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...