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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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Beginning in Advent of this year, the language of the Mass will be very different. A new translation of the Roman Missal—the book of prayers used in the Mass—will be put into use in all Catholic churches in the English-speaking world. Some who have...
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One is tempted to begin, Parturiebant montes, so great were the fears on one side and the expectations on the other concerning Pope Benedict’s long-awaited motu proprio on the Tridentine Mass.
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George A. Lindbeck, George G. Higgins, Monika Hellwig
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is one of the most powerful officials in the Catholic church. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he is also a distinguished theologian in his own right.
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I have been working for MTV Networks for fifteen years and have written several books about rock ’n’ roll. I never expected to find the church trampling in my vineyard.
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Good. The Vatican document On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World (released July 31) rejects "an outdated conception of femininity" as passivity.
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"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely...
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BETTER EXPECTATIONS
I had just finished reading Mark Bowden's 2006 book Guests of the Ayatollah when I picked up Commonweal and read William Pfaff's column on Iran, “The Enemy Within” (July 17), which is rife with errors concerning the 1979 hostage...
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Marc Ouellet, primate of Canada and archbishop of Quebec City, has a new job. Two, actually. Last month, Pope Benedict named him prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
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Cardinal Avery Dulles (1918–2008) was probably the most respected Catholic theologian in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The author of twenty-four books and more than eight hundred articles, Dulles was widely known...
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When Pope Benedict XVI visited Cuba at the end of March, much of the limited coverage the trip received in the United States came from right-wing commentators perturbed by what they perceived as a soft line on Communism.
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By resigning, Pope Benedict served the church well. He has spared it another prolonged period of mounting disarray. He has "humanized" the papacy, as Joseph Komonchak and others have pointed out.
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In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
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Catholics have been arguing about the Second Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a century.
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Some of the photographs discussed in this essay can be viewed at the Web site for the book Bible Road .
Fifty years after Flannery O’Connor took a few words from a road sign encouraging the use of seatbelts and made them the title of a...
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In our 2005 series of articles titled “What Next?”, Commonweal asked several writers to look at the challenges the then newly elected Benedict XVI was likely to face.
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When the German journalist Peter Sewald recently asked Pope Benedict XVI whether the Catholic Church was “opposed in principle to the use of condoms,” the pope replied that under some circumstances the use of a condom could be a “first step” toward...
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Anyone who followed media coverage of the papal conclave that elected the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, couldn’t help noticing that the same breathless questions were raised again and again by commentators assessing the future...
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In his last years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and from the beginning of his papacy, Pope Benedict has demonstrated a real understanding of the nature and scope of the clergy sexual-abuse crisis.
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1963: Vatican II allowed the use of “the mother tongue” in the liturgy, entrusting bishops conferences with overseeing translations, which Rome would then approve. Bishops conferences throughout the English-speaking world established the...
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The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive...
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Lutheran bishop Peter Rogness recently decried our national loss of awareness that government is self-government, and warned that political discourse “to rally people against their own government...is like an immune system run amuck that eats the...
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Much is being made of rumors that the Vatican will soon issue a decree mandating that the priest celebrate the Mass ad orientem (“toward the East” and, presumably, with his back to the people). I would like to support that, but only if we take the...
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Hardly anyone had expected that Pope Benedict XVI would confront the scandal of clerical sexual abuse in the direct way he did during his recent U.S. visit, referring to it four times in five days. In another development that had not been...
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There has recently been much talk about whether Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is faithful to the principles of Catholic social thought—or is instead a libertarian rejection of the church’s commitment to the poor. In response to the Ryan budget, the chairs...
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We asked five writers to look at the challenges the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI will face.
Looking Ahead: My Hope for the Next Pope By Richard Gaillardetz
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Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, Spe salvi (In Hope We Are Saved), is a thirteen-thousand-word meditation that offers new insight and inspiration on every reading. It is a work imbued with the virtue it examines.
Half lecture, half...
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The last four popes all participated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) either as bishop or peritus (theological adviser), and it is clear that their legacies will be distinctively tied to that epochal event.
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You can read Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, $24.95, 374 pp.) to learn about Jesus of Nazareth. Or you can read it to learn about Benedict XVI. Of course, it is not impossible to do both. In some respects, it is impossible not to...
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Bernard P. Prusak, Joseph A. Komonchak, Peter Jeffery, Rita Ferrone
With the release of the document Summorum pontificum in July 2007, Pope Benedict XVI extended permission for the old Tridentine Mass to be celebrated as "an extraordinary form of the Roman rite." Commonweal asked four writers to respond to the pope'...
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum gives broad permission for the celebration of the Tridentine Mass. The motu proprio also permits use of preconciliar liturgical rites for all the sacraments, with the exception of ordination.
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Pope Benedict’s five-day trip to Brazil in May—his first to Latin America as pope—inaugurated the fifth general conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops (CELAM).
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The dramatic resignation last month of Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus at his investiture Mass as archbishop of Warsaw has raised the most serious questions about the integrity of both the Polish church and the Vatican. I have considerable personal...
