetings from Quito, Ecuador, where I arrived last night to cover the International Eucharistic Congress, a week-long global pilgrimage event organized under the aegis of the creatively named Pontifical Committee for Eucharistic Congresses at the Vatican.  I got to Quito well after midnight, and I really haven’t seen or done anything yet, save for taking a Tylenol PM and hitting the hay.  But I will. Just as soon as I press send on this newsletter. I came to see what the Church’s International Eucharistic Congress looks like, and to report back to you about how it lines up relative to the National Eucharistic Congress in Ind...

Why did the CCHD amp up spending while contributions were dropping? Skip to content The USCCB has released its audited financial statements for 2023, potentially shedding additional light on the recent administration of the CCHD, an anti-poverty program administered by the bishops conference which has at times attracted controversy. The headquarters of the USCCB in Washington, DC. Credit: Fr. Gaurov Shroff via Flickr. CC BY SA 2.0 Subscribe now Founded in 1969, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) is a program based on an annual national collection administered by the U.S. bishops. Of the money collected, 25% is retained by the dioceses where it is collected, and dispersed to fund local poverty alleviation projects. The remaining 75% is distributed through grants – typi...

America has had no shortage of pessimistic critiques in recent years. And with titles like Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics and The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success to his name, Ross Douthat has become something of a master of the genre. But at a Sept. 6 talk at the University of Notre Dame, the conservative Catholic commentator and New York Times columnist sounded an uncharacteristically optimistic note regarding the United States’ prospects. “There’s no better place to be for the rest of the 21st century than right here in America,” Douthat said to a full auditorium in Geddes Hall, answering in the affirmative the question posed by his talk’s title, “Is There Hope for America’s Future?” However, there’s a catch: According to Douthat’s presentatio...

“On the Role of Literature in Formation” is perhaps Pope Francis’s best document of his pontificate. Short, sweet, and full of good lines quoted and written. And yet he remains a “second friend” to many of his flock because they see their own world in some fundamentally different ways than he does. Pope Francis’s pontificate has been, to put it mildly, controversial. His judgments—theological, administrative, and otherwise—have generally cheered those who seem to want the Catholic Church to resemble the liberal Protestant groups that are evaporating before our eyes. The ambiguity with which Francis has expressed many of these judgments has unleashed before us a small army of “popesplainers,” those who feel a bounden duty to tell anyone worried about statements, appointments, or any other p...