Columnist: Phil Lawler

[NOTE: The draft letter below was not written by, or for, any bishop. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is no copyright on this post, and ...

When immigrants appear at the border, Church leaders urge us to welcome them. Invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan, and reminding us that we are all neighbors, they invite ...

Today’s CWN briefs brings the report that the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) has presented its top annual honor, the John Courtney Murray Award, to Bryan Massingale, who describes ...

[audio src="https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/203727212/cdce3a168ad90098c655884ed7138f4f.mp3" /] In a legal battle between the Trump administration and the Las Cruces diocese, the religious-liberty arguments of the diocese would be much more persuasive if they were ...

The 'synodal process' goes on and on. To what end? The Synod on Synodality, which Pope Francis loosed on the world back in 2021, is still going strong— even if, ...

Responding to my analysis of confrontation between Pentagon officials and Cardinal Pierre, @MarkSimonHK wrote on X that “Lawler is more open than I am about the role of @Pontifex…” (This ...

The University of Notre Dame, the best known Catholic institution of higher learning in the country, is embroiled in questions about its Catholic identity. What surprises me about those questions ...

By now all responsible public leaders have recognized the need to dial down the rhetoric and de-escalate the confrontations in Minnesota. Yet Cardinal Robert McElroy has joined with several other ...

Help is not on the way. Yesterday, in a cautious optimistic post about this week’s meeting of the College of Cardinals, I observed that “it is difficult to imagine how ...

Let’s look at the bishops’ statement on US immigration policy from a completely different angle. Forget the arguments for and against unrestricted immigration, for and against the Trump administration’s crackdown ...

At a time when the civilization once known as Christendom is near collapse, when attacks on human dignity and human life are accelerating, surely there are more urgent problems requiring ...

With the rise of Donald Trump and his supporters, Americans have become familiar with references to the “Deep State”—that class of political power-brokers who hold themselves responsible for the affairs ...

Pope Leo’s answer to a question about the Chicago archdiocesan award for Senator Durbin was certainly disappointing. It was also largely irrelevant.The key question—the question that American bishops are now ...

Catholic World Report has done a great service to readers today, by dipping into the magazine’s archives and posting an article by the late, great James Hitchcock, Conservative Bishops, Liberal ...

Last week I wrote that Catholics should not have been surprised (although they might well have been scandalized) by the highly publicized meeting between Pope Leo and Father James Martin, ...

Last night, after writing a piece in which I quoted the late Father Paul Mankowski, I realized that the day was the 5th anniversary of his sudden death from a ...

The following quotations speak for themselves. They were collected and collated by a Jesuit friend, now deceased (my faithful readers can probably guess…), who thought they should be made public ...

Summers are usually quiet around the Vatican. Most officials of the Roman Curia—like most other residents of Rome—leave the city for cooler vacation spots, leaving important policy decisions until the ...

“I need to speak to the Pope,” says Libero Milone, the former Vatican auditor general, who was forced to resign in 2017—because, he says, he had exposed widespread financial corruption ...

NOTE: Since the time of the publication of this article, Ed Peters has also announced his employment at Sacred Heart Seminary was also terminated. Is there are a double standard ...

Twenty years of scandals, and the Vatican—to be more specific, the Vatican Secretariat of State—has learned nothing. A priest who was convicted of child pornography has been quietly restored to ...