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A few years ago I had the chance to have a long conversation with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in Straubing, a small, beautiful town in Lower Bavaria. Ratzinger was there to celebrate the annual feast day of Germany’s oldest surviving...
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By now, much of the world knows about the uproar caused by Pope Benedict XVI’s September lecture at the University of Regensburg in his native Bavaria. In his lectio magistralis Benedict quoted a text of the fourteenth-century Byzantine...
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The controversy over Pope Benedict’s September lecture in Regensburg and his use of the now infamous quote from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus condemning Islam was a perfect storm. But it was not the first time that stern words and...
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Pope Benedict XVI returned to Rome from Turkey last month a virtual conqueror. He had achieved the improbable during his four-day visit: substantive steps toward political, cultural, and religious rapprochement with the East. The pope had pleased...
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Pope Benedict XVI has issued a series of apologies for the ill-conceived remarks made in an academic lecture in which he quoted a medieval Christian emperor who called Islam “evil and inhuman.” At least in one sense, then, the pope appears to agree...
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It has been a year since Pope Benedict XVI first appeared in a white cassock above St. Peter’s Square, and four months since he issued his first encyclical, Deus caritas est.
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The reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s long-awaited first encyclical, Deus caritas est (God Is Love), has been appreciative, even enthusiastic. If some assumed that a seventy-eight-year-old celibate, best known for policing the errors of his...
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Commonweal devotes the first issue of each new year to a discussion of ecumenical or interreligious questions. This year we feature the contributions of two distinguished Jewish scholars, Michael Marrus and Eugene Borowitz.
Both men have long...
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Pope Benedict XVI has put ecumenism high on his agenda. Right from the start of his papacy, he has reached out to other churches and stressed the unity of all Christians. Yet despite good intentions, fault lines in his approach are beginning to show...
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Bishops should not disagree with one another in public, especially on the most neuralgic issues of the day. For better and more often for worse, that discipline was a cornerstone of John Paul II’s pontificate. Yet disagree they did at the...
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How is Benedict XVI, long a defender of orthodoxy and famous critic of the “dictatorship of relativism,” likely to approach interreligious dialogue? Does he see religious pluralism and tolerance as little more than an enticement to...
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In articles about Pope Benedict XVI, much has been made of his experience of student unrest at the University of Tübingen in 1968.
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The election of Joseph Ratzinger as pope has evoked reactions of both satisfaction and of dismay. For some, the dismay was quickly reinforced by news of the removal of Fr. Thomas Reese as editor of America magazine.
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It struck me, watching the coverage of John Paul II’s death and the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Benedict XVI, that non-Catholics were generally more inclined to praise the late pope and to feel somewhat welcoming toward his successor...
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I have met Pope Benedict XVI only once. It was seventeen years ago, when I was a graduate student at Yale. Richard John Neuhaus had organized an invitation-only conference in New York on biblical interpretation.
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Habemus papam. I heard these words in St. Peter’s Square as a young seminarian on October 28, 1958. My first impression of Pope John XXIII was disappointing. Pope Pius XII was an austere and ascetic figure, but John XXIII was a roly-poly Italian who...
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In 1996, John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Universi dominici gregis, which laid down detailed procedures to govern the election of a new pope. Among the responsibilities of the cardinals, prior to the recent conclave, was to appoint two...
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No one knows exactly where Pope Benedict XVI will lead the church, to what extent his ecclesiastical style will mirror that of John Paul II’s, or in what ways, theologically or administratively, he may deviate from the legacy of his charismatic...
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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A recent flurry of speculation in Europe suggests that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the controversial prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has emerged as “an important late entry for the papacy” (London Daily Telegraph) in the...
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Good. The Vatican document On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World (released July 31), rejects “an outdated conception of femininity” as passivity. The letter to the bishops of the world, written by...
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Martin E. Marty, Philip Kennedy, Robert P. Imbelli
On September 5, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the declaration Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church
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Pope Benedict XVI’s New Year message to mark the World Day of Peace came at a time when the world faces the worst economic recession since World War II.
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According to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, in the first century AD the Roman emperor Caligula “wrote his laws in a very small character, and hung them upon high pillars, the more effectually to ensnare the people.” Twelve...
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Catholics who like the word “solidarity” are sometimes suspicious of the word “subsidiarity.” They worry it's a euphemism for privatization. Catholics who like the word “subsidiarity,” meanwhile, are often uneasy with the term “solidarity”—unless it...
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Catholic social teaching, whether promulgated by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century or Benedict XVI in the twenty-first, has always been contextual. The themes emphasized, although consistent in their fundamental doctrinal commitments, have...
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This summer witnessed the publication of Caritas in veritate, Pope Benedict XVI's long-awaited encyclical on economics.
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In the Catholic media today, it is becoming harder all the time to keep a free space for public opinion inside the church. A fictional letter from a hierarch may help to illustrate the pressures. He is writing to the editor of an independent...
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“Rome goes fishing in Anglican pond” was the BBC News headline on October 21, 2009, announcing the Holy See’s decision to establish “personal ordinariates” for Anglicans wishing to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.
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The uproar following Benedict XVI’s decision to lift the excommunication of bishops in the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X—one of whom is a notorious Holocaust denier—was predictable enough, except, it seems, to the pope himself.
