Duh
I understand that there are some folks in the Catholic Church who do not agree with everything the Church teaches, but this one goes beyond mere dissent to the level of sheer stupidity. Maureen Fiedler, a Sister of Loretto with a PhD from Georgetown, writes in the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter (where else):Imagine for a minute that it’s 1954, as segregationists faced Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court case which mandated school de-segregation. And imagine that the Vatican, or the Catholic bishops, said to Protestant segregationists in the South, “You can com

It Depends on What You Mean by "Forward"
There has been some consternation among bloggers both Anglican and Catholic about what's happening at the Forward in Faith UK general meeting. Fr. Jeffrey Steel blogs about it today at De cura animarum. He writes, in part:To be perfectly honest, it almost feels like a bluff has been called. Sitting and listening to those speeches made me sad and realise that for many in the C of E, the issue that alone makes them 'feel' Catholic is being against the ordination of women or so it seems. Let me state clearly that I did not leave the C of E over women's ordination or homosexuality th

Sursum corda!
A very literal translation of sursum corda might be something like "Up with the hearts!" Personally I prefer the more standard "Lift up your hearts", which is one of the many places in which the English translation of the Latin Mass matches the English of the Book of Common Prayer used by Anglicans. I mention all of this because I have always thought that there is a great deal of commonality between Roman Catholicism and what is best about Anglicanism (in the interest of full disclosure I will remind my regular readers--both of them--that I am myself a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism). I have blogged often about the reasons for my conversion, so I won't go over all of that ag

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
It has been a while since I blogged about the man who brought me into the Church--by which I mean "Christian Church" this time, rather than "Roman Catholic Church". I thought of Robert Duncan again today because I have been getting some email about me previous post here, the one about appearing on Marcus Grodi's The Journey Home program on EWTN. I mentioned on that program how hearing the preaching of Fr. Duncan, when he was still an associate pastor for campus ministry at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was one of the principal factors in moving me from abject atheism to Christian theism. There were many other factors as well, of course, but the Christian com

Catholicissimi!
So last weekend I hopped on a plane and flew down to Birmingham, Alabama. I've never been to Alabama before, and in some respects I suspect that I have yet to see the real Alabama, because the purpose of my trip was not to visit the Yellowhammer State but to put in an appearance on Marcus Grodi's Journey Home program on EWTN. I've never been on TV before, either, so the whole trip was something of a novelty for me.I was picked up at the airport by an EWTN car, and it was a short drive to "the compound", barely 20 minutes at the most. Since it was Sunday there weren't many people about and, in particular, there didn't seem t