The Moynihan Letters

Tuesday, March 5, 2019, #2 “What only remains is great love.”—St. Edith Stein, 1942, year of her death in a concentration camp What only remains is great love. Lent will begin tomorrow, Ash Wednesday. What does Lent mean? It’s essence, I think, is new beginnings. The chance to begin again, even after failure, even after despair. [...]

Tuesday, March 5, 2019 Pius XII: Hitler's Pope -- Or a Saintly and Heroic Pontiff? The Vatican has decided to open its secret archives for the war years of World War II (1939-1945). The decision was announced yesterday by Pope Francis. (Note: Actually, the archives for the entire pontificate of Pope Pius XII will be opened, [...]

Friday, March 1, 2019 Infanticide Vote The US Senate in a vote on February 25 took a step across a moral line: it rejected a bill that would ban killing a child who was born alive after an attempted abortion. In other words, it rejected a bill that would have banned infanticide. Infanticide is, obviously a [...]

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 Cardinal George Pell Condemned  Australian Cardinal George Pell, 77, has been found guilty in an Australian court on charges that he sexually abused two 13-year-old choir boys (one now deceased) 22 years ago, in December of 1996, in a Melbourne cathedral church corridor, where Pell had just become archbishop, after a Sunday Mass, [...]

Tuesday, February 26, 2019, #2 Discussion of the Pell Verdict Earlier today I sent an email with the news that Australian Cardinal George Pell, 77, had been found guilty by a unanimous jury vote of 12-0 in an Australian court on charges that he sexually abused two 13-year-old choir boys (one now deceased) 22 years ago, [...]

Wednesday, February 20, 2019 "You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." —Walker Percy, an American Catholic writer Tomorrow Tomorrow the long-awaited Vatican "summit" on the sexual abuse of children [...]

Sunday, February 17, 2019 Viganò Vindicated  This morning, on the day after the news that the Vatican has reduced former Cardinal and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick to the lay state (McCarrick, 88, has been staying in a small friary in western Kansas; I mistakenly wrote that he was in Oklahoma in my last email; thank you to those [...]