Like the new Latin-American saint, the Holy Father has chosen not to respond directly to harsh criticism.
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Twenty years is as nothing in the Eternal City. But in the life of one writer it is something. And so a word of thanks to my editors and readers over two decades.
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The moral problem with drugs is that they aim directly at compromising the reason, altering the perception of reality and the capacity to think clearly. With marijuana, it is often this hallucinatory effect that is the principal purpose of the use. Drug use is thus better likened to alcohol abuse, a violation of temperance, not simple alcohol use.
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The heart of Cardinal Wojtyła trembled in 1978, but his heart was strong, every day carrying within it Peter’s conversation with the Risen Jesus, until that day when that heart was finally stilled by a body that had grown weak.
Read MoreRomero should have been canonised in San Salvador.
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Massof testified to a grand jury that he snipped the spines of more than 100 babies after seeing them breathe, move or show other signs of life.
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The confusion of history and holiness now seems to be the principal objection to the canonization of popes.
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The resignation of Cardinal Wuerl brings to an end decades of service that will be tarnished, at least for time, until a fuller appreciation becomes possible. Yet the resignation might serve another purpose too, that of cleansing the culture of the clergy of one of its most serious vices, the failure to tell the truth.
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The following seven notable points might be taken from Cardinal Ouellet’s open letter.
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There are many cultural and practical reasons why the prohibition of alcohol is both unwise and impractical, but that it is legal should not obscure that it does massive damage, often to the most vulnerable.
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Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri announced that the two bishops “had been invited” by the Holy Father, which they must be to enter the synod, but the clear impression given was that they were chosen not by Rome but by Beijing.
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The Church offers beauty not as an ancillary project, but as part of her essential mission.
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Excess in any area does often compromise health, so I am not surprised that there are bad mental health outcomes from the idolatry of work. Interestingly, though, “workaholic” remains an ambiguous term, sometimes even complimentary, in a way that “alcoholic” is not.
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Benedict is correct. For Brandmüller and others, the resignation is now major black mark against Benedict, which stains his entire pontificate.
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The crown wins. Duty wins. Elizabeth Mountbatten must lose. All the more so her vice-regal representatives.
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My general intuition about carbon taxes is that they are the most simple, neat economic instrument to reduce carbon use, if that it is the policy goal. But in a country where the federal government just dropped billions to buy a pipeline it can’t build, the idea that the government is capable of something simple and neat is rather fanciful.
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Did Pope Francis change the settled teaching? No. He could have said that the use of the death penalty is unjust, or intrinsically evil or immoral. Rather, he taught that it was “inadmissible,” which is a term apparently chosen because it has not been used before and therefore has no fixed meaning.
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Just as Benedict’s speeches were saturated in history, ancient and contemporary, Gänswein made a bold diagnosis of the current moment.
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