As I recently mentioned in an email to colleagues, I know that I have the liturgical sensibilities of a mouse. The Liturgy has never been, for me, something that I thought I was supposed to enjoy. When I consider the laws of the Church, I notice that one of those laws is to attend Mass on Sundays...

I confess to an occasional secret chuckle over President Trump’s more outrageous statements—like the one about annexing Canada to the United States (which Canadians, at least, ought not to think funny). But I suppose a good Catholic ought not even to smile at the deliberately bizarre...

In his May 10th address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo explained one of the reasons he chose the name “Leo”: There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the...

As a great many people have observed, under Pope Francis, the concept of synodality morphed into a constant and universal input process, with apparently everybody welcome. That approach was excessively institutionalized and bureaucratized, remarkably costly, and largely a waste of time as it...

David Bonagura Jr. recently wrote his first commentary for CatholicCulture.org on the vexing problem of parish involvement, so I was pleased to learn that he has also turned his extensive Catholic teaching experience to excellent use in a new book from Sophia Institute Press: 100 Tough Questions...

When Fr. Jerry Pokorsky wrote that “It is far more costly for the laity to live Gospel truths” than for priests, he made a reasonable if not always accurate point (see the second-last paragraph in his most recent homiletic essay, Bonds of Blood). He pointed out that “espousing...

Pope Leo offered a striking message to the Knights of Malta on the Solemnity of Saint John the Baptist, who is the Order’s patron. The Pope expressed what is already becoming a hallmark of his pontificate, that is, an emphasis on the central and foundational duty of the followers of Christ...

It’s amazing how out of touch with current reality we can become as we age. I’ve mentioned before Hilaire Belloc’s interesting thesis that people in their sixties tend to still fight the battles in which they were engaged in their twenties and thirties, even though current...

Have you noticed the more recent developments in post-secondary Catholic education in the United States? This is no longer a matter of looking back to the 1970s when Thomas Aquinas College in California, Magdalen College and Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, and Christendom...

In commenting on the Durbin-award controversy, when Pope Leo XIV made comparative remarks about related contemporary moral positions, he put it this way: Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life. Someone who says I’m against...