In the rising tide of sexual immorality—or in judging the pitiful state of the world—devout Catholics tend to remember the famous statement by Our Lady of Fatima that “More souls go to hell for sins of the flesh than for any other reason” (July 13, 1917). Ever since that...

First published March 28, 2017 The Catholic Church has often been called “the Church of here comes everybody”. The reason is very basic: You typically do not find the Church to be representative of just one ethnic group, nationality or social class. Membership in the Catholic Church...

St. John Henry Newman was once called “the most dangerous man in England” by the papal chamberlain, Fr. George Talbot, primarily because of the way Newman engaged the laity in supporting and even managing Catholic schools. Indeed, Newman had to struggle in many of his educational...

In 1901, Gilbert Keith Chesterton married Frances Alice Blogg. As the Catholic world knows now, Chesterton was a prolific thinker and writer who operated through genius more than well-organized habits, and Frances (who was also a writer) often served as his secretary and kept him on track. By all...

I’m a stickler for spiritual caution, so let me begin with a caution here. If you are a person who is too easily sidetracked by the spiritual glitter of private revelations—that is, if you find yourself tempted to revel in what appears to be the immediacy of even legitimate private...

I admit that it is difficult to consider any one factor as a definitive test of a pontificate, but Cardinal Reinhard Marx’s formal regularization of blessings for same-sex couples and couples who have married outside the Church in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising in Germany does...

As you may have heard, Pope Leo issued an Apostolic Letter on October 27th, entitled Drawing New Maps of Hope, which we have added to our library. This new letter was written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Christian Education (Gravissimum...

There has been a trend among Catholic scholars over the past few years of coming together to publish massive collective studies on difficult contemporary moral and spiritual issues. I have already called attention to three such studies on the gender crisis, and now we have a new one focusing on...

One of the most troubling aspects of arguing with those who hold all the standard popular errors is that false positions are so often advanced and defended based either on personal “feelings” (for which we can often read personal “desires”) or on what “everybody...

The Bohemian Catholic Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971) was nearing the end of her life in Germany when she responded in 1970 to the doubts and turmoil within the Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council by publishing Bread Grows in Winter. This book contained six of her most recent...