It only took thirty-five years, but the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints finally recognized what almost every rational Catholic in the world had already known.
The U.S. and its European allies have been the aggressors in this whole unnecessary confrontation. They are the ones who can call it off. There is zero gain in it.
Pope Francis has taken steps to bolster synodality and wean the universal Church from its unhealthy obsession with Vatican centralization. How has he done it?
"Austerity" has been the common language of the modern international economy, but is under attack now by the new interpretation of wealth accumulation and finance.
I used to think something tragic had happened to bring a person back to confession after so long, perhaps a loss or grim diagnosis. That's almost never the case.
President Obama makes it clear that he thinks it’s more important to win a long-term argument with his ideological opponents than to pretend they'll work with him.
Identifying and putting together different constituencies is nothing new in politics. But in recent decades it’s become a new religion, especially among Democrats.
An American cardinal? Maybe, or maybe not: Some of Francis's choices last year were so unconventional that it’s difficult to know what he’ll do this time around.
Can we now say with confidence that our government will not use torture again? In light of reaction to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, I fear we can't.
The pushback to Pope Francis’s reforms is intensifying and the Jesuit pontiff is not shy to admit it. “But that’s a good sign for me – that it’s out in the open."
It's striking how many priests and bishops famous for quoting papal documents ad nauseam seem unable even to pronounce the name of Francis’s apostolic exhortation.
If people paid attention to what Francis says – including bishops and cardinals, even retired – they would not be confused about where he wants to move the church.
Obama’s decision to back away from a policy of separating families of undocumented immigrants brings utterly contradictory responses from Republicans and Democrats.
The highlight of an upcoming three-day sojourn will be a visit to the Phanar, the Istanbul home of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I.
Obama is paying attention to the tens of millions of voters who supported him two years ago and are hoping he'll show them political engagement is worth the effort.
After eleven weeks, the prefect’s chair at the CDW remains without a head. For a major Curia office to be vacant so long is unprecedented in contemporary history.
What purpose could there be for a three-day meeting touted as an “interreligious colloquium on the complementarity of man and woman”? Opposition to same-sex unions.
Laws that once upheld the "traditional views" of marriage social conservatives advocate were dismantled piece by piece because they inflicted other moral costs.
Barack Obama has always been right that joining the fray requires hope. So it is all the more dispiriting that Americans seem to be fed up with the whole thing.
Only nineteen months have passed since Francis became pope. So much has happened it's easy to forget how different things might be if not for his personality.
Republicans have been effective at turning the anger that working-class whites feel about being left behind against liberals, Democrats, and President Obama.
Since the Synod of Bishops was instituted in 1965, no pope has ever begun an assembly’s first working session with an address like the one Pope Francis gave.
China's Xi Jinping insists he will tolerate no concessions to the calls for electoral and governmental reform now being made in mass demonstrations in Hong Kong.
Those hostile to Pope Francis and how he’s governing the Vatican and church have affixed the bull’s eye on the backs of a number of people close to him.
The appointment of Blase Cupich will have an impact beyond the Catholic Church because it tells us about the role Francis wants the church to play in American life.
Reading a new letter from the Vatican, one might think the sign of peace is floundering in the church today. In fact, it's one of the most successful rites we have.
What you may have heard is how racially polarized the country is in its reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown. But polarization is the wrong concept here.
We are confronted with a conservative judiciary using any argument it can to win ideological victories that elude their side in the elected branches of government.
It’s unfortunate that the Obama administration’s initial, parsimonious exemption for religious groups helped ignite the firestorm that led to Hobby Lobby.
To know you need help that you cannot somehow conjure up through your own power frees you. You have to turn from yourself to something outside yourself.
Cheney's Obama polemic would be outrageous even if our former vice president’s record on Iraq was one of absolute clairvoyance. But he was wrong in almost every way.
Republican leaders happily rode the Tea Party tiger when it was convenient. Now, Cantor has fallen to the forces he and his colleagues unleashed and encouraged.
That the rise of the right in European Parliament elections resembles the rise of fascism in the 1930s is nonsense; sovereignty was the most important theme.
