Time for Candor – “In many ways, whatever its strengths, the Francis pontificate was inadequate to the real issues facing the Church.” The Church After Francis (First Things)
Why Religion Went Obsolete – “With each generation since the baby boomers, traditional religion in the United States has fallen further from grace. Why? Ask sociologist Christian Smith.”Out of Practice (Notre Dame Magazine)
The Spirit of the Liturgy at 25 – “If there’s one thing worth celebrating this year, it’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger’s great gift to the Church.” Pope Benedict’s Time-Bomb (What We Need Now)
A Civilizational Struggle – “Nothing inspires more dread in our post-human world than the gaze of a child. The ethical renewal of society has always depended on the disruptive, disturbing, and unbreakable innocence of childhood.” How Postmodernism Became Posthumanism (Brownstone Institute)
Young Adults and the Faith – “The church really communicates a degree of reverence that I didn’t find in the more liberal, laissez-faire approach of nondenominational churches.” Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse — driven by pandemic, internet, ‘lax’ alternatives (NY Post)
A Jesuitical Impatience – “Francis was the first Jesuit elected to the chair of St. Peter—a historic milestone that defined his tenure as chief pastor of the Catholic Church.” The Jesuit Pope (First Things)
New Catholic Traditionalism – “For most of the past century, lay Catholics were seen as a timid cluster that quietly adhered to mainstream politics and society. But that changed during the COVID pandemic … ” Meet America’s new ‘MAGA Catholics’ fighting the religion’s rising wokeness (New York Post)
Rooted in Catholic Faith – “The University of Notre Dame’s theology program has ranked No. 1 worldwide four times in six years — and some say its fidelity to the Catholic faith is key to its success.” Notre Dame’s Theology Rises by Reclaiming ‘a Full Catholic Vision’ (National Catholic Register)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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Those are some interesting articles. Thank you very much!
@ Time for Candor
JJ Reno appears to interpret Francis’ tact in Amoris Laetitia was to buy time for the Church to transit choppy waters regarding changing attitudes on divorce and remarriage – simply as a stratagem for not making it an explosive issue. He adds Francis did this without formally changing Church doctrine. He calls this the tactic of operators.
That interpretation seems supported by the baited promise of great changes for the hopeful radical Germans in order to stiff arm them. One can look at this in two ways, one what Reno appears to suggest simply as a holding strategy while avoiding formal doctrinal change in a positive sense, the other the negative idea that this allows for change to take place in practice. This is the more reasonable interpretation.
The stiff arming of the Germans on divorce and remarriage wasn’t as stiff armed as he makes it because the Vatican did little if anything besides the ‘letter’ of admonition that was expectedly ignored by the German Church. It appears the canny Jesuit Pope outsmarted RR Reno. Or is it me? A testament to the cleverness of Jesuit operators.
As a Jesuit priest–a Catholic one!—once explained to me: “the proof is in the pudding.”
Now after barely a week, the Church at the next conclave has to decide whether the frog should jump out of the hot water and deal directly with “the mess,” or not. I refer to today’s post from the timely Germaniac bishops: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/04/23/german-bishops-blessings-of-same-sex-couples-should-be-done-with-appreciation/ Over three decades, the same Jesuit priest offered other contrarian pudding samples in our correspondence.
Such as:
“For all but the last 70 years [written in 1971] or a little more, all men lived on the verge of starvation, bestiality, cannibalism, or else succumbed to these. Poverty may be the answer to our ills….Oh, if only we could educate the masses in classical-Christian education! If only we could rid the world of most clerics and allied who are not even good functionaries [!]….
“When the liberal stops looking for ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity,’ when the conservative stops divinizing all the past as infallible, when men realize that baptism plunges them into Christ and that that means suffering and death, and tears in between, with lots of joy cementing all three, then we shall return to the kind of cultural Christianity envisioned by Piers Plowman.
“The utterly crucial fact for Medieval Man was revelation. God the Father said through his son that all men must live in the God-Man Jesus Christ in order to be alive and so return to the Father whence they issued.
In 1986 he addressed the Mindszenty Foundation. A relevant excerpt:
“Hans Kung and many of this type reject what theologians call ‘Christology from above’ in favor of ‘Christology from below.’ Having themselves been taught Christology from above, they have rejected it in favor of opinion from below, a kind of presbyterian synodal approach to truth based on numbers and questionnaires [….] How does one converse with those who are striving to create a new ethic based on the murder of the unborn and the aged, on the supremacy of feeling over thought, on the substitution of agreement by consensus for divine and objective truth.”
Re: The Jesuit Pope at First Things.
Rusty Reno’s dispassionate summary on Francis as pope in death offers a strange note of understanding, forgiveness, and compassionate mercy. Monday’s writing presents quite the contrast with Reno’s un-minced writing on the failing of Francis’ papacy in Feb. 2019.
The recent article puzzled at first light on Monday, and it puzzles now. It seems to approach accolade but not quite. It also seems to approach caricature but not quite. It’s like a razzle-dazzle dirty rabbit hole. Perhaps Francis’ papacy now that he has died is really to be seen this way.
Rusty studied at Jesuit university, but that never seemed to unduly influence his writing which well harmonized discordant notes. This article on Francis in death is puzzling.
https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/52218
Always one-sided. Almost the same persons making the same cynical remarks. Look around and see what is happening in the world. Come out of your European – Western comfort zone!