On Being an Ecclesial Expatriate, Ten Years On

October 24, 2020 By Julia Smucker

My late friend and mentor Ivan Kauffman once described himself as “probably the only living person who speaks both fluent Mennonite and fluent Catholic.” If these words were true when he first wrote them, a handful of others, myself included, would eventually follow him to the same ecclesial bilingualism and, if not quite an official dual citizenship, an inescapably dual identity as self-described Mennonite Catholics. More precisely, 10 years ago today, with Ivan standing behind me as my sponsor, I... Read more

What’s Past Is Prologue

October 23, 2020 By Jeannine Pitas

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In November 1900, a fashionable, urban Polish poet from an upper-class background married a rural peasant. In a region of Europe where people of different class backgrounds were usually kept apart by strict social norms, this was a rare event. But some were seeking to break that pattern. In 1795 Poland had been completely colonized by Prussia, Russia and Austria, and the Polish people had spent the entire nineteenth century fighting a series of failed uprisings. Many believed that marriages... Read more

Reading Pacem in Terris, Part II

October 19, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

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This post is the continuation of my ruminations on Pacem in Terris from my Catholic social teaching reading group. The first part can be found here. For this meeting we read the second section of PT, paragraphs 46-79, on the relationship between the state and the individual. This is a shorter but interesting statement. In line with the previous documents, John XXIII takes the existence and need for the state as something given by the natural law: Human society can... Read more

Reading Pacem in Terris, Part I

October 13, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

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With this blog post I am going to start recording my ruminations on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Pacem in Terris. This blog post continues the posts generated by my reading group on Catholic Social Teaching. To read about previous encyclicals, follow the links for Mater et Magistra, Quadragesimo Anno, and Rerum Novarum. This post is rather late–we started reading it a month ago. So over the next week I hope to get caught up. The encyclical PT was published April... Read more

Saul Alinsky and Catholic Social Teaching

October 9, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

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This post got started because of a what I suspect is a very bad movie. Someone on a Facebook group I belong to was touting a new movie on gender ideology as a “must see” event. I quickly googled the film and the directors and could not find much about them (except they are are EWTN a lot) but I did find that they made a previous movie: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, a documentary about the late Saul Alinsky. ... Read more

Holding Your Nose: How to Vote Like a Catholic

October 7, 2020 By Brett Salkeld

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This November, American Catholics will participate in an event of historical, even cosmic, proportions, an event that, though it shows up in our calendars with predictable regularity, is arguably more important to Americans this year than ever before. If approached with a well-formed and thoroughly Catholic perspective it has the potential to alter the fate, not only of the United States, but of the world, and not only of government and politics, but of individual eternal souls. I am talking,... Read more

An American Wake-up Call?

October 4, 2020 By Jeannine Pitas

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It has become something of a cliché, but like all clichés it holds a truth: the American Dream has become the American Nightmare. For many groups of people living in this country, this is nothing new. Founded on the genocide of indigenous people and built with the labor of people forcibly taken from their homes, enslaved and abused, the United States of America originates in a story that was a dream for some and a nightmare for others. Meanwhile, as... Read more

The Two Spectres Haunting the Catholic Church

September 27, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

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In 1848, Karl Marx opened the Communist Manifesto with the now famous sentence, A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. Reflecting recently on the challenges facing the Church in the United States today, I realized that many of our problems can be summarized by paraphrasing Marx: Two spectres are haunting the Catholic Church — the spectres of communism and racism. In the original, spectre meant a ghost, a phantom or phantasm, an apparition. It was, like the... Read more

Reading Mater et Magistra, Part IV

September 13, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

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This post is my final set of comments on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Mater et Magistra. Previous posts are at Part I, Part II and Part III. After a break, my reading group is going to start reading his next social encyclical, Pacem in Terris. In our last session we discussed paragraphs 185-264, the end of the document. But our discussion took us much further afield and much of our discussion was retrospective–an attempt to really understand what Catholic social... Read more

Reading Mater et Magistra, Part III

August 30, 2020 By David Cruz-Uribe

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In this post I consider my reflections on Mater et Magistra, the first social encyclical of Pope John XXIII. The first two parts of these reflections can be found in Part I and Part II. Links to earlier ruminations on Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno can be found in Part I. Our discussions this past week went on a temporary digression as I was looking for the answer to a question that had come up in a discussion on social... Read more