Tag: Church Crisis

The Church’s Crisis of Faith

Our Third President, Thomas Jefferson was a polymath, who devoted himself to many fields of intellectual endeavor before and after his two terms in office. A child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson took a strong interest in eliminating any forms of...

Overcoming Polarization Within the Church

Sadly, our world is more divided than ever before. Even a cursory glance at politics, education, or culture suffices to give one the impression that compromise is often no longer possible.  The most essential principle to any civilization is the...

Our Celebration of Life

The readings for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time are a hymn to the culture of life: even life with all the trials and pain, and limits, and hardships that our human frailty imposes on us. This is possible because Christ lives forever to make...

We Are Living in Dark Times

With the recent arrest of an Ohio priest on charges of impregnating a 17 year old girl, several assumptions have been shattered that the Catholic Church was hoping to hang its hat on. First, the cancer or sickness that affected the Church for...

Catholic Responses to the Abuse Scandal

I recently attended a lay forum at a local Catholic parish and found what one might expect—a mixture of heartache, outrage, cautious expectation, and hope. People spoke tearfully about the deep sadness they felt at the continuing revelations of...

The Greek Persuasion

After the comprehensive and well-written essays on this page by Thomas Addis and Vincent Ruggiero, plus an uproar in the secular media, one might question what I might add to this discussion about the evil that has been polluting our Church for...

An Open Letter To Seekers

I am writing this letter on another anniversary of the events of 9/11. That was a day in which we saw great evil followed by acts of love, faith and charity. It occurred to me this morning how much, in a world of faith, evil can abide. The recent...