The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) meets this week to elect a new president. Relations with Washington top the agenda. Stalking those relations is the reality that the USCCB compromised itself two years ago to facilitate the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden. Now it is caught in the repercussions of its own priorities in … Read more
Pope Francis’ militant environmentalism comes couched in the devotional language of his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Sí.” What he calls “the Gospel of Creation” is a politicized assault on fossil fuels, industrial development, economic freedom, and private property. It is the Great Reset in cope and chasuble. A Vatican campaign intent on social, political, and economic … Read more
The synod is done. But the mutant thing lives on in its final document, “Amazonia: New Ways for the Church and for a Holistic Ecology.” Prudence and discretion, rationality itself, are baffled by its opening hysteria. The Amazon rainforest … is in an unbridled race to death. It requires radical changes with great urgency, a … Read more
The Amazon Synod has convened. The game is on. It is a cheap confidence game, one that only a debased Vatican could summon. The comedy of hierarchs endorsing middlebrow eco-religion is outdone entirely by the tragedy of it. Non-Catholics have good reason to pay attention to the month-long Synod of Bishops for the Amazon region … Read more
Theodore McCarrick was demoted from cardinal to archbishop some months ago. Under pressure of media attention, the Vatican has upped the ante on penalties against him. Now he is simply Mr. McCarrick, forbidden to function as a priest in any but the most extreme emergency situations. He can still offer absolution to the dying victim … Read more
Ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick interests me less than the seminarians who kept mum for so many years. The saga of this man is far larger than the story of one libertine prelate. The ugly dimensions of the scandal lie in the conspiracy of silence, a de facto collusion that permitted a known sexual predator—a sociopath—to rise through the … Read more
The editorial board of the New York Times declared it had identified the source of “The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain.” It names pedophilia and asks: “How have so many pedophiles been allowed into the priesthood?” The question was purely rhetorical because the board had an answer ready. It cited the usual grounds: “the all-male priesthood and the … Read more