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> Italiano> English> Español> Français > All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English * This time as well, in the speech he gives every year to the Vatican curia before Christmas, Pope Francis has come out swinging at his unfortunate listeners. Last year he went after the the Judases “who hide behind good intentions to stab their brothers and sow weeds.” Two years ago he had pilloried the “trusted traitors” who “let themselves be corrupted by ambition or vainglory and, when they are gently removed, falsely declare themselves martyrs of the system, of the ‘uninformed pope,’ of the ‘old guard,’ … instead of reciting the ‘mea culpa’.” And who is in the pope’s crosshairs this year? Below are the most biting passages from the speech given by the pope to the Roman curia on the mor...

ROME – For most of human history, when someone was accused of a crime, whatever passed for a trial to assess guilt was a simple affair: Victim v. Defendant. Unsurprisingly, such “trials” often boiled down to who was more powerful, wealthier or better connected, and had only a passing relationship to justice. In the late 17th century, Enlightenment philosopher John Locke argued that the progress of civilization required the state to supplant the victim as the accusing party in a criminal trial, in order to ensure neutrality and fairness. “All private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties,” Locke wrote. “There, and there only, is a civil society.” To this day, as anyone who’s e...

The first time I road-tripped from Los Angeles to Zion National Park, I remember thinking that the Virgin River Gorge, which cuts a deep slash across Arizona’s northwest corner, was something like a certain literary wardrobe: you entered on one side via the quiet Nevada desert, then emerged a handful of twists later into the magical expanse of Utah, which practically vibrated with otherworldly sights. But the journey was nothing compared to the destination—Zion brims with bucket-list backdrops, from its intoxicating blend of brilliant colors to its serpentine canyons and sheer cliffs, that since my very first visit have never failed to leave me awestruck. One ingredient in that Zion special sauce is that the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert all converge here to cr...

In 1984, Hollywood released “Gremlins,” a film about a father who brings home an unidentifiable furry little animal as a Christmas present for his son. Turns out, this little guy is even more unique than they realized. If you feed it after midnight, it spawns intelligent and vicious lizard-like creatures who are intent on mayhem. I’m not sure there’s an insightful moral of the movie, but there’s an unmistakable surface-level message: otherwise-innocent things can become monsters if you improperly feed them. Therein lies a message to the scrupulous.  How? We’ll come back to that in a moment. So far in this series, we’ve discussed how intellectual conversion can help us know God and how spiritual conversion can help us love God—and how both these forms of conversion can help us overcome...

The year of 1969 was a time of the finest and the worst, when most institutions, equipped with the polished trophies of new science, seemed to be having a mental breakdown. A man walked on the moon. But there were riots, protests, and a moral fragmentation whose detritus now controls the seminal arbiters of culture. The tone of thought at the heart of it was a composite of bewilderment, fascination, and obtuseness. I have rarely written about the days when I was formed into a particular way of ordering my thinking, with a reluctance born of an intuition that looking back might make me brittle as a pillar of salt or soft as sentiment, for nostalgia can be a lethal alchemy. The sound and scene from fifty years past do not need to come alive again, for they never faded in my recollection. It ...

The incorporation of Anglican hymnody into English-language Catholic worship is one of the great blessings of the past 50 years. And within that noble musical patrimony, Ralph Vaughan Williams surely holds pride of place among modern composers. Well do I remember the summer day in 1965 when I heard a massed chorus of men and women under the direction of my old choirmaster, Robert Twynham, rock the Baltimore Civic Center with all eight verses of Vaughan William’s masterpiece, “For All the Saints,” the processional hymn at the opening Mass of what used to be known as a “Liturgical Week.” It was stirring beyond words. And if a retrospective look at the program of lectures and seminars that followed reveals hints of choppy waters ahead in implementing the liturgical reforms mandated by the Sec...

2 Minute Read December is a month in the Catholic Church where the liturgical year ends and is renewed by the season of Advent. It is a month where we see the general theme of the liturgical season being echoed in nature. Darkness has crept over the world, and is increasing each day. Yet, there is hope for soon the days will begin to lengthen and the sun will conquer the night. The earth reveals that there is a light in this dark place and that Light reigns victorious. A Passing Shadow The great Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien knew this reality very well. Throughout his works there is an ongoing contrast between the dark world and the light that illumines it. In particular, Tolkien stressed that even though there is great evil in the world, goodness always triumphs in the end. This theme of...

This month on Craigslist, tucked among ads for worn couches and dusty pianos, was an odd and poignant offer from a woman in Tulsa. “Anybody need a grandma for Christmas?” she wrote. “I’ll even bring food and gifts for the kids! I have nobody and it really hurts.” The response to the Oklahoma woman was swift, and in some cases cruel, with cynical comments that accused her of carrying out a hoax or called her a parasite hoping to prey on a generous family. One person told her to go kill herself. The woman quickly took down the post, but not before 21-year-old Carson Carlock took a screenshot of it after finding the ad while scouring Craigslist for free items. He posted the screenshot on Facebook on Dec. 11 with the hashtag “FINDGRANDMA.” Naturally, thousands of people around the country shar...

Tom Hanks has brought the beloved Fred Rogers to major motion picture screens this holiday season. What is it about his tenderness we seem to long for? What is it about his model for caring for children and one another that we need to recapture?  Erica Komisar is a psychoanalyst in New York City and author of “Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.” In recent weeks, she’s written powerfully about Fred Rogers, political correctness, and the faith of children as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.  Angelus contributing editor Kathryn Jean Lopez asked her some questions about parenting, nostalgia, and what our renewed interest in Mr. Rogers in 2019 might promise for the future. Erica Komisar. (© Sharon Schuster) Kathryn Jean Lopez: In your op...

Did the pagans really worship idols? If so, what was going on? To be precise, they did not worship idols as such, but they worshipped the gods who they believed the idols represented. But it was more than that. They also believed that the idols became the channels for the invisible god. If you like the spirit of the god channeled in and through the idol. In other words, they believed their demon gods and goddesses could infest the physical objects. This is why certain idols were venerated as sacred–because it was believed they were such effective transmitters or carriers of the spirit of the god. Recently, in reading an Old Testament reading from Isaiah it struck me. The pagan idol worship itself was a pointer to the incarnation of the Lord. The prophet writes, And so I revealed things bef...

In his Christmas message of 1944 – the fifth year of a Second World War that spanned the globe with its suffering – Pope Pius XII offered these words: The Church has the mission to announce to the world . . . the highest and most needed message that there can be: the dignity of man, the call to be sons of God.  It is the powerful cry which, from the manger in Bethlehem to the furthest confines of the earth, resounds in the ears of men at a time when that dignity is tragically low. The holy story of Christmas proclaims this inviolable dignity of man with a vigor and authority that cannot be gainsaid. – an authority and vigor that infinitely transcend that which all possible declarations of the rights of man could achieve. Christmas, the great feast of the Son of God who appeared in hum...