Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Pontifications

Whether Maryknoll priest Fr. Roy Bourgeois has been excommunicated or not remains a mystery. As I wrote here, the Vatican told him to recant for supporting women’s ordination–and attending one last July–and at last word he had gone to Rome to plead his cause. Catholic World News and National Catholic Register think it’s a done…

The good news is that the Chicago-based publisher has offered “sincerest apologies” for the cover, which came out in the December edition, timed for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the Nativity–pretty much the Big Three for Mary. As Bruce Tomaso at the Dallas Morning News tells it: In its…

Last week, I wrote about about a Boston Globe op-ed by Judge Michael Merz, head of the lay-led National Review Board that is supposed to ensure that the bishops follow their own policies on child protection. Merz’s view that the hierarchy was doing a good and no one should have any worries–and that any bishops…

I had just finished ordering our annual sheaf of seasonally tacky and nicely inexpensive Christmas cards–my three-year-old on a carousel in various stages of glee, below her a wish for joy to the world and peace in 2009 and all that stuff–when I received a link to Father Jim Martin’s annual Scrooge-fest on NPR. Titled…

The Times’ Paul Vitello had an interesting piece yesterday on how churches are seeing a surge in attendance as the economy tanks. But it is mainly the “enthusiastic” denominations of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism that are doing well. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses are doing more door-knocking because out-of-work folks are at home: A recent spot check of…

The Discovery Channel opens up what many–including the Vatican–had taken to be a settled question, namely whether the famous Shroud of Turin is truly the burial cloth of Jesus. “Unwrapping the Shroud: New Evidence,” airs Sunday (today), Dec. 14, at 10pm Eastern time. The show’s promo material says this: “The Shroud of Turin was believed…

Word has come down that Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, one of the great figures of the Catholic Church, certainly in the United States, died this morning at the Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University in The Bronx. He was 90 and had until the past year or so had been very active, but the effects of…

In an Op-Ed in today’s Boston Globe, the current head of the National Review Board, the blue-ribbon, lay-led group that is supposed to keep the bishops following their own policies on child protection, says Catholics have nothing to worry about–all is fine, and the scandal is history. The hook for Michael Merz’s piece, “No Doubt…

Sound like an odd couple? Not the way the new TV czar for my own Brooklyn diocese does it. Deacon Greg Kandra, a longtime CBS News and “60 Minutes” writer–and author of The Deacon’s Bench blog–was recently hired by Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio to help revamp and rebrand the diocesan network. Once called “The Prayer Channel,”…

1968 was a true annus horribilis, as the Queen (upending Dryden) might have said, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the social upheavals surrounding the Vietnam War ramping up. Then, on Dec. 10, 1968, came the bizarre death of Thomas Merton, the Catholic convert, Trappist monk and enormously influential spiritual…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners