Analysis and Comment
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Why the Iran war is immoral
A hospital is not a fortress. A school is not an armory. A child eating breakfast is not collateral damage waiting to happen. The just war tradition draws these lines in indelible ink, yet the fog of war keeps producing erasers — and generals willing to use them.
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Authentic tradition, authentic voices and religious nationalism
This essay critically examines how appeals to “authentic tradition” in contemporary theological discourse function as tools in ongoing religious and political conflicts. It argues that these appeals often oversimplify complex theological realities, shaping public perception and influencing authority within the Church and society.
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How Iran broke Trump’s alliance with Catholic America
At an Easter vigil for peace, Cardinal McElroy preached that the United States entered the Iran war by choice, not necessity, and failed to exhaust negotiation. He called both its initiation and continuation morally illegitimate.
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Secret dinners and deal-making behind Pope Leo’s election
Two new books detail how private dinners, diplomatic alliances and backroom conversations among cardinals shaped the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, revealing the conclave’s hidden power dynamics in unprecedented detail.
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The boy in the basement
War does not only flatten buildings. It dismantles the invisible architecture of childhood — the assumption that the ground is solid, the belief that adults have things under control. When fear becomes normal, children stop imagining that anything better exists.
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A year on from Pope Francis
Pope Francis engineered a once-in-a-century transformation, shifting Catholicism from its European centre of gravity toward a genuinely global Church — one that listens before it teaches and walks alongside the wounded before it judges.
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When clericalism becomes narcissism, the altar turns into a stage
Clerical narcissism perpetuates itself when a newly ordained priest is assigned to a pastor who demands unquestioning obedience, creating successive generations of leaders hostile to collaboration.
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Faith has always gone to space. Artemis II shows how much it has changed.
Buzz Aldrin once wrote that space missions belong to all humanity regardless of belief, yet he found no better way to honor Apollo 11 than giving thanks to God. Artemis II’s crew carried that same tension forward with grace.
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Catholics and other Christians thanking God together: has the time come to change our practice?
When Pope Francis visited Rome’s Lutheran church in 2015, he reframed the Eucharist not as a doctrinal reward but as sustenance for a pilgrim people. That shift in language was small but significant, opening theological space that had been closed for decades under two conservative popes.
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In the Easter story, women are the first to proclaim the resurrection – but…
Women made up only 14% of U.S. congregation leaders as of 2018-19, despite constituting nearly a quarter of professional clergy. That gap sits uneasily alongside Easter Gospel narratives in which women are the first — and sometimes only — witnesses to the resurrection.
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