Excerpt from Ross Douthat’s interview with Cardinal Burke: It was also in discussing the Amazonian synod that Burke brought up the specter that hangs over Francis-era debates, the idea of a schism in the church. Burke: While the final document is less explicit in the embrace of pantheism, it does not repudiate the statements in … Read more
Some years ago, when I was younger and somewhat more excitable, I wrote a series of essays about Pope Francis’s liberalizing efforts, arguing that the supreme pontiff’s choices risked a schism in the Catholic Church. At the time my argument was criticized by Catholics on both sides of the church’s theological-political divides. Liberal Catholics accused me of hysteria, disloyalty … Read more
For ordinary Catholics, the failures of their leaders have created a two-decade test of faith. Here is a striking fact about the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The sex abuse crisis in the early 2000s, the horrid revelations of predation that began in Boston in 2001, did not have an obvious long-term effect … Read more
One of the best things that the bishops of the American Catholic Church did during the great wave of sex abuse revelations 16 years ago — and yes, there’s a low bar for “best” — was to establish a National Review Board, staffed by prominent layman, with the authority to commission an independent report on … Read more