Anybody who knows much of anything about the US Catholic Church and the abuse scandal knows that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was at the center of much of it. But until now, to my knowledge, no one has mapped his web of influence within the Catholic hierarchy. Well, here is something truly useful for the […]
About a month ago, I posted about a blockbuster Church Militant story on sexual abuse scandal within the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, in particular in the town of St. Marys, Kansas, where the SSPX has a school and a big community. Church Militant kept writing about it (read all its coverage here), and […]
A distressed Catholic reader sends in this clip of the Vatican’s Christmas pop concert, a fundraiser of some sort, which featured a moment on stage in which an indigenous young woman from Latin America taught the audience to embrace the presence of Pachamama (Mother Earth) within. This, in the presence of bishops and cardinals, some […]
Cardinal Angelo Sodano has resigned, at 92, as Dean of the College of Cardinals. Excerpt: Pope Francis used the occasion to express “my gratitude, including in the name of the members of the College of Cardinals, for the precious and punctual service he [Cardinal Sodano] has offered as dean for many years with availability, dedication, […]
A friend — a conservative Evangelical — brought this to my attention earlier tonight. He texted (I quote this with his permission): You know, I have never believed that the claims of the Church of Rome were true, but I have always taken a certain comfort in the belief that Rome would hold firm to […]
I don’t believe that the main reason that Christianity is collapsing in America is because of church scandals. It has much more to do with broader and deeper trends in modernity — with science, with capitalism, with technology, with the Sexual Revolution. But the churches have hurt themselves tremendously with their sex scandals. A Protestant […]
A couple of months ago, I returned to my Bratislava hotel room from one of the most spiritually uplifting days of my life. I started it by visiting a secret room where faithful Catholics risked imprisonment by the communists for producing samizdat prayer books and literature. I ended it in the apartment of a saintly bishop (now […]
Douthat has a good piece this morning about how there are times when conspiracy theorists are actually closer to the truth than their critics. Here’s part of it: And not only true of Epstein and his pals. As I’ve written before, when I was starting my career as a journalist I sometimes brushed up against people […]
Lucian K. Truscott IV writes about the time he, as a West Point cadet, went to visit Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, for a cadet magazine interview. Spellman granted the interview in part because Truscott’s grandfather was a famous general whom Spellman had known in World War II. It was a memorable encounter. […]
‘The abuse scandals have badly damaged, perhaps even destroyed, the moral authority of the Church’ Best-selling author and conservative thinker Rod Dreher has urged the Irish laity not to passively wait for their bishops to “get their act together” but to speak out and defend the faith themselves. In an address at University Church in […]