Pope Francis has returned to his Creator. After more than twelve years on the Chair of Peter, he leaves behind a Church in transition and a ministry that drew global attention but also stirred tensions. We spoke with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller about the spiritual legacy of this pontificate, the
In 2025, we mark the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the first ecumenical council, convoked by Constantine in the city of Nicaea on the coast of Asia Minor in 325. The socio-political factors surrounding that event, the happenings and outcome of the council itself, and the subsequent wrangling over its ratification are
As we remember Pope Francis, the challenge is that we do so without prejudice, seeking those moments in which he showed us things we had overlooked or completely forgotten, in which he instructed us in word and deed. Two works of mercy summon every Catholic as we pray and prepare
The title of Pope Francis’s encyclical Dilexit Nos (2024) can be translated “He loved us,” but we would do better to translate it more literally as “God delighted in us.” I will talk about God’s delight, our delight (if we are able to muster it), and how Jesus’s Sacred Heart
In Mary, the Church finds its fundamentally feminine form as Virgin Bride and as Mother. For she, who is the archetype of the Church, is Virgin Bride because she “lets the divine Word become flesh in [her] own body.”[1] The fruit of her fiat is her Motherhood of God and
The late Pope Benedict XVI, in the first part of his book Behold the Pierced One, defends the devotion to the Sacred Heart primarily by drawing upon Pius XII’s Haurietis Aquas and the Gospels to show its precedents in Tradition and Scripture. In Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, Spirit of the Liturgy,
From the very first moments of his pontificate—when he emerged onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and famously asked the crowd gathered outside to pray for him—Pope Francis has garnered praise for his approachability and common touch. He has continued to win fans for displaying these same attributes throughout