I rarely blog on the subject-of-the-day, because with all the great bloggers out there, I am sure to be out-thunk. I’ll take a stab at this one, however, because it’s in my back yard of Dallas, the city where I was born and now live. I’ve been seeing the blue of the Dallas Police Department…
In most quarters, the frenzy over the Pope’s last press conference has abated. American attention, anyway, has turned to the unfortunate remarks of the U.S. Presidential aspirants instead. But Pope Francis inadvertently presented us with a superb “teaching moment” concerning infallibility and the Magisterium. The setup, in case you missed it: Pope Francis made the casual and…
By now, many of us are familiar with the 2010 quote of Cardinal Francis George, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” It was originally uttered by Cardinal George as a wake-up call to the dangers of an entirely…
After Mass on Sunday (January 3), a friend said, “Well, I’ve already failed at my New Year’s resolutions. What a relief! Now that’s done.” It’s become a sort of a necessary burden, to make New Year’s resolutions. That’s why I’ve waited a few days to talk about the New Year’s schtick… resolutions, goals, intentions, whatever…
Lately, I feel like a tiny rowboat out on a choppy sea. Wave after wave is coming at me. If you’ve been watching the headlines, you know what I’m talking about. I find myself constantly thinking, “Now I’ve seen everything; it can’t get any worse than this!” And then it does. As long as I’m…
Laudato Sí – part 3. In this third and final installment, the political aspects of Laudato Sí will be discussed in terms of classic Catholic social principles. It is impossible to get a balanced view of the Pope’s encyclical Laudato Sí from the secular press. They have dubbed it the “climate change encyclical”1 even though…
Laudato Sí, part 2 of a series We hear it every year on Holy Saturday, sitting in the dark of the church before the Light comes, a litany of all those things made in the Beginning through the Word: the swarms of living creatures, the winged birds, the creeping things and the beasts of the earth,…
At precisely a time when issues have arisen that we don’t quite know how to answer, Pope Francis has given us the new encyclical Laudato Sí. Providence couldn’t be any more pointed if there had been a divine Post-It note slapped on the front of it. Disregard for the integrity of the human body? The…
