In a closed-door speech to Italian bishops on Monday, Pope Francis reportedly spoke about the number and quality of seminary candidates, including concerns about their sexual orientation. At the start of his May 21 audience with Italian bishops, Pope Francis voiced three areas of concern for the Church in Italy, the first of which was the lack of vocations...

American veterans in search of healing attended a recent pilgrimage to Lourdes, through the Archdiocese for Military Services and the Knights of Columbus. Among the pilgrims was Charles Baldinger, a West Point-educated infantry officer who had to retire due to Stage 4 brain cancer. “We came for physical healing with my right side and speech...

You’ve probably never heard of the Waupoos Family Farm. I hadn’t either, until I met some folks involved in it during a recent visit to Ottawa. Their story vividly illustrates the dictatorship of relativism at work. The farm is a vacation site for poor families who can’t afford a holiday together. It’s run by Christians who apply only one criterion to their potential guests: applicants must have an income below Statistics Canada’s poverty line...

What would you have to draw upon to answer this question — revelation, science, or philosophy? Revelation gives us knowledge of God as a free gift and does not require us to prove its contents, but to understand them with the help of the Church. Science cannot prove God’s existence, because God is not an object of empirical study that can be measured with earthly means...

In the 40-plus years since Star Wars took the box office and pop culture by storm, no plot point or line of dialogue, however essential or trivial, has avoided endless scrutiny and second-guessing from fans and skeptics alike. How could the Death Star’s catastrophic vulnerability, so obvious that Rebel analysts spotted it immediately...

In April, BBC Culture polled experts around the world to nominate up to five fictional stories they felt had shaped mindsets or influenced history. We received answers from 108 authors, academics, journalists, critics and translators in 35 countries – their choices took in novels, poems, folk tales and dramas in 33 different languages...

The professor who chaired a Vatican study group on Humanae Vitae stressed that the Bl. Paul VI’s encyclical “needs no updating.” Professor Gilfredo Marengo, of the Pontifical Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, spoke with CNA at the presentation of his latest book, “Chiesa senza storia, storia senza Chiesa” (Church without history...

Editor’s note: Our goal at Google is to make technology that works for everyone. Last year we made Classroom available to more students and teachers, including homeschoolers, and today we’re also updating the eligibility guidelines for G Suite for Education so homeschool co-ops in the U.S. can collaborate using G Suite for Education...

Among the contestants on season 10 of NBC’s American Ninja Warrior, there’s one who stands out. In addition to being a physical trainer, Father Stephen Gadberry is also a Catholic priest. He hopes that his participation in the upcoming season of American Ninja Warrior will make the clergy appear more human and available. Physical activity can be a “simple way to start a conversation with a spiritual leader...

“My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we should have a music talking about niggers and bitches and hoes. It had no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.” Wynton Marsalis covered all the bases. Race. His role in New Orleans’s removal of Confederate statues last year...

On Thursday morning, a small convoy with police protection will depart from the Vatican bound for the northern Italian city of Bergamo, almost six and a half hours away. In a sense, it’s actually a papal motorcade, but of a highly unusual sort. A pope will indeed be making his way north, but not the current occupant of the office...

A statue of a martyr saint has been removed from a Catholic church in Hebei province as Chinese authorities continued their clampdown on religious freedom. The statue of St. John Wu Wenyin was unveiled at Dongertou Catholic Church in Yongnian parish of Handan Diocese on May 3 but a source told ucanews.com that authorities asked the church to remove the statue after the ceremony "stirred a commotion on the internet...

Lord, have mercy. A few days ago, a four-alarm blaze engulfed the chapel at Mary Help of Christians Academy in North Haledon, NJ, an all-girls high school run by the Salesian Sisters of St. John Bosco. The fire alarm went off at 1:29am on May 18th, and though firefirghters came from four nearby municipalities, the fire wasn’t extinguished until around 4am...

Not a lot of people are aware of it, but the pope periodically meets with and gives a speech to the different departments at the Holy See. Every January, for example, he gives an address to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and the Roman Rota (one of the major legal courts at the Vatican). He also gives periodic speeches to groups associated with the Holy See...

Tim, Carl, and Paul hit the turn onto Reformatory Road just after 6:15. Rain now rips over the road in dense horizontal sheets. Objects plunge through the air like knots of sparrows. Carl rounds the corner and guns it north, with conditions pushing the Cobalt to its limits. Each second is precious. Whether or not they realize it...

In The Making of Martin Luther, the Cambridge scholar Richard Rex notes that 1518, not 1517, marks the real birth of Luther’s public profile. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses hit the wider German market in January 1518. He wrote his Instructions for Confession and his Sermon on the Proper Preparation of the Heart for the Reception of Communion in the spring of the same year...

Even a consensus among German Catholic bishops allowing intercommunion with Protestants cannot change Catholic teaching, says a Canadian archbishop. “Even more important is the challenge to remain faithful to Catholic doctrine and not to propose practices that undermine the faith, and the need to foster loyalty and communion with the universal Church...

Bishop of Oakland, California, Michael Barber, in addition to being diocesan bishop, has been a commissioned officer for the U.S. Navy Reserve for 27 years. In 1991, while studying in Rome, he was asked to celebrate Mass onboard naval vessels heading to and from the First Gulf War. He was told, “Father, the next time you come aboard...

Pope Francis has pioneered a new form of papal teaching, massively influential but officially nonexistent. It is something of a shadow magisterium, but on occasion it shines a brighter light than the official magisterium. The latest example regards the nature of homosexuality. Juan Carlos Cruz, one of the Chilean sexual-abuse victims who spent several days with Pope Francis in April...

Why tongues of fire? Why not lips of fire or words of fire? Why not a fiery dove to conform to the baptism of Christ at the Jordan? The tongues likely evoke the Hebrew concept of “tongues” praising God. As such, there is a Jewish mystical tradition that God’s heavenly temple above is surrounded by praising “tongues of fire...