Permit the suggestion, Your Eminence, that the Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion (and, indeed, whatever suffering is caused by those confusions) by helping God’s people embrace the mysteries of faith in love, rather than by suggesting that what has been settled by divine revelation and the authoritative teaching of the Church (in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) is not, in fact, settled.

On March 26, the International Olympic Committee made an announcement that is simultaneously surprising and banal. The IOC declared that only women are eligible to participate in women’s events in the Olympics. Of course, saying that women’s events are limited to women is as newsworthy as a declaration that water is wet.

Lose no opportunity to invest quality time with children at every stage of their lives. Remind them of how precious they are. Teach them as they grow how to recognize opportunities to spread the good news of salvation that our resurrected Lord makes attainable for generations to come.  

This type of encounter helps us see the beauty and the power and the imagination behind God’s creation.

By the end of his life, Orestes Brownson, who was the most distinguished American Catholic public intellectual of the 19th century, had become a ferocious critic of the Americanist path that most of his fellow Catholics had chosen.

On a snow-covered winter day in 1842, Father Edward Sorin stood before a frozen lake in northern Indiana and did something audacious. He consecrated the land, the institution he was about to found and every soul who would ever study or work there to the Blessed Virgin Mary — and he did this not as an afterthought or pious decoration, but as the founding act itself.

Jesus never directly answered, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Instead of simply saying “Yes,” full stop, Jesus gave what many consider to be sidestep answers…

When it was her turn, she walked right up to the cross, carefully leaned down very low, and gave the dark wood a kiss. Then she bounced away.

The Easter season is a time for rejoicing—not just for ourselves, but in a way that invites those around us to join in the celebration.

Because of the evidence of the empty tomb and the encounters of the risen Jesus with the women, the apostles and disciples, and St. Paul, the Church has always believed and preached the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It is the moment that definitively changed human history forever.