August 25, 2016, Thursday -- Two Monks Remain... "There is an incident in the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith which may refer to the young Bede. A plague swept through Ceolfrith's monastery in 686, taking most of the monks who sang in the choir... Only the abbot and a young boy raised and educated by him remained...Ceolfrith [...]
August 14, 2016, Friday - More, Newman and Now From Oxford to Canterbury.... “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages... And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.” —Geoffrey Chaucer, late 1300s, The Canterbury Tales, General [...]
July 29, 2016, Friday -- Again, Russia... Earthen Vessels.... "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves." —2 Corinthians 4:7 "As light was the beginning of the first creation; so, in the new creation, the light of the Spirit is his [...]
The passing of the personal secretary of Pope John XXIII on May 26 at the age of 100 brings a period of Church history, the period of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, to a close. What next? Robert Moynihan “There was a second envelope.” —The late Cardinal Loris Capovilla, speaking to [...]
May 26, 2016, Thursday -- The Pope's Homily on the Feast of Corpus Christi Pope Francis Remembers What Jesus Did, And What He Asks... "Jesus was broken; he is broken for us. And he asks us to give ourselves, to break ourselves, as it were, for others." —Pope Francis, today in Rome, in his homily for [...]
May 26, 2016, Thursday -- Cardinal Sarah's Remarkable Talk Last Week in Washington Cardinal Sarah Issues a Powerful Warning... "The battle to preserve the roots of mankind is perhaps the greatest challenge our world has faced since its origins." —Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Holy See's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the [...]
May 18, 2016, Wednesday -- Francis, His Interviews, and the "Re-Branding" of the Church Francis Interviewed Again, This Time by La Croix, a French Paper... "We need to speak of 'roots' in the plural because there are so many. In this sense, when I hear talk of the Christian roots of Europe, I sometimes dread the [...]
May 16, 2016, Monday -- The Three Positions (And Now Four) On Amoris Laetitia The text below is the Editorial in the May edition of Inside the Vatican, which is just out. (To obtain a copy of the issue or to subscribe for one or more years, click here. We welcome new subscribers, of course. If [...]
Throughout the Church, there is intense debate over the new Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”). Some see it as a “rupture” with the Church’s doctrinal tradition, while others say that isn’t true... Robert Moynihan “My great joy as a result of this document resides in the fact that [...]
May 13, 2016, Friday -- In the Footsteps of Pope Benedict XVI... Blessed Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima... "In terms of what we today can discover in this message [the message of Fatima], attacks against the Pope or the Church don't come just from outside the Church. The suffering of the Church also comes [...]
