By Casey Chalk Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist. He holds a Masters in Theology from Christendom College. Perhaps I was wrong. Just a few weeks ago, right after the presidential inauguration, one of my wife’s close friends, another parent in our homeschooling co-op, expressed her fear that homeschooling is likely to come under greater scrutiny with the new administration. I shook my head in dissent. Sure, I acknowledged, there are some, particularly on the Left, who are suspicious and critical of homeschooling. But ours is a strong movement with political clout, I assured her, with millions of American kids currently …
Author: Manuel Xavier
What Do We Do Now?
By Regis Martin Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012) and The Beggar’s Banquet (Emmaus Road). His most recent book, also published by Emmaus Road, is called Witness to Wonder: The World of Catholic Sacrament. He resides in Steubenville, Ohio, with his wife and ten children. In an essay written …
No Common Ground With Abortion
By Auguste Meyrat Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher and department chair in north Texas. He has a BA in Arts and Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas and an MA in Humanities from the University of Dallas. In an online event recently, Bishop McElroy of San Diego criticized the idea of making abortion a “litmus test” for Catholic politicians. When Catholic leaders do this, he claims, “such a position will reduce the common good to a single issue.” Clearly, the bishop was thinking of many Catholic Democrat politicians, notably the new president, who are fully pro-abortion at all times and at …
Hard lessons from our ancient forebears in the Faith
Christopher R. Altieri is Rome Bureau Chief for The Catholic Herald. He spent more than a dozen years on the news desk at Vatican Radio. He holds the PhD from the Pontifical Gregorian University, and is the author of The Soul of a Nation: America as a Tradition of Inquiry and Nationhood. Writing at the intersection of faith and politics is a dangerous business. Alexandra DeSanctis of the National Review is to be commended for the admirable acquittal she gave of herself in her recent foray into that fraught field, with her June 1 piece, “Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement Can Find Hope in the Story of …
From Christendom times to apostolic times
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent book is The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), and his new book, Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences …
President Biden and a Catholic Inflection Point
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. Catholics who take this apostolic teaching seriously will understand that our first obligation toward our brother in Christ, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is to be in Christian solidarity with him through prayer. We pray for his health, strength, and courage. We pray that he be granted the gift Solomon asked of God: wisdom in governance. We pray for his deepening conversion to Christ. Solidarity in prayer is the first duty of American Catholics toward the …
Archbishop Jose Gomez: A Profile in Episcopal Courage
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. During their annual meeting in November of last year, a critical mass of the Catholic bishops of the United States recognized that Joe Biden’s election to the presidency had brought the Church to a critical point. The president-elect had long spoken, and with evident sincerity, about the ways in which his Catholic faith sustained him in times of great suffering, including the deaths of his first wife and his son. He regularly attended Mass and was …
The Challenge of Eucharistic Coherence
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. In his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Pope St. John Paul II invited Catholics to “rekindle” our sense of “Eucharistic amazement,” for “the Church draws her life from the Eucharist,” which “recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the Church”—Christ’s glorified, abiding presence with, in, and through his people, fulfilling his promise to remain with us “to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20). In the Eucharist, the Church meets her Lord “with unique intensity.” Thus the celebration …
Catholic coherence, Catholic integrity
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. In 2007, the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean completed their fifth general conference with a final report, known from the Brazilian city where they met as the “Aparecida Document.” Its principal authors included Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., then the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Thanks to the efforts of the future pope and others, the Aparecida Document remains an exemplary description of what it means to be the Church of the New Evangelization—and not …
George Weigel: Cardinal Cupich’s Criticisms of Archbishop Gomez are Baseless
Weigel argued that Archbishop Gomez releasing a statement on the inauguration was in keeping with the recommendations from the Working Group on Engaging the New Administration created by the bishops at their November 2020 meeting. CNANationJanuary 23, 2021 WASHINGTON — Archbishop Jose Gomez, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, showed courage in releasing a statement on the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration despite opposition from within the conference, said papal biographer and longtime Church observer George Weigel. Weigel said Archbishop Gomez displayed “episcopal courage” at a time when others demanded “a reprise of the accommodationist approach to Catholic public …