mediamissionaries

Be England Thy Dowry - Crisis Magazine : On November 4, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued an Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, in response to “groups of Anglicans” who had petitioned “repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion individually as well as corporately,” which created for them a new ecclesiastical structure: the Personal Ordinariates. The stated purpose of these was “to …

There Is No 'Catholic Feminism' - Crisis Magazine : Modern Catholicism needs to re-examine its uneasy relationship with feminism, and there’s no better time than this year’s tragic anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As it turns out, January 22 follows hard on the heels of a new landmark—January 15—for Catholic feminists, namely, the Pope’s unprecedented appointment of a woman, Francesca Di Giovanni, to a …

Catholicism is even more local than politics By Dr. Jeff Mirus  (  bio  -  articles  -  email  ) | Jan 14, 2020           It has been said that “all politics is local”, and this is a valuable axiom for winning public office. Unfortunately, after such victories, politics mostly proceeds from the top down. This creates a huge temptation to seek change by leaping over what is local in an effort to control high-level socio-political policies. In the Church, this temptation tends to take its most virulent form in the role by national episcopal conferences. I began an assessment of such conferences last week in  On funding (or dissolving) episcopal conferences . Today I take up their tendency to substitute a thirst for political influence for each soul’s thirst for God. Last week I mentioned the tendency of episcopal conferences to focus on desired policies and goals, including influencing other institutions and gover...

Stone Walls do not a Prison Make By Br. Cyril Stola, O.P. on January 14, 2020   In nineteenth-century America, worlds collided when Catholic nuns moved into predominantly Protestant lands. These habit-clad, Latin-chanting women travelled across the Atlantic in order to build convents and live behind iron grates, entirely cut off from their new neighbors. The populace of the growing United States could not understand why anyone would go through the effort of immigrating just to stay behind closed doors. Anti-Catholic sensationalism fueled suspicion of all things Catholic, and rumors abounded that nuns were prisoners of depraved clergy. From time to time, well-meaning individuals offered nuns freedom from captivity and were often surprised when they learned that nuns did not see themselves as damsels in distress; instead, they were quite happy to stay where they were. We may forgive these would-be liberators for their misguided enthusiasm. After all, the prison and the mona...

The Face of the Deep - Crisis Magazine : In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. I thought often of these first lines from Genesis while crossing the North Atlantic two weeks …

We are trying to present a stage play / pilot video (The Real Golden Girls) using a story that is mainly about baptism. To be or not to be as it were.  "The play is the thing that captures the conscience of the king"

A Man's Home Is His Monastery - Crisis Magazine : If the Church is a body, as St. Paul describes it in 1st Corinthians, then the heart of Catholicism here on earth must be the monastery. Its prayers to God for the world are pumped, like blood, throughout the body of Christ giving Christianity life. If by analogy the monastery serves as our heart, what … If the Church is a body, as St. Paul describes  it in 1 st  Corinthians, then the heart of Catholicism here on earth must be the monastery. Its prayers to God for the world are pumped, like blood, throughout the body of Christ giving Christianity life. If by analogy the monastery serves as our heart, what is it in reality? There are many different answers to this question. One answer is that it is a place where men have given up their worldly concerns and taken up a new life of joyful prayer. The monk has shunned the temporary things of this world that waste away to live in the next. They continually proclaim to the rest of...

New Year's Resolutions for Catholics - Crisis Magazine : During and after the grim martial law period in the early 1980s, many freedom-minded Poles would greet each other on January 1 with a sardonic wish: “May the new year be better than you know it’s going to be!” As 2020 opens, that salutation might well be adopted by Catholics concerned about the future of …

Nutcracker Not-So-Sweet - Crisis Magazine : During a recent eighth-grade trip to Chicago, chaperones and students of Notre Dame Academy in Toledo walked out of a performance of The Nutcracker after learning that lead characters would be portrayed in a gay marriage. This was a courageous and bold move—a correct application of Pope Francis’s well-publicized encouragement of young people “to make …