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I spent the evening after November 5 on YouTube. The site was full of time-compressed videos that tracked news media icons and Hollywood celebrities as election night wore on. The clips were mesmerizing. It was like watching a Carnival Cruise ship gradually sink. Passengers went from champagne to life jackets in just six hours. Jimmy Kimmel, Rachel Maddow, the always unpleasant Joy Reid, and so many others found themselves trapped in a Greek tragedy, with the bill for their jumbo helping of hubris suddenly due.   How did it happen? The reasons, as the emotionally battered luminaries said, were legion: misogyny, racism, and transphobia from America’s uneducated, sex-reactionary masses. And the pain was made even worse by bitter treason on the part of Latinos, blacks, and women. Ov...

NEW YORK – There’s more fallout for a Brooklyn pastor who allowed pop star Sabrina Carpenter to film a music video inside his church.  Monsignor Jamie Gigantiello has been stripped of his duties at the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church in Williamsburg.  Church officials said they were appalled he permitted Carpenter to film the provocative video last year for her hit song “Feather.”  The Diocese says an investigation revealed instances of mismanagement, including unauthorized financial transfers to a former aide in the Adams administration, which is now the subject of a corruption probe.  “Evidence of serious violations”  “I am saddened to share that investigations conducted by Alvarez & Marsal and Sullivan...

Nowadays more and more people, Christians and non-Christians alike, are pondering the themes of enchantment and disenchantment. (I haven’t read it yet, but this is the theme of Rod Dreher’s newly released book, Living with Wonder.) Many lament the loss of an enchanted world, the pre-modern world in which people experienced themselves to be caught up in a spiritual drama, a world where people perceived the presence of spiritual realities around them, in which there was no sharp break between the spiritual and the physical. Many people long for a world in which gods and fairies, elves and demons were directly experienced, a world in which blessings and curses, magic and sacraments were not just believed in but perceived to work. Instead, we now have a disenchanted world, a secular world in w...

Soon after becoming president, Democrat Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde Amendment into law — barring the use of federal funds for abortions, except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake. When the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration attempted to kill the Hyde Amendment, a small — but symbolic — group of Democrats appealed to the elderly Carter for help. “We are asking President Jimmy Carter (who signed Hyde into law) to please help us in saving it. We are so grateful for your humanitarian work and for everything you did for women and families in office,” said a tweet posted Monday, March 22, by Democrats for Life of America (DFLA).  “America needs you again, Mr. President. Help us save Hyde,” the group added. Battles over the Hyd...

There are 33 years in Jesus’ life and 33 weeks in Ordinary Time in the Church. Soon we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, and then the cycle starts over with Advent. But first comes the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, the dramatic end of the liturgical year. The Gospel for the day is dire, insisting that the end really is coming, and we should be ready for it. Here are takeaways from the readings from previous This Sunday columns. First: Jesus is revealing the end game of Christianity. In the Gospel Jesus speaks about a tribulation, after which “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” But then “the Son of Man” will come “in the clouds with great power a...

The then Prince of Wales went on to condemn the mega-corporations that fund such experiments, specifically expressing concern over the US giant Monsanto, which produces disease-resistant genetically modified crops. ‘It is money that drives everything and wisdom has been banished in the face of seemingly unstoppable marketing. One is made to feel so powerless when confronted by such vast corporations as Monsanto…’ Later that year, Charles would link his opposition to genetic modification to his deep faith, arguing that ‘genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone’. Poplak, who famously refurbished the interiors at Highgrove House as a wedding gift to Charles and Princess Diana, died in 2005. His treasure trove of royal correspondence was recently auct...

Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the Vatican cardinal who is appealing his embezzlement conviction last year, has pushed back against recent claims made by the Vatican’s chief editorial director, criticizing his “vaguely moralistic tone” and saying “we are dealing with a criminal trial, not a trial aimed at teaching lessons.”  In a commentary published in L’Osservatore Romano and Vatican News Nov. 11, the former deputy Vatican secretary of state said an Oct. 30 editorial by Andrea Tornielli “surprised” him as he had appreciated the “balance and accuracy” of Vatican News during the trial.  Tornielli, a top official in the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, had penned his reaction, published in L’Osservatore Romano and Vatican News, to a Vatican Tribunal’s publication of its reasons for...

The Romans, as any first-year Latin student can tell you, were in the practice of ending their sentences with verbs. Regina agricolam amat, for example—literally, “The queen the farmer loves.” Unless you are Yoda, however, you would speak this sentence in English this way: “The queen loves the farmer.” (Something tells me this relationship is not going to work out.) In any case, Latin word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, object, verb. In English, word order often (not always) proceeds this way: subject, verb, object. Because Latin nouns are declined—that is, they are assigned distinct endings for how they function in a sentence—it is easy to identify the subject and the object. The Church preserves the practice of ending sentences and clauses with the predicate. I...

By Clement Harrold November 8, 2024 We know remarkably little about who the Antichrist will be and what his arrival on the earth will look like. The very word antichrist only appears in four verses of Scripture, all of them in the Johannine epistles: 1 John 2:18, 1 John 2:22, 1 John 4:3, and 2 John 7. The author of these epistles clearly expects his readers to already have some background knowledge of what kind of creature the Antichrist is supposed to be, since he presents the concept without introduction: “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour” (1 Jn 2:18). This fits with what we know about ancient Jewish theology more generally, which included an anti-messianic figure ...

Two blood covered hands were raised up in the dim light as Macbeth walked unsteadily from the chambers of Duncan. “This is a sorry sight,” he says to his wife. A few minutes later, after discussion and debate, Lady Macbeth goes into the chamber and then also emerges, having placed the bloody daggers in the hands of King Duncan’s guards. “My hands are of your colour; but I shame, To wear a heart so white” (2.2). Lady Macbeth, it seems, is ashamed to not have participated more fully in the murder of Duncan; in fact, she had said previously that she only failed to kill him because he reminded her of her own father. Nevertheless, she is co-guilty of this murder. She and her husband have pursued the inverse of what man and woman are called to in marriage. Rather than co-create, as man and woman...

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio – articles – email ) | Nov 02, 2024 Commonweal Magazine turned 100 years old this year! Can you believe it? Do you care? I don’t blame you if you don’t care. Those of us who read (or write for) Catholic Culture are not exactly Commonweal’s target audience. As the New York Times writes in its laudatory piece on Commonweal’s centennial: Commonweal Catholics were educated, liberal-minded and middle-class, and aspired to assimilate into elite culture while bringing their Roman Catholic faith, education and sensibility with them. I don’t know that many of us identify as liberal or aspire to “assimilate into elite culture.” And I’m guessing a lot of us might question to what extent the dissident writers of Commonweal actually did bring “their Roman Catholic fa...