The Dispatch
Passions of the Soul is often rewarding, sometimes lacking
“We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power [...]
Pope Francis says conservative critics have a ‘suicidal attitude’
Features
CNA Staff, May 16, 2024 / 16:58 pm (CNA). In an interview with “60 Minutes” airing this Sunday, Pope Francis takes aim at his “conservative critics” in the United States, reportedly saying a conservative is someone who [...]
Love (and Learning) in the Ruins
Essay
The news is chockful of campus protests, commencement walk-outs, devastated libraries, and shouting matches on the college lawns that traditionally represent solemn respites from exterior storms, where students read, ponder, and serenely stroll to their [...]
Essay
Unity in what?
Among the many urgent questions raised by the Synods on the Family in 2014 and 2015 and the current Synod on Synodality – questions that will inevitably bear on the next papal conclave – is [...]
Chapp's Schtick
On Faggioli’s feverish “Trump-Strickland-Barron” fantasy
My friend, the journalist Christopher Altieri, says his least favorite form of writing is what he calls “ink on ink”. That is, a form of writing where one publication comments critically on something in a [...]
Books
In the Courts of Three Popes opens windows into how the Church works
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was Mark Twain’s novel in which the main character found himself in a very different world: Hank Morgan was somehow carried back in time to the court of King [...]
Analysis
Spinning Balthasar
Recently the name of Hans Urs von Balthasar has been invoked to defend the concept of a more “feminine” Church. On reading some reports it seems that the invocation has now become a meme and [...]
Essay
The Touch: On Saint Damien of Molokai and the love of Christ
A while ago, my wife and I were trying to find a movie that we hadn’t seen before. We settled on the film Molokai (1999). Though I had heard of Fr. Damien before and had [...]
Essay
The role of the diocesan curia and the mission of the Church
Note: The following essay is adapted from an Address to the Curia of the Diocese of Charleston delivered on April 25, 2024. If we take our time-machine back fifty years ago—or maybe only forty—I suspect [...]
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My friend, the journalist Christopher Altieri, says his least favorite form of writing is what he calls “ink on ink”. That is, a form of writing where one publication comments critically on something in a [...] -
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A week ago, the editors of the National Catholic Register published an editorial titled “It’s Time to Remove Father Rupnik’s Art”. Their strong stance, they said, was “not an expedient surrender to iconoclasm or ‘cancel [...] -
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Francy:
The lack of basic Christian charity in so much of what Pope Francis says and does is astonishing and disappointing.…
James Connor:
His given name is Bergoglio, his chosen Francis.
Inigo:
Besides the arrest, if these other items are factual - refusal of visitation and movement to another facility without informing…
