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A brief dip into Latin helps us understand how preconceptions can lead to biased judgments that falsify history — as they did when an Australian Royal Commission on sexual abuse recently impugned the integrity of Cardinal George Pell.

As the world and the Church mark the centenary of the birth of Pope St. John Paul II on May 18, a kaleidoscope of memories will shape my prayer and reflection that day.

Given that he was one of the principal planners and prominent leaders of last October’s special Synod on Amazonia, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, OFM, is understandably enthusiastic about the results of that exercise. Indeed, the enthusiasm of the emeritus archbishop of São Paulo and prefect emeritus of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy seems virtually boundless: Cardinal Hummes recently claimed that “The Synod for the Amazon was historic; no previous synod was as synodal and reform-oriented as this one.” High praise indeed.

There are pictures of the christening, and a few years ago I found a lovely letter that Father Love (whom I never met) wrote me shortly afterward. But I cannot say that I took the date of my baptism seriously until I was nudged into greater baptismal awareness in the 1980s

The post-synodal apostolic exhortation “Querida Amazonia” (“Dear Amazonia”) did not accept or endorse the 2019 Amazonian synod’s proposal that “viri probati” – mature married men – be ordained priests in that region. So until the German church’s “synodal path” comes up with a similar proposal (which seems more than likely), a period of pause has been created in which some non-hysterical reflection on the priesthood and celibacy can take place throughout the world church. Several points might be usefully pondered in the course of that conversation.

   Her fiction may occasionally get the chop in politically correct 21st-century American high schools. But as Benjamin Alexander writes in the preface to a new collection of her letters, Flannery O’Connor’s place in the pantheon of American short story writers seems safe, up there with Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. (I’d be tempted to drop Hemingway from the canon, but that’s a matter for another day.)

Immediately after news broke on Jan. 12 that retired Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Robert Sarah had written a book on the crisis of the priesthood in the 21st-century church, online hysteria erupted – which rather underscored the prudence of a New Year’s resolution I had recommended to concerned Catholics in a Jan. 1 column: “Resolve to limit your exposure to the Catholic blogosphere.”

Weekly Mass attendance percentages have fallen into single digits in German cities and aren’t much better in Austria and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Has this implosion of the sacramental community compelled a rethinking of the strategy of cultural accommodation? On the contrary.

During the 2001 Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who’d suffered through a lot of synodal speechifying and small-group discussions over the years, made a trenchant observation: “Jesus Christ didn’t intend his Church to be governed by a committee.”

Out on the Kansas plains, he was just turning 21 when the Second Vatican Council promulgated its “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (Lumen Gentium) and its “Decree on the Pastoral Office of the Bishops in the Church” (Christus Dominus). So it’s unlikely that the fathers of Vatican II had Charles Joseph Chaput in mind when they described the ideal diocesan bishop in the third millennium of Christian history – an evangelist, sanctifier and governor who would accept those weighty responsibilities so that the gospel might be proposed for the salvation of the world.

If you’re feeling a bit down about the future of Catholicism in the United States, ask yourself these questions: Why haven’t American seminaries emptied over the past 16 months, as Crisis 2.0 continues to roil the U.S. church and an aggressive media regularly puts Catholicism in the worst possible public light? Why haven’t the McCarrick affair, the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the Bransfield affair, and other revelations of episcopal misgovernance (and worse) caused a mass exodus of young men from priestly formation? Can you name another profession, regularly subjected to media ridicule and popular caricature, to which young men are applying in greater numbers than 20 years ago?

Throughout the 20th century – the greatest period of martyrdom in history – persecuted Christians used the dross of this world to make religious artifacts.

A timely lamentation on the state of discourse in our church and nation. Weigel proposes "a framework for collaborative thinking in which there is ample room for serious debate over tactics," but says it will work only if ideologues stop going ballistic "at the first whiff of disagreement."

Pope Francis’s recent “motu proprio” on sexual abuse, “Vos estis lux mundi” (You Are the Light of the World), was a welcome addition to church law, as world Catholicism seeks to heal the wounds of abuse victims, promote chaste living, foster mutual accountability within the body of Christ, and restore the credibility of the church’s leadership. The response to the motu proprio by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, ably summed up that document’s achievement:

In Herman Wouk’s novel “War and Remembrance,” Warren Henry shocks his Bible-reading father, the novel’s hero, by claiming that human beings are “microbes on a grain of dust ... and when it’s over we’re just dead meat.” The Washington state legislature has now topped the cynical young Warren Henry by declaring that we’re useful meat, as in potential compost, such that one can legally choose to be composted after death, then used for fertilizer.

Judging from the immediate, volatile and sometime vicious responses to Ratzinger’s memorandum from the same quarters two weeks ago, too many on the Catholic left remain in denial about the link between doctrinal and moral dissent and clerical wickedness. ... One of these frothing pundits even went so far as to charge Benedict with being, in effect, a schismatic.  

Some two millennia ago, a ragtag bunch of nobodies learned what their tortured and executed friend, the rabbi Jesus from Nazareth, meant by “rising from the dead” (Mark 9:9-10) — because they met him again, the same but utterly transformed, as the Risen Lord. The Easter Effect upturned all they had once thought about time, history, and God’s promises to Israel; it also transformed these nobodies into extraordinary evangelists, for the missionary project they launched converted perhaps as much as half the Mediterranean world over the next two and a half centuries.

Your Eminence: I noted with interest your recent announcement of a “binding synodal process” during which the church in Germany will discuss the celibacy of the Latin-rite Catholic priesthood, the church’s sexual ethic and clericalism, these being “issues” put on the table by the crisis of clerical sexual abuse.

Writing recently on women seeking the presidency and the “likability” factor in our politics, Peggy Noonan made a tart observation: “There are a lot of male candidates with likability problems. Some, such as Andrew Cuomo, a three-term governor of a large state, are so unlikable they aren’t even mentioned as contenders.”

The morality of tyrannicide is not much discussed in today’s kinder, gentler Catholic Church. Yet that difficult subject once engaged some of Catholicism’s finest minds, including Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, and it was passionately debated during the World War II by German officers –many of them devout Christians – who were pondering the assassination of Adolf Hitler. (Their efforts were known and tacitly approved by Pius XII, but that’s another story.)