Author: Manuel Xavier

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker Father Dwight Longenecker is the pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Greenville, South Carolina. His upcoming book, Beheading Hydra: A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age, will be published by Sophia Institute Press in the Spring. Read more at www.dwightlongenecker.com. When faced with Christian slogans like “Jesus died to save you from your sins” or liturgical commonplaces like “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” the 21st century twenty-something with virtually no understanding of Christianity might well ask, “What does the execution of a criminal two thousand years …

By Patrick J. Walsh Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Quincy, MA. He holds a graduate degree in Anglo-Irish literature from Trinity College, Dublin and has written for The Weekly Standard, Modern Age and several other publications. Peter Kavanaugh, brother of Ireland’s last great poet Patrick Kavanaugh, used to say that “Ireland was a racket centered in Dublin.” Today, it is a racket centered in Brussels. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the European Union. It is no longer a Catholic country. After struggling for hundreds of years for their own independence, the Irish put their own constitution in mothballs. Ireland …

By Eric Sammons Eric Sammons is the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. His upcoming book Deadly Indifference (May 2021) examines the rise of religious indifference and how it has led the Church to lose her missionary zeal. One year ago today, darkness engulfed the United States. On March 18, 2020, the final holdout American dioceses suspended public Masses, making it impossible (or at least disobedient) for a lay Catholic in this country to attend Mass.  I followed the shutting down of public Masses closely, creating maps on Twitter so Catholics could see which dioceses had shut down, and which remained opened. Although looking back it …

By Declan Leary Mr. Leary is the Collegiate Network Fellow at The American Conservative and a graduate of John Carroll University. Though the politics of the USCCB are rather more complex than we are often led to believe, there is at least one issue on which the bishops’ conference is reliably (and disastrously) left-wing: immigration. Who can forget the image of El Paso’s Bishop Mark Seitz physically escorting a family of five Honduran nationals across the U.S. border and into his diocesan territory? The act was an explicit protest against the Trump administration, which had been working diligently to curtail endless waves of such …

By Stacy Trasancos, PhD Stacy Trasancos, Ph.D. is the executive director of Bishop Joseph Strickland’s St. Philip Institute. She has a doctorate in chemistry and M.A. in dogmatic theology. She is the author of Particles of Faith: A Catholic Guide to Navigating Science. Bishop Joseph Strickland (Tyler, TX), along with Dr. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, myself, and two others, recently released the statement “To Awaken Conscience” regarding the scandal given by Catholic leaders’ widespread acceptance of abortion-tainted COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, the statement has received extensive support—more than 3,000 co-signers to date. It has, however, also elicited controversy in the Catholic world. Many people have …

By Gretchen Erlichman Gretchen Erlichman is currently a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow at The Catholic University of America. She will be entering as a postulant with the contemplative Dominican nuns of the Monastery of Our Lady of Grace in North Guilford, Connecticut in July 2021. We live in “unprecedented times.” This oft-repeated phrase has not only made the headlines of the daily newspaper and graced the lips of many a newscaster but has also become an ever-present mantra of our everyday encounters. “Unprecedented times” describes the bewildering conglomeration of political chaos, religious tensions, and a pandemic-ridden society.  Yet, it is precisely …

By Jonathan B. Coe Jonathan B. Coe writes from the Pacific Northwest. Before being received into the Catholic Church in 2004, he served in pastoral ministry in rural Alaska and in campus ministry at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Several years ago, when I was received into the Catholic Church, I thought I had come into the experience with my eyes fully open. The scandals of 2002 had already happened, and their details and significance were being truthfully unpacked by many Catholic commentators for all the world to see. Because I had spent several years in leadership roles in evangelical-charismatic …

By Austin Ruse Austin Ruse is a contributing editor to Crisis Magazine. His next book, Under Siege: No Finer Time to be a Faithful Catholic, is out from Crisis Publications in April. You can follow him on Twitter @austinruse At least some of the country was riveted by the images of an autistic boy writhing on the floor of an airport after he had been kicked off a flight for not masking. I say “at least some” because a large cohort of Americans couldn’t care less about his discomfort. They are the Maskers. And God help you if you stand in their way or …

By Suzan Sammons Suzan Sammons is a writer, editor, nutrition student, and blundering gardener in southwest Ohio. She is currently in year 17 of what she projects to be a 29-year project called homeschooling. Early March saw a flurry of tweets from blue-checkmark women bemoaning the looming return of life to its pre-pandemic whirlwind: blazers and heels, carpooling and rushed meals, less time at home and much more on the run. Why does the thought of going back to their old lives frighten these professional women who have staked so much to their careers outside the home?  Importantly, it’s not just high-powered …

By Anne Hendershott Anne Hendershott is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH. She is the author of The Politics of Envy (Crisis Publications, 2020). While a growing number of media outlets are attempting to indict “white supremacists” for the dramatic increase in reported hate crimes against people of Asian descent, the reality is that for more than four decades Asian Americans in some of our largest cities have been the victims of violence and discrimination perpetrated by members of several racial and ethnic groups. And, although there has indeed been an …