Catholic Review
Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore
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Filed Under: 2025 Conclave, Commentary
A tidy church would be a dead church, so we may as well just keep to our ugly, vulgar and unseemly ways, remembering that (somehow) we, as church, have birthed so much wisdom and beauty century after tawdry human century!
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary, Remembering Pope Francis
As we absorb the news of Francis’ death and anticipate his funeral and then the conclave gathering to elect a new pontiff, here is a quick look at how we have come to know Jorge Bergoglio over these past 12 years.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary, social media
God is good and full of mercy, with plans for us — plans of fullness, not of harm. Increasingly I feel called to serve that reality, to quiet down and let the frenzied world turn its terrible ways while in the grips of a chaos magic that has been increasing in its scope for many decades.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary, Lent
We stand before Christ, transcending time, awaiting the moment when the energy of light and life — unleashed at creation, and subsumed (just once) into the quiescence of a grace-filled womb — flares through that enshrouded body, reanimating, resurrecting.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary, Lent
In retrospect, all these meals were as awful as they sound, but — whether intentionally or not — they delivered a message that our fasting and our abstinences were meant to be taken seriously and not subverted through technicalities.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Catholic Social Teaching, Commentary
The ongoing lesson of the crucifix is that sometimes disturbing things are permitted so that something great might be enabled to occur.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary
How many of us are walking around with broken hearts because we won’t permit ourselves the medicine of weeping and fully feeling the things we’ve determinedly repressed because we want that illusion of strength?
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary
We enter 2025 after a careening, mad season of confusion, hate, deceit and instability. The sense that things are vastly off-kilter and that centers are not holding is almost palpable.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary
Thoughtfulness is slow-going, though, and other parts of my “wish list” seem stuck in a stifling inertia of bureaucracy, material reluctance or perhaps (to be charitable) indecision.
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OSV News
Filed Under: 2024 Election, Commentary
The shrug also helps us to remember that good people may disagree and still be good people, and that most of us are doing the best we can, by such light as we are given.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary, Synodality
Service is about willingness, not worthiness; the church needs to be willing to actually sit down and create a plan for the creation of formal lay ministries, and then do it.
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OSV News
Filed Under: Commentary
Muscular evangelization is not helped by a plethora of crumbling church buildings and sacraments going unbestowed amid dying congregations; evangelization requires energy, and bringing young, enthusiastic believers into community together begets exactly the happy vigor needed to effectively share the faith.
