Stephen P. White

If the Church would keep the sheep in the fold, and call home those who have strayed, it would do well to speak in a recognizable voice.

The mission of the Church is not the responsibility of the diocesan pastoral center or some committee in the parish. It can’t be delegated or outsourced or professionalized. The mission belongs to all of us.

Our destiny is not to return to the way things were once, before all was made subject to corruption. Rather, our redemption lies through corruption, through suffering, through even death, to what lies beyond.

Restoring episcopal credibility is going to require a level of accountability and transparency which may be painful, even humiliating, at times.

Concerns about the pitfalls or potential abuses of synodality ought to be acknowledged, but it would be a terrible mistake to dismiss the promise of synodality out of hand.

The status quo will not be improved simply by denying Joe Biden (or anyone else) access to the Eucharist. But bishops weighing the pastoral costs of taking a clear stance on Eucharistic coherence ought to weigh those costs against the cost of perpetuating the manifest failures of the last several decades.

If liturgy was once the universal common denominator for Catholics the world over, it no longer is. A concerted effort to strengthen a shared ecclesial life – and especially shared liturgical life – across linguistic barriers ought to be a pastoral priority.

Any attempt to promote understanding or renew devotion to the Eucharist will be hampered so long as bishops imagine that ecclesial communion is damaged less by grave sin than it is by bishops who proclaim truths the world doesn’t want to hear.

The geopolitical context surrounding the 1981 attempt on John Paul II’s life is just one layer of the story. Another layer of the story, more familiar to pious Catholics for obvious reasons, has to do with the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima.

Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus connects the theological and philosophical foundations of Catholic social teaching to the ideological challenges of our own century.

A good shepherd does not abandon his sheep; he lays down his life for them. Bishops who are willing to give up everything – who are not afraid to go and die for their people – are the bishops the Church needs.

Catholics in the United States too often demonstrate a complacency of mind more characteristic of an establishment church than a distinctive minority.