By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 10, 2024 Having lived through quite a few synods over the past two generations, most of us are aware that, like all human meetings, they are opportunities for people to try to win approval for their own particular ideas of the best way forward in the situation faced by the institution in question, in this case the Church. And just as with most meetings, the individual participants have a variety of attitudes toward the past image and past policies of the organization they purport to represent. The result is that despite the actual necessity and even the (relatively rare) benefits of formalized meetings, they often spark the formation of factions, exacerbate conflicts, and waste more time in their process than they save later th...

COMMENTARY: A university should be a place where students can pursue ultimate truths about God and the human person, not merely a place where they learn skills to help with employment. Over milkshakes and burgers, one of my student’s fathers said to me that he could not thank me enough for the kind of formation his daughter was getting in the classics and in the faith at my university. He said we were providing her something that he himself could not have provided, and he even suggested that we run a summer program for parents at our satellite campus in Rome. Did this father make a prudent choice for his daughter? After all, many people whose judgment I trust counsel their kids to forgo Catholic universities and instead attend subsidized state institutions. “The No. 1 rule,” they routinely...

By Clement Harrold October 11, 2024 Many skeptics and even some Christians struggle with the idea that the Bible not only fails to condemn slavery, but actually seems to justify its existence in places. What are we to make of the Mosaic Law’s detailed prescriptions for how slaves are to be treated, for example? And how about St. Paul’s injunction to slaves to “obey in everything those who are your earthly masters” (Col 3:22)? If the Bible is the inspired Word of God, how can it be so complicit in something as evil as slavery? There are a number of points worth making here. At a basic level, we need to remind ourselves that the kinds of slavery sanctioned by Moses in the Old Testament are nothing close to the chattel slavery which plagued the New World following the discovery of the America...

ITHACA, N.Y. (OSV News) — While cleaning out your house or a loved one’s, you come across a batch of rosaries, crucifixes and other religious artifacts. You hesitate to throw them out, recoiling at the thought of treating such spiritually significant items as mere garbage. Yet you may not wish to keep them for yourself. What to do? One popular option — as Erika Lindsell knows from experience — is to leave the goods at the local parish. Lindsell, the administrative assistant at Immaculate Conception in Ithaca, has often found boxes full of religious objects on the office doorstep upon arriving for work. “People leave stuff there figuring the church will know what to do with it,” Lindsell remarked. The rub, she said, is that it’s not so simple for parishes to place the objects, especially if...

As the brutal fighting in Ukraine approaches its third winter with no end in sight, the Vatican has once again dispatched Italian Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi to push for peace. Cardinal Zuppi, who is Pope Francis’ special envoy to Ukraine, embarked on his second visit to Moscow on Monday, where he will “assess further efforts to facilitate the reunification of Ukrainian children with their families and the exchange of prisoners, with a view to achieving the much-hoped-for peace,” according to Matteo Bruni, director of the Holy See Press Office. One million people have now either died or been injured as result of the conflict in Ukraine, according to recent estimates, including 200,000 dead Russians and 80,000 dead Ukrainians. Ukrainian infrastructure has also been severely damaged, as long...