The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) plans to devote part of its national meeting next month to the sensitive issue of which Catholics are worthy of receiving Communion, and President Joe Biden will be a key subject. Dozens of bishops had written to the USCCB president, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, requesting to postpone Read more
The University of Notre Dame held its commencement ceremony this weekend with the notable absence of one very important guest: President Biden. The Catholic News Agency reported earlier this month that Biden, the second Catholic president in American history, was invited to give remarks to new graduates but could not attend due to scheduling conflicts. Read more
Pope Francis will attend the UN Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow in November. Pope Francis and John Kerry, U.S. President Joe Biden’s special envoy for climate, met privately in a closed-door meeting, last week at the Vatican. In an interview after the meeting, Kerry said he believes Francis will participate in the UN Framework Read more
The Jesuit priest who oversaw President Biden’s inaugural Mass resigned from his post as president of Santa Clara University this week. The resignation came after an internal investigation found he engaged in behaviours that conflicted with the Jesuit order’s “protocols and boundaries,” according to a statement issued by the school Wednesday. The Rev. Kevin O’Brien, Read more
Recently, a handful of American Catholic bishops have issued statements questioning whether anyone who supports abortion rights should be receiving Communion, and journalists immediately pounced: Will President Joe Biden, they wanted to know, be denied Communion by the U.S. bishops’ conference because of his pro-choice position on abortion? Journalists, here’s your answer: This is a Read more
It has puzzled me a long time why Catholics are so much more engaged with the abortion issue than members of other Christian churches. All Churches start their response to abortion from the same baseline – the Commandment “thou shalt not kill”. Yet they do not all arrive at the same destination. Why is this? Read more
Thumping the armrest of his chair, Emeritis Pope, Benedict XVI smacked down conservative Catholics who failed to accept the legitimacy of Pope Francis. Benedict called the conservative Catholics “fanatics”. Some hardline conservatives Catholics are unhappy with Pope Francis and have often voiced doubts about whether Benedict stepped down willingly. “Some of my more fanatical friends Read more
Are Catholicism and democracy incompatible? Pope Pius IX, in his notorious 1864 Syllabus of Errors, seemed to think so. Every Catholic politicians since then has had to wrestle with the eruptions and upheavals that occur where these two tectonic plates grind together. The latest example is President Joe Biden, who has been reprimanded by the President Read more
Less than three months after the formation of a controversial working group to deal with President Joe Biden, the nation’s Catholic bishops have disbanded the group, which produced a public rupture among the U.S. hierarchy in its approach toward the nation’s second Catholic president. According to two bishops familiar with the process, the work of Read more
The American Catholic bishops are split over how to deal with Joe Biden, the first Catholic president since John F. Kennedy, but it’s not just one split. A small but vocal minority wants to punish the new president for his support of legalized abortion, gay rights and birth control. These are the bishops who consider Read more