As the last session of the Synod on Synodality continues its second week, an interview published on Tuesday gives more insight on Pope Francis’s vision of the role of synodality in the Church today. It highlights some of the inherent tensions between the use of synods and the power of the papacy in modern Catholicism. Read more
Taken as a whole, the online Catholic world can look more like an abstract pointillist painting than a coherent landscape. To borrow the imagery of Isaiah Berlin, the internet environment encourages us to think like foxes rather than hedgehogs. Virtual discussions roam over many small things (e.g., the kerfuffle last spring over Harrison Butker’s graduation Read more
Many Catholics were hasty to assume that the opening ceremony of the Olympics went out of its way to “mock” the Last Supper. The instant outrage the tableau aroused — right or wrong — tells a larger story about something that has happened in Catholic life across the last four decades. But it has not Read more
Yet another religious order or congregation leaves our diocese. A much-loved Vatican II-inspired archbishop dies. Our parish priest tells us that relieving priests are more difficult to find. These are all striking moments in church life. Yet the biggest shock has been to learn of the seemingly inevitable decline of the National Council of Priests Read more
The Week of Christian Unity, the church celebrated this week, supports an unfashionable cause. It encourages the healing of divisions between churches. Divisions rule In culture, politics and religion, however, division provides most of the news of the day. The religious headlines emphasise fractures within churches. They tell of discrepancy between the professed values of Read more
On May 1, the Associated Press ran an interesting report on the return of conservative Catholicism in the United States. The nutshell of the article is this sentence: “Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has Read more
“Without liturgical reform, there is no reform of the Church,” Pope Francis said emphatically last February during an address to the plenary assembly of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. His remarks came around the 60th anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy that was issued during Read more
As this column is being written, the Synod of Bishops is bringing to a close the most opaque assembly ever to be held in its relatively brief, post-Vatican II history. Actually, once the members of the October 4-29 gathering have voted on a final document (Saturday evening) and then celebrated the concluding Mass in St. Read more
Conventional wisdom holds that it takes a century for an ecumenical council to flower and bear fruit. Altering customs and thought habits, especially when linked to faith, takes a long time. Simply getting the word out of a council’s teaching and its implications can take decades. Then, there are people and institutions for which new Read more
Of all that happened in the liturgy in the aftermath of Vatican II, only two events were visible to most people. First, was the disappearance of Latin (which had become a de facto badge of identity for many Catholics), and the second was the fact that now the president of the Eucharistic assembly ‘faced the Read more