Reading ‘Pacem in Terris’ today, when the U.S. has its second Catholic president, reveals how politically impotent Catholics and the papacy have become since then.
Vatican II was a time of rising expectations for theology, for how much it could transform the Church and the world. Have those expectations been betrayed?
Joseph Ratzinger was a brilliant theologian whose anti-progressive views became inseparable from his persona. Few committed Catholics will be indifferent about him.
His 2019 essay departs not only from the current pope’s analysis of the sex-abuse crisis, but also from that of almost everyone else who has studied it.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI didn’t turn his back on Vatican II: he endorsed its core ideas, emphasizing the person of Christ and our role as Christ’s body.
This month, the U.S. bishops met to elect new leadership. The gathering came at a time when the Church may be on its way to becoming a post-episcopal institution.
From the archives: The catechesis of the 1970s became the model of what not to do in passing on the faith. For years I was sympathetic to that analysis. But now?
“Here in the overlap of the sixtieth anniversary of the opening of Vatican II and of the Cuban missile crisis, the latter has largely overshadowed the former.”
From the archives: German theologian Gregory Baum reflects on the mysterious and promising early days of the Second Vatican Council, sixty years ago this month.
Pope Francis’s motu proprio, ‘Traditionis custodes,’ stirred controversy in the Church. Commonweal writers help unpack its motives and potential consequences.
The defense of ‘Traditionis custodes’ often relies on an oversimplified view of traditionalists, one that diverges from Pope Francis’s typical emphasis on dialogue.
Rita Ferrone explains the logic—and in her view, the wisdom—of Pope Francis’s decision to largely rescind permission for priests to celebrate the Tridentine Rite.
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.
If the hierarchy wants to reclaim some moral authority, shaping a better Catholic narrative in public life is necessary. Pace Charles Chaput, it must be inclusive.
Despite the pivotal role he played in Vatican II, Benedict XVI has spent the rest of his career, particularly his emeritus papacy, distancing himself from it.
The late German theologian Johann Baptist Metz believed theology was a culture of questions, not answers. Key to his theology was the unsettling figure of Christ.
The Shakers, who arrived in America in 1774, are a religious community facing extinction. Their decline means nothing less than the end of an idea of heaven.
Ministerial Juridic Persons, mostly comprised of laypeople, have canonical authority for church ministries. That’s unprecedented, and potentially transformative.
Readers respond to pieces about the reach of EWTN, the performative politics of abortion, and the Vatican’s failure to consult the laity on reproductive technology.
Thomas Merton taught me to value self-denial, but a bout of depression forced me to question whether asceticism was the healthiest response to my life.
