Adult education in church: unattractive because it smacks of school which was not a pleasant experience for many people. Education is buried in a school culture of competition and poor methods. Here are some ideas that should be investigated by adults because the issues sound remote or too complex yet they keep coming up in [...]

Germany, Ireland, and Austria are awash in the sex abuse scandal. Ireland has no less than three full bodied, lengthy police and court reports that provoked the Prime Minister to attack the Vatican in parliament. (There are Gaelic names for the prime minister and parliament,  but I am too lazy to try to get them. [...]

  The Irish Catholic Church, one of the hardest hit by the tragedy of abuse of children and young people sexually and otherwise in its many parishes and institutions and with an abysmal track record of Episcopal oversight has perforce come up with a workable solution that would greatly benefit the USA. They have a [...]

Today, March 25, is the Solemnity of the Annunciation. That is the formal title and it means among other things even though it is Friday we are not at all penitential today. We will be, in fact, penitential as a Church for quite some time because of the continuing impact of the botch our leadership [...]

It is more than a feeling and something not quite a thought. It is certainly not a mood. I look back at various crises…an aging person’s privilege…and I honestly cannot think of quite a time like this where so many boundaries have been crossed, so many chickens have come home to roost, so much clarity [...]

It is supposed to be a cliche…viewing with alarm. It is supposed to be an easy and obvious and trite thing to do. But right now in places like Philadelphia where a grand jury indicted a former Archdiocesan official we can wonder that viewing with alarm in the church is not done fast enough. This [...]

If Vatican Cardinal traditionalist Medina thought it fit to overturn the entire collection of English speaking Bishops’ conferences then we are at an interesting point in history: neither reformers nor traditionalists seem to trust the Bishops. This article from US Catholic will be a very helpful addition to the fixit category of Church. Right now the [...]

Before becoming a Catholic, John Henry Newman had to resolve two problems he had with Rome. First, was Rome a factory for new doctrines? Second, were official Roman practices really abuses? He answered the first with his Essay on Development. The second he took decades to think through and develop and then publish as a [...]

What good is the Church? Not much says Newman who had a way of granting the opposition validity without accepting all the conclusions. Here is an Anglican sermon: Still on the whole the great multitude of men have to all appearance remained, in a spiritual point of view, no better than before. The state of [...]

I was reading Extension Magazine, a publication of the society that raises funds for “home” missions. There were a few brief interviews with vocation directors. One of them said we should not promote priest recruitment by talking about the needs, the closings of parishes, and such. He said nobody wants to join a sinking ship [...]