Category: catholic news

Ready to have your heart broken?  Then be inspired again? And proud to be Catholic? Read the narratives of some Catholic nuns on the ground in India during this horrific time of pandemic, suffering, and deprivation. We all see the clips on the news. We watch as cameras skim over jammed hospitals, overwrought caregivers, funeral…
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Sometimes there’s help from unexpected quarters. Take the USCCB draft document on communion for politicians who do not oppose abortion. Please.  Who decided to help with this? Cardinal Luis F. Ladaria, S.J., head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In a May 7 letter to Archbishop José H. Gomez, the president of…
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Honestly, I had trouble with the Roman numerals. I was taking notes by hand listening to Cardinal Joe Tobin’s talk in Chicago, and I kept writing something like JP XXXIII and crossing out the unnecessary letters. How infrequently I hear someone referring to John the Twenty-Third these days! Tobin, whose screen name is above, gave…
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Right now I have sixteen tabs in my browser gathering material as I consider a USCCB plan to address the Joe Biden communion issue at their June meeting. I wrote last week about an article I haven’t even linked to again: “I must admit that if Father Louis Cameli had come down differently on communion…
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“It stands out to me that, although a girl passing by, Darnella Frazier, had the presence of mind to record a video of the entire encounter on her cell phone so we could all see what happened entirely too clearly, we were not certain of the outcome.” Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American gives…
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Many people are still writing about Hans Küng and church blessings for those in same-sex unions, but I’m going to shift back to the priesthood. Specifically, to Pope Francis’ call for a three-day symposium in February 2022 to discuss the issues involved. I have to hand it to him; he acts on his belief that…
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The only two books with broken bindings in my Catholic bookcase are my sister’s Baltimore Catechism and On Being a Christian by Hans Küng. Much used, the books reflect an ideological transition in the lifetime of the Vatican II generation. Küng’s was a gift from my late friend Mary Ellen Anderson; the binding is broken…
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Dan Stockman begins his retrospective of Sister Simone Campbell’s career at Network with the bounce that Vatican criticism gave to the organization: new support, energy, and money. She said what I say every time the Vatican condemns women’s ordination: “We often joked that we should send the Vatican a thank-you note.”  This is a reflection…
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Wouldn’t you think, in this age of synods, that cabals would be out of date? Wikipedia describes a cabal as “a group of people who are united in some close design, usually to promote their private views or interests in an ideology, a state, or another community, often by intrigue and usually unbeknownst to those…
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Pope Francis was safe in Iraq. His venturing out to such an unstable place is a testament to his willingness to take risks for the good of the people, Christian and Moslem alike. America and NCR had reporters covering this trip and generating stories about this remarkable outreach; about 75 journalists on the papal plane…
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