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
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
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
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
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
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
This is the second post on my thoughts on Mater et Magistra, based on the discussions of my reading group. You can find Part I here. This week we read a bit less, paragraphs 70-121, but this was a very rich selection. This section continued the discussion of the fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching as laid out in RN and QA, but reinterpreted and expanded for the current time. Following up on a point raised in our previous meeting,... Read more
With this post, my ruminations on Catholic social teaching continue. Last week, my reading group moved on to the first post WW II encyclical, Mater et Magistra, by Pope St. John XXIII. You can find links to the discussion of Quadragesimo Anno here, and to the discussion of Rerun Novarum here. Mater et Magistra, published in May 1961, came at a significant moment in the life of the Church. The war and its aftermath had had a substantial, even traumatic,... Read more
This post is the fourth and final part of my ruminations on Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI’s major contribution to Catholic social teaching. You can can read the earlier reflections here: Part I, Part II, Part III. It follows up on earlier blog posts on Rerum Novarum by Leo XIII. Next week, we move on to reading Mater and Magistra by Pope John XXIII. Our discussion started off by returning to some of the terms I mentioned in the coda... Read more
This article first appeared in the Summer 2020 Newsletter of the Brothers and Sisters of St. Francis Region of the Secular Franciscan Order, and is reproduced here with permission. It is specifically addressed to Secular Franciscans, but I think the underlying ideas should be relevant to all Catholics, particularly in an election year. To avoid formatting issues, I reproduce here an earlier, slightly different version. At my first meeting of the regional executive council last February, a big item on... Read more
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