In 2013, in the year of the election of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio SJ as Pope Francis of Rome, at the tail end of the Latin Church’s Year of Faith, the See of Rome welcomed into its central square, the one named for the Holy Apostle Peter, the statue of the Lady who had appeared to three shepherd children at Fatima and predicted the ideological horrors of the twentieth century. At this event, Francis offered a speech describing the faith of the Theotokos. Though... Read more
Of all the scary things that an Eastern Catholic can say to someone in the Latin Church, that we are not supposed to pray the rosary ranks pretty high up there. The other one is that we are not under the Pope of Rome – we are in communion with him – but in saying that, there is still something of an acknowledgement of the bishop of the church that presides in charity over the churches, and when it comes down to it, most... Read more
The first time I prayed the rosary was in a class on Christian spirituality at the Catholic high school in my senior year. The teacher, a young newlywed who had stolen a seminarian from the Latin priesthood, had us make our own rosaries with multicolored beads in class. I was thankful for the clear instructions that she gave for how to do it, as I had never seen a rosary before; I was Protestant. Most of my friends were Catholic (of the... Read more
Recently, I was at an evangelical Protestant college event as a workshop speaker, and as part of the leaders’ staff gathering, they went around a circle saying positive things about each other. Such kumbaya moments are rare in the Kyivan Church, where what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, so I treasured every moment. The best part was that after we were done saying nice things about each person, the staff leader channeled his inner black-Korean Pentecostal, bellowing, Are you blessed? The response: So blessed.... Read more
By the time I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, I thought I knew so much about Mary: councils, customs, cultures, and even cults. I suppose today is the right day to tell the story of how much of this knowledge became a much more intense form of Catholic love, as we celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration two days ago. The Dominican Order was also instrumental in this journey, so I am enjoying this happy coincidence... Read more
I told a rather prominent Anglican ecumenist recently that when I was an Anglican in my former days, I thought I had found the silver bullet to resolving the thorny problem of women’s ordination that lay in the way of the Anglican Communion and the Latin Church. A saint who is commonly acknowledged between the two churches is Dame Julian of Norwich, who famously spoke about Christ as our Mother from whose breast we are nourished and under whose maternal... Read more
It is a truism within Chinese evangelical circles that whatever is not its brand of ‘conservatism’ is ‘liberal.’ ‘Conservatism’ among Chinese evangelicals usually refers to apolitical congregations, the inerrancy of every punctuation mark of the Bible, premillennial dispensationalism of the kind where true Christians get raptured into heaven before the Great Tribulation, the urgency of global missions as long as it’s someone else’s calling, and the sovereignty of the God whose will is always to make sure you are middle... Read more
I attended a school run by an Assemblies of God church in Fremont, California, from preschool to junior high. I suppose that it might be tempting to conclude that me and everyone there was Pentecostal. To me, that’s funny. I don’t know whether the internal religious and racial diversity of the school was a function of being in Fremont, where the population is just over half ‘Asian’ in an aggregated way and is so religiously and racially diverse that Harvard... Read more
A few years ago, when I was very single, I used to see a Filipina nun in the Latin Church for advice about women. I was Anglican at the time, and Sister told me that that was wonderful; she was also into Jung and Rahner and some ecofeminist stuff and assumed that I was just another liberal Anglican. For her, this was supposed to mean that I was much more progressive than her church. The truth is that I was probably cooler as a person... Read more
There is a story about Constantinople that makes the inner evangelical in me wince. It’s about Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, who had defeated his opponents at the Battle of Milvian Bridge by painting on his soldiers’ backs the sign of the cross; in hoc signo vinces, he had heard in a vision – in this sign conquer. Helena, in her turn, took a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and brought back (among other things) a part of the True Cross,... Read more
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