Why the Príncipi case matters Skip to content The Vatican Secretariat of State’s “extraordinary procedure” to reinstate a laicized priest, blocked this week by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, may prove to be the most significant Vatican story of the year. Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra meets with Pope Francis in 2017. Pillar file photo. Little is known, as yet, about why sostituto Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra issued an order trying to reinstate a man convicted of child sexual abuse by two interdiocesan tribunals in Argentina. But his decision to do so, and the DDF’s move to publicly void the attempt, raises real questions about the role of Pope Francis, the rule of law, and the exercise of power in the Vatican. Share — According to canon law, Ariel Alberto Príncipi’s case was clea...

Yes and no, picking a wife, and still dead to me Skip to content Happy Friday, friends, I cannot be the first father to view their kid as the most beautiful puzzle box ever fashioned by the Divine craftsman, surely. But it doesn’t stop me feeling like the experience of trying to figure this gorgeous little girl out is unique to me. She had a recent birthday, which was lovely and exhausting for all of us in equal measure. And, what with her notching up another solar lap, I suppose it is normal to spend a little time wondering when she grows up, what will she be, as the lady sang. I’m not giving up on my quietly nourished hope she will pursue veterinary science. It’s a good living and would dovetail nicely with my equally cherished and probably equally delusional ambition to one day move to ...

Few of us reach for our Swiss army knife when we simply want to cut something. Aristotle asserts that nature is not like the Delphic smiths, makers of the original Swiss army knife, “a single knife for all kinds of use,” a knife with which, clearly, he was not impressed. Rather, nature crafts things such that the primary ordination of the thing is not obscured or hindered by other tasks or purposes. He says this when discussing the nature of woman. Nature has crafted woman in view of motherhood, and anything else—and there certainly is more in the life of a woman—is in a sense secondary or ancillary. It seems to me that this simple if somewhat odd-sounding point has three powerful implications when rightly considered. First, the reality of motherhood provides a kind of icon or beacon in li...

‘He’s my hero,’ Meghan Drye says of 7-year-old Micah. A 7-year-old boy called out to Jesus to save him before Hurricane Helene flood waters carried him away earlier this week. Micah Drye’s lifeless body was later found about a quarter-mile away from his home in Asheville, North Carolina. But his mother thinks he was saved nonetheless. “You know, I’m so proud of my son, because in his last moments, he wasn’t screaming for me. He was screaming, ‘Jesus.’ ‘Jesus, save me.’ ‘Jesus, I hear you.’ ‘Jesus, I’m calling upon you,’” said Meghan Drye, the boy’s mother, in an interview with Fox Weather on Thursday. Micah always wanted to be a superhero, his mother said. “And instead, he’s my hero, because he reached for something past flesh, past human, past anything that even grown adults, I think, wou...