There has been a discussion on social media about beautiful Catholic Churches. The usual ignorant comments were spouted..you know the old grumble: "Look at that huge expensive church! They should have given the money to the poor!" The obvious ripostes are: The Catholics built beautiful churches but they also always built schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, poor [...]
On this day sixty years ago John F Kennedy was assassinated and in Oxford, England C.S.Lewis died. Lewis had a great impact on my life--in many ways saving my Christian faith. I had been brought up in fundamentalist Protestantism and, after high school, went to Bob Jones University. The education I received at BJU was actually [...]
A reader has asked me to comment on the recent reply to questions from a Brazilian priest about access to baptisms. The question was whether a person who is confused about their gender can be baptized, whether children from a same sex union (presumably conceived through surrogacy) can be baptized and whether such persons (those who [...]
News is bubbling out of various Catholic bishops who are banning the ad orientem celebration of Mass and the faithful from receiving communion kneeling at altar rails. Is it possible that Catholic leaders could be any more stupid than this? Do they not understand the quirks of human nature and how we all respond to senseless rules [...]
I was a young Anglican priest and serving as an assistant curate in a parish in which Father John my boss (the pastor) was also a convert from a conservative Baptist home. We were con-celebrating Mass on the evening of All Souls Day, and our parish was blessed with a good choir and music director who [...]
Our Lady of the Rosary in Greenville, SC is located in a part of town that is challenged in many ways. The church campus is surrounded by low income housing, high density population, a large transient population and all the difficulties associated with modern American poverty: high unemployment, homelessness, human trafficking, prostitution, substance abuse and broken [...]
There were plenty of frightening things when we were growing up in the countryside of Southeastern Pennsylvania. There was an abandoned tumbledown log cabin in the woods with the door swinging on its hinges. The interior was still furnished with rotting sideboards, beds and a rusty old pot bellied stove. We crept inside expecting to [...]
If he is guilty, Slovenian ex-Jesuit Markos Rupnik is clearly a pretty trashy guy, but what about his art? It's junk and here's why: First we have to understand what sacred art is supposed to be and do. To do that one has to know a bit about art history. In the earliest days Christians were [...]
You don't have to be a mystical, supernatural prophet to see the future. If is possible to simply read the signs of the times. While most of the future remains unpredictable, it is possible to see where things are going and make some fairly accurate predictions. One of these concerns the human population. Every indication is [...]
One of the themes echoing through the discussions on the synod on synodality is the question, "How can we create safe and welcoming spaces for those who feel excluded from the church?" A chasm has appeared in the response to this question. Progressives appeal to the need for compassion for those they perceive as excluded victims [...]