An interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about the restoration of an urban Jersey parish. I guess this really strikes me because it plugs into much of the vision of the Church that I'm working on in my dissertation. That work has got me quite curious and concerned about how local priest are (or are not?) being trained in their ( Read more... )

Thomas Merton died 40 years ago today, electrocuted by the faulty wiring of his floor fan as he stepped out of his shower at a world-wide conference of monks in Bangkok. The National Catholic Reporter has an article commemorating Merton, which in a Left kind of way seems to magnify the tour Merton made at the end of his life, where he, as one of ( Read more... )

Today's the Feast of Lewis, being the 45th anniversary of his death, as well as those of Kennedy and Huxley.

My birth certificate showed up in the mail, which was a relief. My identity remains my own for another day. So all my paperwork is in order, and my files can be put away for another decade. The day was spent digging back into Chapter 1 ( Read more... )

Up all night typing up the major Latin texts from the Second Vatican Council pertinent to my dissertation and beginning translating all of them. I have decided that "The Tower of Babel" is the greatest horror story in human literature.

The sky turned an almost uniform shade of peach tonight at sundown. I don't think I'd ever quite seen anything like that before. Weaving my way through clumps of undergrads scattered around campus, I was spending the sunset hour reading over at the Courtyard, where the roses are finally growing back around the fountain. Father Fahey had given me ( Read more... )

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I have to thank jucundushomo for giving me the heads-up on this New York Times op-ed that James Martin, S.J. turned in. Tim was right on target in knowing I'd be interested in that I have complained in times past that the official canonization process in the Catholic Church has gotten corrupted by being politicized. Certainly, I merely have to think back a ( Read more... )

Archbishop's book tells of battles over control of liturgical reform ( Read more... )

Googling for something else, I found this book review on the Carnegie Council website. of a Thomas Cahill book I'd never heard of on Pope John XXIII that I thought was engaging and worth copying into the notebook.  The anecdotes related about Roncalli in Paris are worth the read alone.   Thomas ( Read more... )

Oi. I woke up this morning to find that there was a new document that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) had issued regarding the Second Vatican Council's statement that the Church of Christ "subsists in" the Catholic Church. Nicole Winfield, one of the regular AP reporters I read covering the Vatican, has a story out on it that ( Read more... )