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Over the last two pontificates, what’s formally known as the Pope’s Christmas “greeting” to his Curial chiefs has gone well beyond glad tidings – if anything, the forum has arguably made for the most significant in-house speech of the year for Benedict and Francis both. The traditional opening “bookend” to Vatican Christmas – which closes in early January with the “State of the World” address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See – at today’s appointment, the reigning pontiff yet again focused on his continuing effort on the reform of the Roman Curia, the wholesale thrust of which might finally be executed in the New Year with the most sweeping makeover of the church’s central government since Vatican II. Yet while Fr...

Today’s Gospel gives us some background for the Christmas feast that we need to take to heart. It speaks to us of a crisis at Christmas. We tend to sentimentalize the Christmas story as we think of the baby Jesus in the manger. It is not absolutely wrong to be sentimental, but we must also be prayerfully sober about how difficult that first Christmas was, and about the heroic virtue required of Mary and Joseph in order to cooperate with God in making it come to pass. Let’s look at this Gospel in three stages: distress, direction, and decision. DISTRESS – This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilli...

Germany and Austria are preparing for a year-long string of events to honor the 250th birthday of Ludwig Van Beethoven, one of the Western world’s greatest and most prolific composers. The activities will be centralized in the German city of Bonn, where Beethoven was born, and the Austrian city of Vienna, where the composer spent most of his life and composed the majority of his works. The event will proceed under the moniker BTHVN2020. DW reports that each of the 5 letters in the logo corresponds with a German word for five key aspects of the composer’s character: Beethoven as a citizen, as a composer, a humanist, a visionary and a nature lover. Coordinators refer to these as “pillars” of Beethoven, and events are expected to bring these themes into their presentations. The celebration ki...

During the advent of my first pregnancy, in 2012, I was comfortably settled into my own unique brand of postmodern feminist Christianity. I remember lounging on the couch amidst waves of debilitating nausea, watching news coverage of the controversial Contraceptive Mandate, rolling my eyes in anger and disgust at those regressive Catholic priests in their prim white collars, telling women what to do with their bodies. Yet almost exactly two years later, I would be standing before such a priest at the Easter Vigil Mass, publicly confessing my desire to be received into the largest, oldest male-helmed institution in the world, the Roman Catholic Church. My sudden swerve into Catholicism prompted a dramatic worldview inversion on a number of issues related to feminism and sexuality, including...

Christmas is not the birth of Christ; what the birth of Christ was, and is, will never change. Christmas is a celebration, a remembrance and marking of the birth of Christ – and it has changed, and is still changing. “People ask themselves how much remains of this observance and of the feast and its customs.” So mused Hilaire Belloc over ninety years ago in his essay, “A Remaining Christmas.” Cognizant of a general loss of age-old Christmas traditions, Belloc set out to record how Christmas was still celebrated in his home in Sussex. Much more than a tale of quaint holiday practices, the essay is a profound reflection on the place of such observances in human life. “Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed trad...

It was not until early October that I encountered a full-throated conservative reaction to the Pew finding: the September 29–October 12 issue of the National Catholic Register with its 60-point headline, “Eucharistic Wake-Up Call.” The issue contained no less than fourteen articles on the Eucharist, including articles on the production of hosts and Eucharistic wine and sidebars on Eucharistic miracles, Eucharistic books and DVDs, and Eucharistic papal encyclicals. Nowhere did I find any outright blaming of the Second Vatican Council, although there was a lot of familiar grumbling about the post-conciliar “spirit” and lack of catechesis. If many of the articles could have fit into my pre-conciliar childhood, they were less dogmatic and more conscious of contemporary challenges to understand...