March 26, 2016, Saturday - Holy Saturday The Silence of the Lord "In the hours of Holy Saturday, a great silence overtakes the Church. Our silence commemorates that God in Christ descended to where no human word is uttered or heard— the silence of the grave. Yet even in that silence God is speaking. "In fact, [...]
March 22, 2016, Tuesday -- The Nuncio A Man of the Church About half a decade ago, at an event in Rome, I ran into an American woman I hadn't seen for more than 20 years, since the time we were both students working on dissertations in the manuscript room of the Vatican Library. To my [...]
March 21, 2016, Monday - Corrected Emeritus Pope Benedict Text A few lines left out This letter is to correct an oversight in my Letter #16 of March 17 which was entitled "Emeritus Pope Benedict Grants an Interview." I translated the text from Italian into English during the night between March 16 and March 17. I [...]
March 17, 2016, Thursday -- Emeritus Pope Benedict Grants an Interview on Justification and God's Mercy “What the human person needs for salvation is the intimate openness to God.” —Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI, in a 2015 interview with Jesuit theologian Father Jacques Servais. The interview was conducted during 2015 for a book on the doctrine of [...]
March 16, 2016, Wednesday -- Mother Teresa To Be Canonized on September 4 in Rome Mother Teresa in 1993 in New Delhi, India. Pope Francis announced yesterday that she would be canonized on September 4 in Rome. Last December, the Pope accepted the 2008 healing of a Brazilian man with a brain infection and kidney disease [...]
Robert Moynihan The great predicament in our modern age is less a belief that we moderns are “like gods” than it is a conviction that we are like animals, ruled by instinct — that we have no free will. But Christian belief is that man is in fact free... The early Church universally held [...]
February 28, 2016, Sunday - One Less Light in the Vatican One Less Light in the Vatican And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. —The poem God's Grandeur, [...]
February 12, 2016, Friday -- Today's Common Declaration of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in Cuba The Middle East -- "We call upon the international community to act urgently in order to prevent the further expulsion of Christians from the Middle East."—Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, Common statement, issued today in Cuba, just a few minutes [...]
February 12, 2016, Friday -- Today's Meeting Between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in Cuba The Day's Schedule Here is the schedule for the meeting today between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Friday, 12 February 2016 7:45 a.m. Departure from Rome's Fiumicino airport for Havana (Cuba) Greeting to journalists during [...]
February 6, 2016, Saturday -- The Passion that Looms Over the Pope Francis-Patriarch Kirill Meeting in Cuba The "Diplomacy of Music" I just received an email bringing my attention to an article by Dr. Terry Mattingly, an Orthodox scholar and writer who edits the popular GetReligion.org website. Here is the link. The Mattingly article quotes extensively [...]