Service, self-abnegation, solidarity, fraternity, courage: in the trial at hand, the grace of conversion is available to the whole of humanity—including the church.
This COVID-19 crisis is the kind of emergency that in the last two centuries has amplified the advantage the institutional papacy has over local churches.
Francis’s post-synodal exhortation ‘Querida Amazonia’ is unique in more ways than one. It throws his one major structural reform into considerable turmoil.
A new book on Francis by noted papal biographer Austen Ivereigh promised to be more critical. And yet in important ways, it again lets Francis off the hook.