Vatican II Continued
Catholics have been arguing about the Second Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a century. Many...
View Article‘Intrinsic Evil’ & Public Policy
Everyone knows what the Catholic Church teaches about abortion, right? It is an “intrinsically evil act.” Yet the answers of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in the recent vice-presidential debate suggested,...
View ArticleMorbid Symptoms
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
View ArticleAmerican Pastoral
During their fall meeting in 1986, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops passed by a vote of 225 to 9 the final draft of Economic Justice for All (.pdf). Many had hoped that the bishops would...
View Article'The Spirit Is Still on the Job'
On October 11, 1963, Bishop Luigi Bettazzi addressed the Second Vatican Council on the need for collegiality. He was the newest bishop participant, having been consecrated only a week before, and, at...
View ArticleTrue Then, Truer Now
Soon after moving to central Minnesota in the summer of 2011, I visited one of the region’s landmarks, the Mall of America: a four-million-square-foot collection of more than five hundred stores that...
View ArticleExit Signs
On February 11, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would step down at the end of the month. His reasons? Age and infirmity. His doctors have advised him not to leave Europe. But perhaps stress...
View ArticleBenedict's Act of Humility
The last pope to resign did so more than seven hundred years ago, which is a long time even by church standards. The controversy surrounding Celestine V’s abdication and the succession of Boniface VIII...
View ArticleAfter Benedict
"The church is not the pope, and the pope is not the church,” theologian Joseph Komonchak reminds us (see “Benedict’s Act of Humility”). Amen to that.
View ArticleShock Therapy
By resigning, Pope Benedict served the church well. He has spared it another prolonged period of mounting disarray. He has "humanized" the papacy, as Joseph Komonchak and others have pointed out. He...
View ArticleNothing to Celebrate
At the end of a busy week—one that included both Ash Wednesday and the pope’s surprise resignation—New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan took the time to write a blog post about gun control. Yes, he’s for...
View ArticleLetting Go
Several Orthodox friends have asked what I think of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. A few are, like me, former Roman Catholics. When I mentioned Joseph A. Komonchak’s comment in Commonweal...
View ArticleRegime Change
[Editor's note: William L. Portier's and Richard R. Gaillardetz's are the final in a special series of stories we are posting as the cardinals gather for the conclave. All of the previous articles in...
View ArticleA New Center of Gravity
In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward...
View Article'Catholics Are Different'
Over the course of six decades, Fr. Andrew M. Greeley—who died on May 30—wrote regularly for Commonweal. Following are excerpts from just some of his articles, the first of which here originally...
View ArticleSaintly Politics
Pope Francis is proving himself to be a genuinely holy man, a brilliant politician, and a leader who knows that reform requires a keen understanding of how creating a better future demands...
View ArticleThe First Encyclical of Francis?
In presenting Lumen fidei to the church, Pope Francis described it as the product of four hands.
View ArticleThe Things We Share
There's this guy I know in Manhattan. Call him Jim. Jim Watson. We’re friends, I guess. We used to be friends, anyway—grabbing a hamburger together near Gramercy Park, from time to time, or meeting out...
View ArticleCan Francis Cure the Curia?
“His quips and one liners won’t get Pope Francis far in changing the Roman Curia,” a veteran Vatican official told me. “There are certain procedures which worked well in the past. Things have gone...
View ArticlePoem | Patrick O'Shea
I. We charter a large motor yacht to strew Alan’s ashes, and Patrick says what St. John taught. The wreath of orchids splashes into the vessel’s foaming wake, as turbid as my thoughts. Pinned to the...
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