Catholics

Mitchell Atencio 3-31-2023

Stickers in the shape of a heart with a trans flag are pictured during a conversation about trans care, equity, and access, during National Trans Visibility Month with the Rainbow Room, a program of Planned Parenthood Keystone, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, March 29, 2023. Hannah Beier/Reuters

Nearly 30 groups of Catholic nuns, totaling more than 6,000 people across 18 states, signed onto a statement celebrating Trans Day of Visibility and calling people to resist anti-transgender legislation in their states.

Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear, by Michael J. O'Loughlin / Broadleaf Books

AFTER TWO YEARS of COVID-19, the world yearns to move forward. Meanwhile, we commemorate 40 long years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The first years were characterized by silence, as government, churches, and other institutions generally ignored people living with HIV and dying from AIDS. However, compassionate individuals broke the silence and offered care and advocacy. In Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear, Michael J. O’Loughlin gives voice to Catholics who followed the gospel call to serve these marginalized in the U.S. in the 1980s and ’90s.

Hidden Mercy, based on the podcast series Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church, focuses on the experiences of a few individuals—including a nun in the Midwest, a gay artist priest, and a lay Catholic nurse. One championed the first public HIV/AIDS education program—notably held in a Catholic church. Others advocated for hospital beds for HIV patients, established hospice homes, or ministered to the homeless and persons of color, who were—and still are—disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. They facilitated pharmaceutical clinical trials that included persons of color. Others led interfaith memorial services. These Catholics ministered to the sick while the institutional Catholic Church was first silent, later insensitive, and at times heartless in written and verbal statements targeting gay people with HIV/AIDS.

Gina Ciliberto 11-02-2020

A woman decorates her car at an event encouraging community members to vote at an early voting site in Houston, Oct. 25, 2020. REUTERS/Callaghan O'Hare/File Photo

While groups like CatholicVote and others have narrowed in on pro-life, pro-Trump messaging, many other Catholic groups are urging Catholics to think more holistically when they enter the voting booth. “Pro-life,” they argue, extends to honoring the dignity all life from the womb to the tomb, which behooves voters to consider issues like health care, housing, education, racism, climate justice, migration, and criminal justice reform while voting.

Rose Marie Berger 10-22-2020
Illustration by Matt Chase

Illustration by Matt Chase

Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’ encyclical on “social friendship” released in October, sounds like a new gelato flavor—something between fior di latte and tutti frutti. Like the Italian frozen dessert, Francis’ pastoral sections melt in your mouth—but a nutty, bitter crunch hides in every bite.

Encyclical letters are used by popes to address important issues. Recently, these letters have been addressed not only to Catholics, but to “all people of good will.”

Where Laudato Si’, released five years ago, developed new doctrine and broke ground in Catholic social teaching to address the fierce urgency of climate collapse, “On Universal Fraternity and Social Friendship” (as it’s called in English) counsels us not to backslide as a human family. Cardinal Michael Czerny said, “If Laudato Si’ taught us that every thing is connected, then Fratelli Tutti teaches us that everyone is connected.”

Adam DeVille 11-06-2019

Image via Shutterstock/Natata

That guilt — whether over the privilege into which he was born, or from a sense of inferiority over never meeting parental expectations, or survivor’s guilt for outliving his brother Fred whose alcoholism led to an early death at 42 — is what I believe has motivated Donald Trump for much of his life.

John Gehring 3-01-2018

Photo courtesy John Gehring

Earlier this week, I participated in civil disobedience for the first time. Forty Catholic sisters, priests, and other lay Catholic advocates were arrested in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building in solidarity with young undocumented “Dreamers.” These immigrants, brought to this country as children, are living in fear of deportation after the Trump administration ended an Obama-era program that offered them protection. Congress now has to find a solution. About a third of all House members, including Speaker Paul Ryan, and a quarter of senators are Catholic. More than a 100 Catholics, including Dreamers, showed up for a rally and press conference outside the Senate building, urging lawmakers to act.

Image via RNS/Jerome Socolovsky

Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims, and others reacted vigorously and emotionally to President Trump’s announcement that he will withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate change agreement.

While leaders of the so-called religious left were overwhelmingly critical of the move, conservatives were somewhat divided.

Image via RNS/Lee Pellegrini/Boston College

For Catholics, the key to working collaboratively with Pope Francis, on issues from mass migration to climate change to Hispanic evangelization, may be found in a controversial movement that many left for dead long ago: liberation theology.

