Readers expecting a tour de force of church history shouldn’t. The question for Wills is this: Why do we need the church or Pope Francis to remind us of God’s love?
There was no personal greeting from Pope Francis during a recent visit by New Ways LGBT pilgrims to Rome; the Vatican did not even properly acknowledge them.
When Paul VI celebrated the liturgy in Italian, it was a pledge to future generations that the church and her liturgy would lean toward outreach and mission.
This Lent, Francis celebrates the 50th anniversary of first vernacular Mass said by a pope; one of Rome’s most dynamic pastors retires; forgetting Panama’s cardinal.
Seminaries have four to five years of post-college priestly formation to train men to be leaders of the small “corporations” that parishes have become.
The Holy See has publicly dealt with four bishops for committing abuse or trying to cover it up. But there has been no transparency on their status or whereabouts.
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.
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?
In exposing Pope Francis’s accomplishments, Austen Ivereigh presents “the concrete Catholic thing” as something that has the power to create true solidarity.
Archbishop Cupich talks about immigration, abuse and accountability, what happened at the synod on the family, and meeting the needs of Chicago Catholics.
A weeklong visit to Sri Lanka and the Philippines has been wildly successful in terms of local (and global) media coverage and by the large crowds Francis has drawn.
Even several days before consigning the old year to the annals of Vatican history, Pope Francis indicated the new year was likely to be full of surprises.
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.
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.
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.
