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LOS ANGELES — Roberto Dell’Oro, a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, publicly urged support for legal abortion prior to the possibility of fetal pain during a recent panel discussion sponsored this month by Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.   During an Oct.12 panel discussion, entitled “Confronting the Dobbs Decision: A Conversation About the Legality of Abortion,” Dell’Oro, a bioethicist and theologian at the university, and two other LMU panelists criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization, the 2022 landmark decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.   In prepared remarks, Dell’Oro attacked the Dobbs ruling for failing to uphold democracy, which “maximizes rather than restricts a space of personal freedom...

Jesus is God, and he has been listening to us pray all our lives. And after all he has heard, he wants to tell us how it sounds from his perspective on the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C. He asks us a question he already knows the answer to: Are our prayers — yours and mine — more like the proud petitioner who thinks he is doing pretty great in his spiritual life, or are they more like the sad sinner who knows he isn’t doing very well at all? It’s statistically very likely that you and I are more like the proud guy than the humble one. St. Luke begins by saying “Jesus addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness.” If you asked those who know us, the chances are that they would put us in that group. Nearly 90% of respondents thought Christians were judg...

If your kids are constantly on their devices, squinting at tiny screens and ignoring everyone around them, you might have a problem brewing. Too much screen time for children can contribute to behavioral problems and loss of social skills, among other risks. Photo Credit: Libreshot Mom blogger, Molly DeFrank knew about the risks, but she was also concerned about their overall lack of engagement with life around them. It was time, she thought, for a screen detox. She wrote on her blog: “I knew screens were having a negative impact on my kids, even though we only allowed an hour a day. One day when I got home after running errands, my kindergartener greeted me at the door with, “Can I play on your phone?” Nope. That was the last straw. My husband and I decided that we needed a course correct...

WASHINGTON — A study that claims to be the largest national survey of Catholic priests conducted in more than 50 years has found that despite relatively high levels of personal well-being and fulfillment among priests as a whole, a significant percentage of priests have issues with burnout, distrust in their bishop, and fears of being falsely accused of misconduct. Conducted by The Catholic Project, a research group at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., the study released at an Oct. 19 press conference used survey responses from 3,516 priests across 191 dioceses and eparchies in the United States. The study also draws on in-depth interviews with 100 of those priests and a survey of U.S. bishops, 131 of whom — or about two-thirds of the total — responded. The study is f...

Share via: I grew up in the beautiful mountains of Colorado with loving parents. We were not religious at all; in fact, our family had an anti-Christian attitude. I believed in an impersonal God and had a deep devotion to angels, though I am not sure where those beliefs originated. My parents worked hard to provide for my brother and me, and they instilled in us a strong sense of right and wrong. We were a tight-knit family. Wicca, a Family Affair When I was 11 years old, my brother and I were playing in our yard. We stumbled upon a stone circle we had never noticed before; the stones and the circle were clearly placed by human hands, in a pattern that pointed to their ritualistic purpose. Thinking satanists must have snuck into our yard and built this thing, we proceeded to destroy it by ...

“A canonizable saint.”  That was a widely shared judgment upon the death of Father José Luis Soria, an Opus Dei priest who died in Vancouver on Oct. 3.  “Canonizable” is the key. Opus Dei’s raison d’être is that ordinary people can become holy — saints in heaven — in the most mundane circumstances, attracting no particular attention from the world. Being a saint is rather the default position from their members. A “canonizable” saint is something different, one who attracts widespread attention for his holiness.   One story making the rounds about Father Joe — as he was universally known — was that Archbishop Michael Miller of Vancouver was once asked why there were no canonized saints from his diocese. “Because Father Soria has not died yet,” Archbishop Miller replied. &nbs...

Father John Horgan, pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Vancouver and a widely known face and voice of the Archdiocese of Vancouver, died Wednesday at the age of 63. Father Horgan had been battling stomach cancer and was recently admitted to palliative care.  A native of Cambridge, Mass., he attended Harvard University, majoring in religious studies and graduating magna cum laude in 1980 when he began his studies for the priesthood in Rome. He received his bachelor of philosophy, bachelor of sacred theology, and master’s in moral theology at the Angelicum in Rome in 1985. At the urging of students he volunteer to serve in Vancouver and worked with the Office of Religious Education and was assigned to Holy Rosary Cathedral. Father Horgan in a 2011 file photo. He was an expert in ...

Writing my new book, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), afforded me the welcome opportunity to dig into the Council’s 16 texts and the many fine commentaries on them. It also made me ponder why the Council was necessary. That question is often raised today by young Catholics who, unsettled by the excessive ecclesiastical air turbulence over the past decade and generally ill-informed about the pre-conciliar Church, imagine that everything in Catholicism was copacetic until John XXIII made the fatal mistake of summoning an ecumenical council. That, however, was not the view of some quite orthodox Catholic leaders in the decade before Vatican II. Msgr. Giuseppe De Luca was a stalwart churchman who had drafted the Holy Office decree placing the books of 1947 N...

Some theologians and historians dispute today whether the belief that everyone will be saved (“universalism”) was condemned by the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. Nevertheless, the fact that universalism might not have been condemned by that council constitutes nothing more than an interesting historical tidbit for orthodox Christians. Even if some great saints or a significant minority in certain ages of the Church held universalist beliefs, historical orthodox Christianity definitively came to reject universalism. But, given the interest in universalism today, it is helpful to say a few words on that point. Let us be clear about our terms. Universalists think that all will be saved. Universalists are not saying that everyone will end up in heaven just by good luck; people wh...

It is believed that there exists a staircase in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that St. Joseph built. Since I read about it as a young child, I have always wanted to see the famous staircase, and I was finally blessed with my chance on a recent road trip. My father was a gifted carpenter, and I was fascinated by his projects growing up. If my dad needed something — a storage compartment for his boat, a home sauna or a ramp for his wheelchair — he didn’t buy it. He built it. Growing up, I used to love going to the lumber yard with my dad to pick out wood, stain and nails for his projects. I was mesmerized watching Dad turn raw materials into beautiful, finished products. Perhaps that is what initially spurred my interest in the staircase. And though I thought about my Dad as I admired the stairs, I ...

October 17, 2022 “Most of these extraordinary cases come from violating the First Commandment and that means turning to a spirit other than God for comfort, information or power. So, if you’re not playing around with other spirits than God, you’re not usually going to end up in trouble. Now, if you start getting close to being in trouble, confession and the Mass — for the Catholic who has access to those sacraments — is going to resolve more than 90 percent of the situations,” said Adam Blai, author of “The Exorcism Files: True Stories of Demonic Possession” (Sophia Institute Press). Blai works in the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh and is an expert on “religious demonology and exorcism.” Learn more at his website, “Religious Demonology....

Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia (The Church of Holy Wisdom) Note from the Author: Copy/paste GPS Coordinates listed below into Google Maps to see or travel to each location. I had the opportunity to travel with a friend of mine to the incredible country of Turkey recently.  My wife, my oldest son, and I lived in Turkey for 2 years and it had been over 10 years since I had set foot in my home away from home in the Middle East. My wife very generously watched our four kiddos to allow me to go on my pilgrimage.  After landing at Istanbul’s stunning airport… …we first drove to the Church of St. George at the Phanar (above, GPS Coordinates: 41° 1’45.17″N, 28°57’6.19″E).  This church is the Greek Orthodox Church’s version of the Roman Catholic Church’s Vatican.  Inside this small chu...