That message reverberated, from Feb. 6 to Feb. 10, through the halls of Boston College and a nearby retreat center, as nearly 40 theologians gathered from across the Spanish-speaking world to discuss the movement’s future with its founding figures.

Gary Hall 1-18-2017

Image via RNS/Francisco Daum via Creative Commons

Washington National Cathedral was founded in 1907 and envisioned as a “Westminster Abbey for America,” which, in part, is why it finds itself at the center of controversy about its role in President-elect Donald J. Trump’s impending inauguration.

For more than a century, the cathedral has tried to stand in two worlds at once, attempting to be both a practicing Christian church and a gathering place for American civic expression. As the cathedral’s former dean, I believe that fidelity to the former role now requires rejecting the latter.

Warren Hall 1-12-2017

Image via RNS/Francis Micklow/courtesy of The Star-Ledger

It has also been five months since Myers suspended me from all priestly ministry, for my “disobedience” in continuing to be involved with that same work against LGBT discrimination.

That’s given me a lot of time to think about what would happen when a new archbishop came to Newark, and what my future would be.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

The United States Congress is about as Christian today as it was in the early 1960s, according to a new analysis by Pew Research Center.

Nearly 91 percent of members of the 115th Congress convening on Jan. 3 describe themselves as Christian, compared to 95 percent of Congress members serving from 1961 to 1962, according to congressional data compiled by CQ Roll Call and analyzed by Pew.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Alessandro Bianchi

“Pope Francis has a lot of explaining to do by approving the newest Vatican instruction,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, which campaigns for LGBT rights in the church.

“Francis’ famous ‘Who am I to judge?’ statement in 2013 was made in response to a question about gay men in the priesthood,” DeBernardo said. “That response indicated very plainly that he did not have a problem with a gay priest’s sexual orientation.

Image via RNS/Emily McFarlan Miller

Does Pope Francis have a position on the Dakota Access Pipeline?

That’s one question he hasn’t been asked, and he might demur if pressed on such a specific issue. But in his landmark encyclical on the environment published last year, and in other statements, Francis has strongly supported arguments of the Native American-led resistance movement on three core issues: indigenous rights, water rights and protection of creation.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Darren Ornitz

“The picture is mixed,” said Besheer Mohamed, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center who specializes in religion.

“On the one hand, its seems clear that Muslims are a pretty small part of the population. On the other hand, they are concentrated in some states and metro areas that might increase their voting powers in those specific areas.”

Gay Clark Jennings 11-15-2016

Image via RNS/Reuters/Carlo Allegri/File Photo

I fear now, as I have feared for months, the impact of his presidency on vulnerable people — including the white and working-class voters in places like my home state of Ohio who lent him their support.

Christians always have disagreements about policy proposals or party platforms during election seasons. But this year, I wonder how white Christians who read the same Scriptures and hold many of the same beliefs that I do could support a man who in word and deed has flaunted the core teachings of our faith.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Ettore Ferrari/Pool

In an interview conducted on Nov. 7, on the eve of the election, and published Friday by an Italian daily, the Argentine pope declined to make any judgment about Trump.

“I do not judge people or politicians,” the pope told Eugenio Scalfari of La Repubblica when asked what he thought of Trump. “I only want to understand what suffering their behavior causes to the poor and the excluded.”

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In the summer of 430, the great Christian writer and bishop Augustine of Hippo lay dying as barbarians besieged his North African city – basically a mop-up operation in the slow-motion fall of the Roman Empire.

Today, in the fall of the year 2016, a lot of Christians can relate.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

They are many, shift between parties, and typically side with the candidate who ends up winning the White House.

That’s what makes Catholics the ultimate swing voters in the U.S. And this year they are going to throw their weight behind Democrat Hillary Clinton, a panel of political analysts said on Oct. 31.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Remo Casilli

The strongest earthquake to strike Italy in more than three decades claimed no lives, but struck at the heart of the country’s vast religious and cultural heritage.

The Oct. 30 quake, which measured 6.6 magnitude according to the U.S. Geological Survey, was stronger than the one that killed almost 300 people on Aug. 24, and it struck a region already shaken by tremors last week.

Image via /Shutterstock.com

In 2013, Francis provoked an outcry from economic conservatives with the release of his apostolic exhortation, “Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel),” which was widely seen as his personal manifesto. In it, Francis said the world could no longer trust “the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market,” and called for ecclesiastical renewal and compassion for the poor.

Cox, who taught at Harvard for 50 years, dedicated his latest book to the pope because they share a concern about what Francis called a “deified market” that’s creating “new idols.”