Religion News Service

The bishops have urged more support for mothers and families, even as Ascension, one of the largest Catholic health care providers in the U.S., has been closing labor and delivery units at its hospitals. 

Katie Pruitt, a queer singer-songwriter based in Nashville, Tennessee, writes music that, with agile vocals and catchy guitar riffs, explores the fraught nature of leaving one’s childhood faith.

Streaming the Eucharist online for the world to watch or broadcasting it on television is an abomination, writes Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese. It is akin to showing video of people eating a meal to people who are starving.

"There's the sense that the liberal order is so corrupt that elite Catholics have to find positions of influence and use them in a kind of noble and appropriate way," says scholar Kevin Vallier.

"The Christian celebration of Easter is about new life, yet the world's consciousness remains flooded with ideas of death," writes Phyllis Zagano. That includes war and famine, plus euthanasia and abortion, she writes. 

In recent months, Catholic Charities staffers across the country have experienced increased smears and threats by critics opposed to offering aid to immigrants. 

The pope has always stressed that the synod is about synodality, not about controversial issues. He believes the church must become synodal before it can deal with these issues.

Is there an ethical or spiritual way to kill an animal?

That’s the question that animates "Christspiracy: The Spirituality Secret," the forthcoming documentary that suggests Jesus and many of his early followers opposed the killing and eating of animals. 

Demos II is a fraud who mourns a church of the past and his own loss of power in it.

The process for choosing a pope is not divinely inspired. It is a human creation that has changed over time and can change again.

Church Militant, the far-right Catholic media network, will cease operating at the end of April, according to a press release issued March 1 by the law firm Todd & Weld LLP. 

While reductive narratives depict priests as perfect heroes or evil villains, truth is more complicated, says Fr. Stephen Fichter, writer and producer of the streaming movie "Trinity's Triumph."

In her new book Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, Cole Arthur Riley centers Black emotions, experiences, memories and bodies in every prayer, mantra and poem.

"Wishing partisanship away is not going to work," writes columnist Thomas Reese. "Short of a miracle or a national catastrophe, partisanship is here to stay."

The lawsuit from Ken Paxton's office "seeks to revoke Annunciation House's authorization to do business in Texas and asks the court to appoint a receiver to liquidate their assets."

"When presumably educated, responsible politicians sound as if they are preaching from a bar stool," Phyllis Zagano writes, "what can the rest of us do to remove angry denigration from whatever other pulpit we might be near?" 

If the U.S. is going to experience a eucharistic revival, then it needs liturgical texts that promote the full and active participation by all people in the liturgy. The current text in English does not do that.

"As there's ashes on our head, there's also blood on our hands because we cannot exempt ourselves from what this country is doing," said the Rev. Graylan Hagler, pastor emeritus of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ.

A new documentary about the Virgin of Guadalupe — the vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus, seen by a 16th-century Mexican peasant — premiered Tuesday (Feb. 13) at an event in Los Angeles attended by the city’s archbishop.

Fasting is an act of penance for what we in the rich world have done, and it is a prayer for help in avoiding catastrophe.