Word on Fire

The quarantine’s three lessons about the Church

So Catholics, don’t get discouraged. Rather, use this time of deprivation and abstention to awaken a deeper love for the Church in its Eucharistic, symbiotic, and incarnational distinctiveness.
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Anthony Hopkins portrays retired Pope Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce portrays Pope Francis in a scene from the movie "The Two Popes."

The One Pope

I would have been happy to watch four hours of a film that was as honest and insightful about Joseph Ratzinger as it was about Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
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One cheer for George Will’s ‘The Conservative Sensibility’

Will gets some important things right, but he gets some even more basic things quite wrong.
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The USCCB Meeting, Jordan Peterson, and the “Nones”

What is particularly sad to me is that the commentariat, especially in regard to religion, has become so polarized and ideologically driven that the most elementary distinctions aren’t made and the most broad-brush analyses are commonplace.
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Wake Up: The real danger posed by the California confession bill

Catholics should, of course, rise up in strenuous protest against this very aggressive incursion—but so should anyone who cares about the freedom of religion in our society.
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Seeing abortion

In 1850, lots of good and thoughtful people defended the institution of slavery. Now, only insane people would. In 2019, lots of decent and thoughtful people defend the pro-choice position. One can only hope that these recent laws, and this viscerally disturbing film, will hasten the day when only insane people would.
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Frank Gehry and the quest for transcendence

The Church ought to sing the transcendence of God to Frank Gehry as it once sang it to Giotto, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Dante, Gaudí, and the architect of Chartres Cathedral. 
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New York, abortion and a short route to chaos

Abandoning the convictions of one’s conscience in the exercise of one’s public duties is precisely equivalent to “I’m personally opposed but unwilling to take concrete action to instantiate my opposition.”
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Talking to some young Jesuits about social justice and evangelization

I told my young Jesuit conversation partners that they ought to follow the prompt of our Jesuit pope and go not just to the economic margins but to the “existential margins”—that is to say, to those who have lost the faith, lost any contact with God, who have not heard the Good News.
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The challenge of John Chau

Say what you want about his prudence. I will speak of him with honor.
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Tintoretto and the Reform of the Church

Tintoretto sheds considerable light on this issue of Apostolic weakness and strength in the very manner in which he has arranged the figures in his composition
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