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Peter Damian’s Counsel

Sometime during the second half of the year 1049, Peter Damian, prior of the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in what is now the Italian region of Marche near the Umbrian border, wrote a lengthy letter to newly installed Pope Leo IX. The letter concerned “the befouling cancer of sodomy,” which Peter . . . . Continue Reading »

Pope Francis, Yves Congar, & True Reform

Austen Ivereigh describes Pope Francis' various reforms in light of the work of Dominican theologian Yves Congar and his influence on the Holy Father's thought. According to Ivereigh, Congar had a decisive impact on Pope Francis, specifically in his views on church reform as delineated in his 1950 . . . . Continue Reading »

Saving Punishment

Jim was holding his one-year-old son while smoking meth freebase when the oily liquid spilled on the little boy, badly burning him. Technically, it was an accident; the proximate cause was the breakdown in the electrical signals between his besotted brain and his fumbling fingers. Even in that . . . . Continue Reading »

The Indomitable and Effective Cardinal Pell

Shortly after George Pell was named Archbishop of Melbourne, he instituted several reforms at the archdiocesan seminary, including daily Mass and the daily celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, both of which had fallen by the wayside in the preceding years. The seminary faculty, enthusiastic proponents of Catholic Lite, thought to call the archbishop’s bluff and informed him that, were he to persist in such draconian measures, they would resign en masse.The archbishop thanked them for the courtesy of giving him a heads-up, accepted their resignations on the spot, and got on with the reform of the Melbourne seminary—and the rest of the archdiocese. Continue Reading »

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