As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?” To which Franklin famously responded, “A republic,…
The Holy See has declared that, if the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) proceeds with the ordination of bishops in July without a papal mandate, those involved in these illicit ordinations are automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated — that is, excommunicated by their own acts. One may, indeed one should, hope that it does not…
When he was elected Bishop of Rome on October 16, 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had a rather limited experience of the Catholic Church in the United States. He had met American churchmen at the Second Vatican Council, and a few of them visited Poland in the ensuing years. The Cracovian cardinal had made two visits…
Good news not being thick on the ground these days, I’m delighted to note some very good news from the mother country: on April 24, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill failed to gain passage in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, thus ending, for now, the efforts to legalise assisted suicide in…
The Catholic Difference The traditional Lenten practices of intensified prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are spiritual disciplines to be followed along the six-week pilgrimage from Ash Wednesday to the Easter Triduum. As I suggested in Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches, that journey can be lived as a kind of annual catechumenate-for-the-already-baptized, in which we join the…
The Catholic Difference Within 24 hours last month, three mainstream Catholic websites ran stories describing Pope Francis’s meeting with the members and consultors of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the following headlines: Pope Francis defends blessings of couples in ‘irregular situations,’ including same-sex unions (America Media, January 26); Pope defends document…
My friend and colleague Carl Trueman recently observed that “the West is no longer a consortium of serious cultures”. To which I am sorely tempted to add, “…or serious polities”. The two are connected, the cultural decay of the West being a not-insignificant factor in our descent into political infantilism. The exploration of that connection…
The Catholic Difference George Weigel In the apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam (To Promote Theology), issued by Pope Francis on Nov. 1, 2023, the Church was urged to do theology contextually: as the motu proprio put it, theology must be “fundamentally contextual…capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and…