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About four years ago, I had to take the long flight to New Zealand to give a retreat to the priests of the Diocese of Christchurch.
In order to pass the time, I brought along an iPad with the entire first season of Mad Men on it. So in one very intense period, I got immersed in the world of Don Draper, a world that I vaguely remember from my own childhood — not the booze and the affairs, of course, but the look, the feel, the colors, the way people moved and talked.
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It was revealed recently that, for the first time in its history, Harvard University, which had been founded for religious purposes and named for a minister of the Gospel, has admitted a freshman class in which atheists and agnostics outnumber professed Christians and Jews.
Also recently, the House and the Senate of California passed a provision that allows for physician-assisted suicide in the Golden State. As I write these words, the governor of California is deliberating whether to sign the bill into law.
Though it might seem strange to suggest as much, I believe that the make-up of the Harvard freshman class and the passing of the suicide law are very really related.
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The upcoming canonization of Blessed Junípero Serra in Washington, D.C. — the first ever to take place on American soil — has generated, as I’m sure you know, a good deal of controversy.
For his defenders, Padre Serra was an intrepid evangelist and a model of Gospel living, while for his detractors, he was a shameless advocate of an oppressive colonial system that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Indians.
Even many who typically back Pope Francis see this canonization as a rare faux pas for the Argentine pontiff. What should we make of all this?
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Every third summer, the Catholic lectionary provides a series of readings for Sunday Mass from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. This is the magnificently crafted chapter in which the evangelist’s Eucharistic theology is most fully presented.
It is a curiosity of John’s Gospel that the Last Supper scene includes no “institution narrative,” which is to say, the account of what Jesus did with the bread and cup the night before he died.
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Recently, Stephen Colbert gave an interview in which the depth of his Catholic faith was on pretty clear display.
Discussing the trauma that he experienced as a young man — the deaths of his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash — he told the interviewer how, through the ministrations of his mother, he had learned not only to accept what had happened but actually to rejoice in it: “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10; that was quite an explosion . . . It’s that I love the thing that I wish most had not happened.”
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Conservation International has sponsored a series of videos that have become YouTube sensations, garnering millions of views.
They feature famous actors — Harrison Ford, Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, and others — voicing different aspects of the natural world, from the ocean, to the rain forest, to redwood trees. The most striking is the one that presents Mother Nature herself, given voice by Julia Roberts.
They all have more or less the same message, namely, that nature finally doesn’t give a fig for human beings, that it is far greater than we, and will outlast us. Here are some highlights from the Mother’s speech:
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Many of you have seen the appalling hidden-camera videos of two Planned Parenthood physicians bantering cheerfully with interlocutors posing as prospective buyers of the body parts of aborted infants.
While they slurp wine in elegant restaurants, the good doctors — both women — blandly talk about what price they would expect for providing valuable inner organs and how the skillful abortionists of Planned Parenthood know just how to murder babies so as not to damage the goods.
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Many of you have seen the appalling hidden-camera videos of two Planned Parenthood physicians bantering cheerfully with interlocutors posing as prospective buyers of the body parts of aborted infants.
While they slurp wine in elegant restaurants, the good doctors — both women — blandly talk about what price they would expect for providing valuable inner organs and how the skillful abortionists of Planned Parenthood know just how to murder babies so as not to damage the goods.
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In 1986, after serving in a variety of capacities in the Jesuit province of Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio commenced doctoral studies in Germany.
The focus of his research was the great 20th century theologian and cultural critic Romano Guardini, who had been a key influence on, among many others, Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger.
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In the wake of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ and the pope’s recent speeches in Latin America, many supporters of the capitalist economy in the West might be forgiven for thinking that His Holiness has something against them.
Again and again, Pope Francis excoriates an economy based on materialism and greed, and with prophetic urgency, he speaks out against a new colonialism that exploits the labor of those in poorer countries.
In a speech in Bolivia, a country under the command of a socialist president, the pope seemed, almost in a Marxist vein, to be calling on the poor to seize power from the wealthy and take command of their own lives. What do we make of this?
