Commentary
How Pope St. John Paul II changed my life (and still does)
“I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to meet the saintly pontiff a dozen times or so through the years, most of those while studying in Rome. He never lost his sense of humor even as his health began to fail. I remember handing him a…
As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens recorded a two-hour conversation in 2007 deriding religion that got millions of YouTube views and was said to have sparked an atheist revolution. No longer. In the fall of…
The Church and immigration sanity
Francis X. Maier, First Things Thursday, October 23, 2025 One can reasonably criticize the Trump administration’s current deportation efforts as too broad and too blunt. Along with arresting gang members, traffickers, murderers, and rapists,…
How Much Does “Dilexi Te” Reflect Leo XIV’s Thinking?
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, First Things Wednesday, October 22, 2025 What lifts people out of poverty? That is not a question the Christian tradition really asks, and neither does the Holy Father in Dilexi Te, a document much more in the line of…
Same-sex marriage failed to launch a transgender revolution
Mark Regnerus, Public Discourse Wednesday, October 22, 2025 What might have seemed like the next progressive triumph-in-waiting is instead running off the rails. The stalled transgender revolution could be tenuous and temporary – although that’s…
5 Ways to Become a Grounded Woman
Carrie Gress, Theology of Home Tuesday, October 21, 2025 “It is hard to find a grounded woman today. I started looking at women with a careful eye over a decade ago while doing research. Tragically, women today have been robbed of the ideals…
Restoring trust: Why US bishops should elect Bishop Barron as president
Niwa Limbu, Catholic Herald Tuesday, October 21, 2025 Only 52 per cent of priests in America presently trust their own bishop, a figure that has declined from 63 per cent in 2001, and a mere 27 per cent say they trust the US bishops’ conference…
Trump’s IVF policy could be worse, but it’s still bad
The entire thrust of the policy is to make something unethical (IVF) more widely practiced. Such a policy is itself unethical. Americans won’t be required to violate their conscience, but our public policy will promote IVF more now than ever…
A New French Abbey: Tradition’s enduring appeal
The Europe that a monk named Raoul Glaber saw with pride at the dawn of the year 1000, covered with “a white mantle of churches,” has entered a dark era of de-Christianization. And yet, there are still communities in France that continue to…
Pope Leo gets a horse
Other donors have already gifted the pope a white motorcycle and an electric car. On Wednesday, Leo XIV received a white horse as a gift. Proton, a purebred Arabian, was given to the Pope by Andrzej Michalski, owner and founder of the Michalski…