In theory all parishes are more or less equal. Yet inevitably in any city it is easy to find a parish (or a few) that seems to attract faithful from all over the place. What is it that draws people to a parish? A Denver-based organization has the answer and the tools to help pastors turn their parishes into thriving communities...

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò issued a third testimony today, the feast of the North American Martyrs, which we publish in full below, with a link below it to Cardinal Ouellet's letter of Oct. 7. He begins by saying, To bear witness to the corruption in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was a painful decision for me, and remains so...

Last week, a federal judge in California dismissed a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union had filed in 2016 challenging the government’s award of grants to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to provide services to unaccompanied minor illegal aliens and trafficking victims. In the lawsuit, the ACLU argued the grants violated the Establishment Clause because the Department of Health and Human Services allowed the Catholic organization (and its sub-grantees) to deny girls and women in their care contraceptives and abortion...

It was a movie destined for failure — relying on crowdfunding for its shoestring budget, garnering little to no attention among liberal media outlets and opening in only 673 theaters around the country. Still, “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” succeeded in its opening weekend at the box office, becoming the No...

Does Pakistan’s Supreme Court have the courage to free Asia Bibi, an illiterate 53-year-old Christian woman on death row since 2010 for “blasphemy,” while thousands of Islamic extremists across the country bay for her blood? If the court releases Ms. Bibi, the best-known victim of a cruel blasphemy law often used to target religious minorities...

Anyone who has studied the history of Orthodox Christianity knows the details of this story, as well as arguments about its signifigance. As the first Christian millennium was drawing to a close, something big happened among the East Slavic and Finnic tribes of Europe. As always, the change involved economics, culture, military might and...

The pope enters the room of the Nunciature and greets the Jesuits one by one, starting with the provincial, Fr. Vidmantas Šimkūna. In all, 28 Jesuits are present: 22 from the province of Lithuania and Latvia, two from the United States with close links to Lithuania, and four Jesuit bishops: Lionginas Virbalas, Archbishop of Kaunas; his predecessor Sigitas Tamkevičius who had been imprisoned by the KGB; Jonas Boruta...

On our way to Sarajevo's Ashkenazi Synagogue for the Friday evening Shabbat (Sabbath) service, my friend Paula Goldman and I walked down cobblestone streets through the Baščaršija, the old Ottoman area of the city, passing mosques, shops and a madrasa (Islamic school). It was the year 2000, and the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina still bore the scars of the Balkans War...

The U.S. Department of Justice has served subpoenas to several dioceses in the state of Pennsylvania, in what is believed to be a statewide move by federal authorities to investigate sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy. Chanceries across the Commonwealth were served with requests for documentation and files Oct. 18. While Pennsylvania diocesan officials have not commented on the scope of the materials subpoenaed...

When my son Athanasius was eight years old, his batting average for the baseball season was over .900. To be more specific for you baseball neophytes, he made a total of one out in an entire season of batting. And so, for a few years, he and I both dreamed of the major leagues in his future. On the way to baseball practice one day...

My father had an expression: “Charlie, people disappoint.” It was his way of saying that even people we think irreproachable, godly, and saintly can let us down, either with sin or simply by being unable to help us in key moments. Something of that comes through in the words of St. Paul from today’s first reading. Here were people that St...

On the military terrain, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues at low intensity. But on the religious terrain, the clash has reached its peak. On October 15, the patriarchate of Moscow “and all Rus” broke off Eucharistic communion with the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, led respectively by patriarchs Kirill and Bartholomew...

The First Reading for this Lord’s Day is personally very significant to me, because it caused me to be disturbed as a young man, and even contributed to a bout of depression I had. When I was in college, a group of Messianic (Christian) Jewish singers called “The Liberated Wailing Wall” came to my home church to put on a concert...

I received a disconcerting email this year from a senior staff member in the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach. The email was soliciting ideas from the Sarah Lawrence community for a conference, open to all of us, titled “Our Liberation Summit.” The conference would touch on such progressive topics as liberation spaces on campus...

After an Iraqi cardinal said Tuesday that the U.S. government has “done nothing” to aid beleaguered Christians in his country, a Trump administration official on Wednesday insisted that “the U.S. is helping a tremendous amount, by any measure.” “We have mobilized a massive amount of resources,” said Mark Green, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development...

Recently in America magazine, there appeared an article titled, “Yes, democratic socialism is compatible with Catholic social teaching.” While it may be exasperating to see pro-socialism columns like these appear again and again, it’s not surprising. As it turns out, the core philosophy we now call “socialism” has been one of the most persistent errors in Church history...

Although clergy sexual abuse scandals aren’t new, the ones that have rocked the Catholic Church this summer revolved around a group seldom focused on before: seminarians. The sexual harassment and abuse of seminarians, and the response of seminary leaders, have been at the center of the case of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick...

When Philip Nielsen set out as a concerned Catholic layman to respond to what he saw as a lack of transparency in Church governance, he knew he could expect opposition. Indeed, he has faced plenty since word got out that he was organizing Better Church Governance, a group that plans to investigate the Church’s cardinals and publish its findings in what it calls the “Red Hat Report...

'Lord Of the Rings' director Peter Jackson has seen footage of a mine explosion that his own grandfather was only a hundred yards away from on the Western Front at the time. He spoke about his new film 'They Shall Not Grow Old' with reporter Lisa Hartle.

Why do scholars try so hard then to give a late date to the New Testament? Because they have another agenda. If Jesus really claimed to be God incarnate–as the gospels show–then it is difficult to avoid this conclusion about him. However, if these “mythological” elements can be shown to be later inventions, then they can be dismissed...