Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

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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The Gallup poll I cited below is puzzling. Why should Church regularly-Church-going Catholics be laxer in their attitudes to morality than regularly-Church-going Protestants?

The Church regards Tradition as the source of revelation. Tradition is That Which is Handed Over, tradere, and includes Scripture. Scripture is part of the life of the Church, and is to be [...]

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The Gallup Poll, as Bill Cork pointed out, has revealed that Church-going Catholics are far more likely that Church-going non-Catholics (almost all Protestant) to accept immoral behavior.

I do not find this surprising. Other polls I have seen over the years reveal similar patterns.

This data helps explain Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama. Many Catholics accept Obama’s [...]

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Notre Dame did not anticipate the level of criticism it is getting for its invitation to Obama, criticism not only from grass-root pro-life activists, but also from bishops and cardinals. Those who defend the invitation have been rather lame. They claim that the invitation does not show an approval of Obama’s positions on life; this [...]

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For several years my sources in biotechnology have told me that the fight over the use of stem cells obtained by killing human embryos was meaningless, that stem cells taken from the patient’s own body were far more promising. The National Post reports:
The ethical deate over embryonic stem cell use may soon be moot, thanks [...]

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On dotCommonweal someone commented

The question that occurs to me is that some things now considered “intrinsically evil,” such as slavery, can be recognized as evil at the time, if not by the perpetrators, at least by the victims. But it seems like other “intrinsic evils” (mainly those involving sexual behavior) are kind of like victimless [...]

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