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The interview Pope Francis granted to Norah O’Donnell of CBS for 60 Minutes, recorded in April and aired this week, was noteworthy for four clear “Noes,” one implied “No” and one “Yes.” The clear Noes were regarding: women in holy orders — including deacons, surrogacy, blessings of same-sex couples, and papal abdication.  The implied No was regarding synodality. The Yes was on welcoming migrants, though with important nuances. Any interview with the Pope must be interpreted carefully, as he prefers a looser and more informal style, a style which does resonate widely and sympathetically. Matthew Bunson explained that well in these pages. It is important to catch what the Holy Father means, rather than attend only to what he says. For example, while praising women in this interview, Pop...

ST. CLOUD, Fla. – A Florida priest could face charges after an argument over Communion resulted in allegations that he bit a woman, according to the St. Cloud Police Department. In a charging affidavit, police said the incident happened around 1:20 p.m. Sunday at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church along Brown Chapel Road. Upon arrival, police said they learned that a woman had attended Mass at the church to participate in her niece’s Communion. However, the priest conducting the service, whom News 6 has decided not to name because he was not arrested and does not yet face formal charges, reportedly refused to give the woman Communion bread, claiming she hadn’t performed the necessary steps to be given the holy sacrament, the affidavit says. While the woman argued that she had performed the...

ROME. Age certainly accelerates one’s sense of the passage of time. Well do I remember high school classes that felt as long as Würm Glaciation, the minute hand circumambulating the clock’s perimeter at a glacial pace. Yet this past April 27, sitting in the south transept of the world’s greatest tombstone – the Papal Basilica of St. Peter’s in the Vatican – I remembered being at that exact spot at the 1996 Mass marking John Paul II’s priestly golden jubilee, and the intervening decades seem to have passed at hypersonic speed. Tempus fugit, indeed! It was the tenth anniversary of John Paul II’s canonization, so it was also unnerving to realize that a full decennium had gone by since the man whose biography I had written was raised to the glory of the altars in company with Pope John XXIII. ...

A blind spot in terms of driving refers to an area where the traffic outside your vehicle cannot be seen in its mirrors.  The first time you encounter the reality of blind spots as a new driver can be quite disturbing; you look in your side-view mirrors and see nothing, but as soon as you start to change lanes, you realize there was another car right next to you, completely invisible to your view!If you were like me, you were probably told that blind spots are inevitable, and the only thing you can do to overcome them is to physically look over your shoulder.  I’ve been driving for a quarter of a century. And for 25 years I’ve been looking over my shoulder whenever I change lanes in order to check my blind spot.  Well, I recently learned that cars don’t have to have blind sp...

One of the assumptions that seems to animate so many of the conversations surrounding a more synodal Church is that a more “democratized” Catholic Church is by definition a better Church. To that end, we saw in last year’s Synod on Synodality that there was a lot of chatter about a Church that listens to “the people of God.” And those two concepts — a democratized Church and the Church as the people of God — were often conflated to mean almost the same thing.  I think that this conflation is incorrect and that the “people of God” metaphor, used in Lumen Gentium, when properly understood not only does not endorse a more democratic Church but actually implies the opposite. Whenever I saw the “people of God” metaphor referenced in the lead-up to the first part of the Synod on Synodality,...

The pilgrim bridge, the news, and a priest of courage Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Hey everybody, Today is the feast of St. Roman Adame Rosales, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.  Roman Adame Rosales was born in 1859, in Jalisco, Mexico. In 1890 he became a priest — and during his priesthood, established associations of laity committed to nightly adoration of the Eucharist. Those associations continue to this day, actually. But in the 1920s, anticlerical violence saw Fr. Roman, like many priests, go into hiding, taking their ministries “underground,” and offering Masses in houses, social halls, and other places where they wouldn’t be found. In April 1927, while he was giving a kind of Lenten mission at a place calle...

The new Vatican document on how to judge purported apparitions of Mary and other supernatural events tends toward caution but also offers more clarity and transparency, experts told the Register. Going forward, local bishops are not supposed to make a public pronouncement on a reported apparition until the statement is approved by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), which is now taking a more active and more public role in examining such reports. “I appreciate the document. It’s well-written, because it clearly explains what the problems were in the past, and it also moves toward transparency,” said Gloria Falcão Dodd, research professor at the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton in Ohio. “There is a call here, first of all, for tran...

Readings:Deuteronomy 4:32–34, 39–40Psalm 33:4–6, 9, 18–20, 22Romans 8:14–17Matthew 28:16–20 Last Sunday, we celebrated the sending of the Spirit, which sealed God’s new covenant and made a new creation. In this new creation, we live in the family of God, who has revealed himself as a Trinity of love. We share in His divine nature through His Body and Blood (see 2 Peter 1:4). This is the meaning of the three feasts that cap the Easter season— Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi. These feasts should be intimate reminders of how deeply God loves us, how He chose us, from before the foundation of the world, to be His children (see Ephesians 1:4–5). Today’s readings illuminate how all God’s words and works were meant to prepare for the revelation of the Trinity and God’s blessing in J...

I was honored to give a faculty reflection at the Saint Mary’s College Nursing Pinning ceremony today. The graduating class is the first cohort of students I had the privilege of teaching since coming to Saint Mary’s two years ago, and I wanted my reflection to be a gift to them and their families. I wanted it to be something really special and meaningful.  So I ended up writing two.  This was the first one, but I wasn’t satisfied that it struck the right note. Neither was my wife, and I trust her opinion, so I buckled down and hammered out another (which I managed to deliver with a minimum of sobs, believe it or not). Still, I kinda’ like this one, and I did write it for my students, so I’m going to post it here to make it easy to forward to them.&n...

We shook on it. After too many moves, my wife and I committed to move once more into a small cabin on the land. After years of false starts, it finally happened, as I wrote back in January. More than any of the practical things we hope to do, it was a move for our family, seeking to root ourselves in a rhythm of daily prayer and work. We were seeking a liturgy of life rooted in the land’s own ordering to God. With the rise of remote work and growing frustration within American cities, the back-to-the-land movement is in full swing. Often, people arrive in the country with lofty or overly idealized expectations and are not ready for the hardships, skills and financial commitments involved in homesteading. My friend and neighbor, Jason Craig, recently offered a book with Thomas van Horn on d...

Whether it’s bankrupting your family in Monopoly or securing the last victory point against your buddies in Settlers of Catan, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of board-game triumph. We’ve collected experts’ best tips and tricks of the best board games, so you can dominate every time. MONOPOLY Most players forget the real goal of this game: It’s not to become rich. Instead, you must bankrupt your opponents before they wipe you out. Brian Valentine, who placed third at the 2015 World Monopoly Championship, recommends going all in on the orange properties. From jail, a ­rival’s dice toss of six or eight—statistically among the most likely rolls—puts them smack in the middle of this real estate. This makes these amber gems some of the most lucrative on the block. TIC-TAC-TOE In the worl...

By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | May 15, 2024 Do you remember the “long hot summer” of 1967, when racial violence broke out in the inner cities all across the US? Then the following year there melees in the streets of Chicago when the Democratic Party held its national convention there. One more year brought waves of campus unrest, with student agitators shutting down classes to protest the war in Vietnam. The sequence may be different, but a similar pattern is evident today. First there were the BLM riots—and Yes, they were riots, even if sympathetic reporters characterized them as “mostly peaceful.” Now the campus “protests,” which are actually attempts to shut down rational protest and debate by force and intimidation. And in August the Democrats will be meeting i...