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The Wild of the Mass

Only say the word and I shall be healed. Isn’t that the most humble unadorned thing you can say about faith? Don’t you always say that with a shiver in your heart? The hair prickles on my head sometimes when I say that. Continue Reading »

Francis’s Argentine Letter and the Proper Response

The real problem with the Argentine norms is their deviation from this larger and more fundamental principle: that grace truly sanctifies and liberates, and that baptized Christians are always free to fulfill the moral law, even when they fail to do so. Jesus Christ holds us to this standard in the Gospel. It is presumptuous of Francis—however benign his intentions—to decide that his version of “mercy” trumps that given by God himself. Continue Reading »

Catholicism’s Empty Quarter

Québec, a flourishing Catholic region for centuries, is now Catholicism’s empty quarter in the Western Hemisphere. There is no more religiously arid place between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego; there may be no more religiously arid place on the planet. And it all happened in the blink of an eye. Continue Reading »

The Myth of the Moderate Catholic

Any Catholic who rejects Catholic teaching, or who technically accepts it but minimizes it to the point of insignificance, is not a “moderate” Catholic but a dissenter, or one seeking approval from the world (a temptation Our Lord warns against)—and should be identified as such. Continue Reading »

The Myth of the Moderate Catholic

Any Catholic who rejects Catholic teaching, or who technically accepts it but minimizes it to the point of insignificance, is not a “moderate” Catholic but a dissenter, or one seeking approval from the world (a temptation Our Lord warns against)—and should be identified as such. Continue Reading »

Notre Dame’s Deal with the Devil

Tim Kaine is a Harvard Law graduate, but he and other pro-choice Catholic politicians owe much to Notre Dame. As Matthew Franck has observed in First Things, Mario Cuomo’s 1984 “personally opposed but won’t impose” speech at the university was a “watershed moment” for pro-choice . . . . Continue Reading »

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