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How will it end? Each day seems to bring more “revelations” of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and of bishops who covered up the crimes. Many of these stories are decades old, but some are not. Now the focus is on how the Vatican, and especially...
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On the Wednesday after Easter, nine hundred Notre Dame students serenely walked into the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center to see a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. “Is Religion the Problem?” was the question. About two hours...
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Stanley Hauerwas is the most immediately likable bombthrower I have ever met. I first encountered him and his essays during that part of the 1970s I spent in the newly hatched field of bioethics.
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There has been a lot of loose talk about the current crisis facing the Catholic Church and the Vatican in particular.
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Around these parts, the “Year of the Priest” has been as much of a nonevent as the opening of Al Capone’s vault or spending New Year’s Eve with the Y2K bug. Although Pope Benedict XVI officially began the observance last June, it wasn’t until eight...
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If you work in bioethics, are of a certain age, and have a degree from the University of Virginia, colleagues are likely to assume you studied with James Childress, the legendary teacher who co-authored Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a...
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While I took Lent and Easter more seriously than ever this year—in terms of prayer, Scriptural reading, reflection, and discipline—I didn’t go to Mass. In fact, I haven’t been since Christmas.
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Many years ago I started looking for a copy of Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Highlights of Vatican II, then long out of print. Copies were as rare and as prized as gold dust, but eventually I found one in Chicago, among the office bookshelves of a...
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Pope Benedict’s Summorum pontificum and its accompanying “Letter to the Bishops,” issued last month, will theoretically make the so-cal
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum pontificum, issued motu proprio (as an executive order), universally permits celebrating the sacrifice of the Mass according to the Roman liturgy that was in existence prior to the reform of 1970.
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Late in her life, the Vermont historian Abby Maria Hemenway recalled that, while she was a young girl in the early 1840s, she had a vision of Our Lady in a field behind her house in Ludlow. Not a common occurrence for a Yankee Baptist girl, you...
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The lay Catholic movement Focolare got a boost last year when some of its ideas—including the “economy of communion”—were mentioned favorably in Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate. On Saturday it got another boost with the first...
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In 2003, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of the Pontifical Council for the Family made headlines by claiming that condoms are unsafe because HIV “can easily pass through.”
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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The Italian word dietrismo translates literally as “behind-ism,” but it means more than that. It expresses the Italian belief that things are never as they seem, that there is always a story behind the public story. The powerful know what’s really...
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Not all religions have imposed moral precepts upon their adherents, but all those known as “world religions” have made such a firm connection between their practice and the practice of the moral virtues. Living a morally upright life is, in the...
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The Vatican's decision to speed Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood aroused great elation—and a backlash among Catholics who see the rush as unseemly. There is an obvious remedy that could bring contending Catholics together and send...
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I’m tired of being nice about it, tired of being politically correct when this issue comes up. So I’ll be blunt. Someone just left my parish to join one that has an altar on wheels, and I’m angry about it.
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Every day for years I’ve prayed the liturgy of the hours and attended daily Mass. I say a rosary each day, join my parish for a novena, participate in exposition and benediction, play the organ, and still have favorite Latin hymns. I’ve taught the...
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Everyone knows what the Catholic Church teaches about abortion, right? It is an “intrinsically evil act.” Yet the answers of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in the recent vice-presidential debate suggested, each in its own way, that knowledge of this...
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During their fall meeting in 1986, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops passed by a vote of 225 to 9 the final draft of Economic Justice for All (.pdf).
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Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. There are few women in the pantheon of great jazz instrumentalists, and even fewer jazz performers in the pantheon of great...
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On October 11, 1963, Bishop Luigi Bettazzi addressed the Second Vatican Council on the need for collegiality. He was the newest bishop participant, having been consecrated only a week before, and, at thirty-nine, he was also one of the youngest.
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Pope Benedict's resignation shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did. As an institutionalist who believes in the Roman Catholic Church as the carrier of truth in a sinful world, he would worry a great deal about the impact of his own...
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On February 11, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would step down at the end of the month. His reasons? Age and infirmity. His doctors have advised him not to leave Europe. But perhaps stress contributed to his decision. These are difficult times...
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The last pope to resign did so more than seven hundred years ago, which is a long time even by church standards.
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"The church is not the pope, and the pope is not the church,” theologian Joseph Komonchak reminds us (see “Benedict’s Act of Humility”). Amen to that.
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What do the Roman Catholic Church and the American political system have in common? Both are divided into factions that neither trust nor understand each other, and both confront a crisis of governance.
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Several Orthodox friends have asked what I think of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. A few are, like me, former Roman Catholics. When I mentioned Joseph A. Komonchak’s comment in Commonweal (“Benedict’s Act of Humility”) that the pope’s resignation...
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John Wilson, Mary C. Boys, Peter Jeffery, Richard R. Gaillardetz, William L. Portier
[Editor's note: William L. Portier's and Richard R. Gaillardetz's are the final in a special series of stories we are posting as the cardinals gather for the conclave. All of the previous articles in this series appear below.]
William L...
