Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Catholic progressives often criticize “creeping infallibility” and discount the authority of Church’s ordinary magisterium when it comes to sexual morality. Galileo is often cited. This approach has been used for other purposes.
Pius XI repeatedly condemned Nazi and Fascist racism, culminating in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.
The Italian fascist official Robert Farinacci went to the Nuremberg [...]

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Breivik saw a threat to European civilization and decided to commit a crime to call attention to the danger to Europe and thereby to avert an even greater evil. That is, he killed 80 people so that a whole civilization might be saved. He was a practical exponent of proportionalist consequentialism. He ignored the moral [...]

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In researching my new book, I have come across the extraordinary animus that the clergy of all denominations bore against dancing, an animus that becomes choreophobia. The Curé of Ars not only tried to stop dancing, he told one penitent that she was forbidden to watch dancing, because she would be “dancing in her heart.” [...]

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 Supi, celibacy is going to disappear,and you can marry me - or?
 
German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.
 
Now [...]

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Poussin - The Death of Sapphira
Pope John Paul did not want criminal abuser priests reported to the police. 
He will be canonized and 99.99% of the laity will applaud. 
No one wants anyone to be accountable – for fear they THEY might be held accountable. 
John Allen interviewed Cardinal George, who tip-toed around the delicate issue of whether [...]

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In his Christmas message to the curia, Pope Benedict lamented sexual abuse and said the church must reflect on what went wrong. He, as a theologian, thought that distorted moral theology in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the abuse. 

In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In [...]

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Tom Roberts at the National Catholic Reporter reflects on the failure of the hierarchy:
Danneels was generally seen as one of the last of the Vatican II generation who knew that council intimately and supported its reforms. He would be, for lack of a better term, a liberal by many of today’s ecclesiastical measures. But it [...]

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When I researching the book on clerical murders that I have underway, I noticed that even secular newspapers from 1900 -1920 used the words expiation in regard to punishment, especially capital punishment. Now the word expiation appears only in crossword puzzles.
 
The word and the concept appear to be suffering a similar fate in Catholic theology: 

According [...]

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The Greek philosophers in general and Christian thinkers after them have seen the emotions (passions) as innate parts of human nature. Even the Stoics, who seem to condemn the passions, really only condemn disorderly, irrational passions, as Aquinas and others have noted. 
John Chrysostom cautions against anger, but he implicitly means disorderly anger, as he sees [...]

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As the Murphy Report noted, church discipline in Ireland was almost totally neglected in Ireland. In thirty years only two canonical trials were held, and these were held in opposition to the chief canonist. 
The Roman Catholic Church sometimes suffers from legalism, to which voluntarist moral theology and casuistry contributed. But law has a place in [...]

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The question of lying is a vexed one in moral theology. 
Lying is wrong. But in every situation? 
The classic modern example: the Nazis come to you and ask if you know where the hidden Jews are. You do, but you lie and save a life. 
But it is never right to do evil that good may come [...]

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President Clinton went to Georgetown Law. Apparently he picked up one element of Catholic doctrine and practice. 
About Lewinsky, he famously said “I did not have sex with that woman.”  But it all depends what you mean by sex. 
The Irish Times, in “Church Lied without Lying,” details the Catholic justification for and practice of such weaseliness, [...]

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The fully justified anger about Bishop Lahey should not blind us to the failings in other forms of Christianity. There have been crimes and cover-ups in other denominations. 
Abuse in independent churches is almost impossible to track. Even denominations like the Southern Baptists have a polity that makes it impossible to screen out abusers. 
When hierarchical churches have [...]

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As I noted in my book, Catholic bishops uniformly failed to get angry when they heard that a priest had defiled a child, often in the church itself. I examined this failure at length in my book Sacrilege, especially on pp. 465-471. 
The bishops have failed to heed the warning of St. John Chrysostom: “He who [...]

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Mel Gibson’s wife has filed for divorce. His behavior over the years has been provoking both his alcoholism and his remarks that she would not be saved because she was an Anglican. Gibson himself belongs to a schismatic group so the latter remark was especially puzzling.
I have observed over the years that individuals and societies [...]

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