One of my jobs as a priest is to help people discern which of the acts they have done (or might do) are genuinely sins―and which are not really sins, even though they might think they are. Priests do this so that people can participate in being forgiven when they have genuinely done something wrong…

At the age of nine, Catholic priest and scholar James Alison realised two things. The first was that he was gay. The second was that his life would never be the same. “I did know immediately that basically, I was lost,” he tells ABC RN’s Soul Search. “I was afloat on a sea with no port.…

Published by Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic resource, on 26 July 2023 In text messages released this past May, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson described watching an online video of some Trump supporters beating a protestor, around the time of the January 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.  “It was three against one, at least……

The death of Christ as analogy of the “nothing” that makes a difference.

I remember being convinced that I had a vocation, but that was long before I was able to question how much of my conviction was self-importance and a need to be special. Years of peeling away and undoing would be required if ever I were to fall into the hands of the living God.

His point, Francis said, was to insist on decriminalization. And of course, as Pope, he upholds the normal teaching about the sinfulness of sexual acts outside marriage (irrespective of orientation), with all the usual caveats that are necessary concerning different circumstances, and occasions when there may be no culpability at all―but chief among all of…

An initial contribution to a reserved discussion Castellano • Français James Alison’s contribution to a “Chatham House Rules” Catholic – with ecumenical participation – discussion about matters gay. Neither the names of other participants, their contributions, nor the host location are to be shared given the potential for violence against some participants if it were…

So many Catholics are dodging the tantrum and hewing to Our Lord. The responsum is unlikely to dissuade us from blessing God as we find God blessing us.

There are no major points of doctrine at stake, nothing in the Creeds, putting at risk the shape of our salvation. And there are no real scruples about the apparently hostile Biblical texts since fundamentalist readings are in any case officially disapproved by Church authority.

Unless you can convince gay people that gay sex is automatically wrong because they aren’t really gay, and therefore aren’t acting according to their real nature, you have failed to maintain the prohibition.

As it turns out, my mind is of little importance. What is important is who has changed my mind. Both the big Who and the many, many secondary whos and whats we all represent for each other.

Lies and violence in the heart of family and church life. That’s where my testimony begins. For whatever reason of God’s own, I have received the formal commission to live this reality as a priest… failure is one of grace’s preferred building sites.

The real joy of the gospel is found in groups of sinners who sit lightly to their sins, know they are loved, and long to love better starting from where they are.

Canonically, it makes no sense at all, but … he does these things!

When Paul urges his listeners to become his imitators in offering himself up as sacrifice, just as Paul imitates Christ; or Peter tells his that they are living stones of the long-awaited New Temple: both take for granted that to be in Christ is a fundamentally priestly form of life.

What might those who follow the thought of René Girard have to offer to those currently excavating Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey?

One can, and some do, read Martel’s book as an accusation against the world of systemic mendacity which it reveals. For my part, I read it as one of the events which signal that God’s forgiveness is at last reaching even the hardest-hearted parts of our Church.

So, the other shoe has finally dropped. The veil has been removed from what the French rather gloriously call a “secret de Polichinelle” – an open secret: one that “everybody knows” but for which the evidence is both elusive and never really sought. The merely anecdotal is, at last, acquiring the contours of sociological visibility.