Claire works for the Avila Foundation as editor and contributor of their website spiritualdirection.com. Her work is also featured on various Catholic sites including Catholicmom.com, Endowgroups.org, and The National Catholic Register, and on her own blog, eventhesparrow.com. She speaks frequently on the topics of saints, spirituality, respect for life, and the mission and vocation of women in the Church today. Claire has led a large women’s study group at her Phoenix parish for the last six years and has a passion for helping women see the beauty and possibility in their own interior lives and their unrepeatable place in the …
Author: Manuel Xavier
What Kind of “Believers”?
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. This past June I was in the Munich area for four days, giving a public lecture on Evangelical Catholicism and doing a lot of media interviews. My hosts were exceptionally gracious, but it was also obvious that the Catholic Church in what was once Germany’s most intensely Catholic region is in terrible shape. The numbers tell the tale. The parish in whose rectory I stayed has some 10,000 parishioners—which is to say, the pastor knows that …
Balderdash on the Tiber
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. Today’s first reading is from an explication of the academic program of the reconfigured Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences by Msgr. Pierangelo Sequeri, the institute’s rector (translation provided by the institute): The recomposition of the thought and practice of faith with the global covenant of man and woman is now, with all evidence, a planetary theological space for the epochal remodeling of the Christian form; and for the reconciliation of …
Historical Clarity and Today’s Catholic Contentions
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. One of the curiosities of the 21st-century Catholic debate is that many Catholic traditionalists (especially integralists) and a high percentage of Catholic progressives make the same mistake in analyzing the cause of today’s contentions within the Church—or to vary the old fallacy taught in Logic 101, they think in terms of post Concilium ergo propter Concilium (everything that’s happened after the Council has happened because of the Council). And inside that fallacy is a common misreading …
The Cup of Salvation: Where Does Altar Wine Come From?
Producers of sacramental altar wines are a select group. When at the request of his Mother Mary, Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana, it was the finest of all wines. And it was the purest wine of all when, at the Last Supper, he “took a cup … saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins’” (Matthew 26:27-28). The wine had to be the purest from the vine because earlier Our Lord also said, “For my …
The Bread of Heaven: Where Do Communion Hosts Come From?
These sisters bake altar bread — the Communion hosts that will be consecrated at Masses every day. These sisters bake altar bread — the Communion hosts that will be consecrated at Masses every day. When the sisters at the Monastery of the Sacred Passion in Erlanger, Kentucky, walk into their bakery several days a week, they are going to work at one of the most important physical labors in the Church. The cloistered sisters more than 745 miles north in Westfield, Vermont, and those 542 miles west in Clyde, Missouri, and others in a handful of monasteries from Brooklyn to …
How can I explain transubstantiation?
Father Cal Christiansen is pastor of St. Pius X Parish in Mountlake Terrace Q: The other day I was trying to explain the eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation to a coworker who is not Catholic, and I’m afraid she was more confused by the end of our conversation than when we started! How can I explain this doctrine to non-Catholics in a way that they can understand? A: When the disciples sat down with Jesus at the Last Supper, they were preparing to celebrate the Jewish Passover with him. Jesus, however, had something more in mind. “While they were eating, Jesus …
The Scourge of Pope Francis by Antonio Socci
Ambiguity and confusion reign under this pontificate The revelations made by Eugenio Scalfari about the personal (mis)beliefs of Pope Bergoglio continue. This week he dropped another bomb. Whoever has had, as I have several times, the fortune of meeting him and speaking to him with the maximum cultural trust, knows that Pope Francis conceives of the Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, man, not God incarnate. Once he has become incarnate, Jesus ceases to be a God and becomes a man up until his death on the cross. First, the journalist summarized a conversation in his own words: Whoever has had, as I have several …
Protestantism Made Me Catholic
Casey Chalk is a senior writer at Crisis and a graduate student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College. First Things has been running a fascinating and provocative series of articles that question the principles and beliefs of most of its readers. In May, it published “Why I Became Muslim” by one Jacob Williams, a Brit who grew up Anglican and then converted to Islam. More recently, the magazine published “Catholicism Made Me Protestant,” a reflection by Onsi A. Kamel, who grew up a “non-denominational, baptistic evangelical,” then seriously considered Catholicism before returning to Protestantism, though …
Looking for Schism in All the Wrong Places
Michael Warren Davis is the editor of Crisis magazine and host of The Crisis Point podcast. Pope Francis boldly declared last week that he’s unafraid of “pseudo-schismatics”: a clique of (mostly American) rigorist prelates and journalists whom Francis regards as a kind of loyal opposition to his papacy. But why should he have been afraid to begin with? A pseudo-schismatic is, by definition, not a schismatic. Pontiffs need no more fear pseudo-schismatics than exorcists need fear little boys who dress up as Harry Potter for Halloween—or, as the Holy Father might call them, pseudo-sorcerers. Or maybe I’ve misinterpreted him. Francis …