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Roman Catholicism

Nuns for Trump

John Fea   |  June 5, 2024

Donald Trump may be struggling to win over white suburban women and Black women, but he has some fans among Catholic nuns. Here is a taste of Elle Hardy’s piece at Unherd: Bespectacled and berobed, a softly spoken nun may […]

“They like the singer but not the song”

John Fea   |  May 29, 2024

Pope Francis’s 60 Minutes interview is still making waves. Evangelicals are freaking out because Francis said that human beings are “good at heart.” Progressive Catholics are mad about his remarks on the ordination of women as deacons and his comments […]

Pope Francis on Ukraine

John Fea   |  May 6, 2023

The Pope wants peace in the Ukraine. He opposes Russian war crimes, but is not acting diplomatically on behalf of the West in the way John Paul II did during the Cold War. Over at The Atlantic, John Allen, the […]

What William F. Buckley thought about Dorothy Day’s Catholicism

John Fea   |  April 26, 2023

Here is a taste of David Mills’s column at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: In 1960, the leader of American conservatism treated a leading radical, and as it happened fellow Catholic, like an idiot. The first, who died in 2008, is now […]

“It’s the Gospel, stupid”

John Fea   |  March 8, 2023

Here is Oxford church historian, journalist, and Pope Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh at Commonweal on why the pontiff focuses so much on migration: Yet neither the current scale of the problem nor Francis’s own background is sufficient to grasp why […]

Pope Francis: “I think Benedict’s death was instrumentalized”

John Fea   |  February 6, 2023

I recently read a blog post from Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, that used the death of Pope Benedict to score political points. Here is a taste of that post: Ratzinger was a great […]

Revisiting the Catholic baptism pronoun controversy

John Fea   |  February 22, 2022

Last week we brought to your attention the Phoenix, Arizona Catholic priest who resigned after he used the wrong pronoun while performing baptisms. Over at The Washington Post, Michelle Boorstein gets Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and religion journalist, to […]

Commonweal writer slams the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops

John Fea   |  June 29, 2021

Molly Wilson O’Reilly, a practicing Catholic, pulls very few punches in this piece at The Atlantic. The context, of course, is the bishops’ efforts to ban Joe Biden from communion for his views on abortion. Here is a taste: It […]

Pope Francis reaches out to Italian Pentecostalism

John Fea   |  May 15, 2021

As someone shaped by Roman Catholicism, evangelicalism, (though not Pentecostalism), and Italian-American culture (which I realize is quite different from Italian culture), I was pleased to see this. Here is Vatican News: Pope Francis has expressed his closeness to the […]

Joe Biden’s Georgetown pastor: “The Eucharist is not to be used as a weapon”

John Fea   |  April 29, 2021

The U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops is divided over whether Joe Biden can uphold pro-choice policies on abortion and still partake of communion. Here is a taste of Michelle Boorstein’s piece at The Washington Post: The Rev. Kevin Gillespie, pastor […]