Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

 On Saturday, April 24 at 1:00 PM, Dario Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, the former President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclésia Dei, will celebrate Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the High Altar of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. The stated occasion is the fifth anniversary of the election [...]

[Read more →]

On March 15, I asked If the Freemasons Come, Can the Jews Be Far Behind? 
The answer is by about a month. The Guardian reports:
A furious transatlantic row has erupted over quotes that were attributed to a retired Italian bishop, which suggested that Jews were behind the current criticism of the Catholic church’s record on tackling [...]

[Read more →]

The current contretemps over Benedict is a symptom that the role of the pope has grown too large. 
One can accept all the dogmatic formulations about the papacy and still think that its role has become hypertrophied in the modern church. 
The popes sought protections from their real enemies (Freemasonic, Nazi, Communist) by making the pope a [...]

[Read more →]

I wonder what all the pain in the Church will lead to. Will the news cycle move on, and the public be distracted by one of the manifold disasters that are always occurring? Or will the outcry, both from individuals and governments, at last force Pope Benedict to make some essential reforms: extending zero tolerance [...]

[Read more →]

I read this as grace for our family Easter dinner, and for some reason it made a big impression on my now-adult children, perhaps because they have lived long enough to have people they love die, and therefore to realize what it means that Jesus has conquered death.
Christ is Risen!

If anyone is devout [...]

[Read more →]

 
Here are wife’s favorite Rembrandts. 
The passage it illustrates is
But Mary stood w But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.  They [...]

[Read more →]

 Whispers in the Loggia reports: 

Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, Archbishop of Baltimore, issued the following statement in response to Father Raniero Cantalamessa’s Good Friday comments (fulltext) at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome:Father Cantalamessa’s words on Good Friday, somehow linking the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal with anti-Semitism, were unfortunate and reprehensible. They pose harm to Catholic-Jewish [...]

[Read more →]

I have been harsh in some remarks, but I really like Benedict. I pray for him every day, and did so when he was a cardinal. In an interview years ago he said he liked to vacation in a cooler spot than Italy, but the salary of a cardinal was not enormous. I sent him [...]

[Read more →]

Is there a school at the Vatican where priests and bishops are taught how to offend everyone? 
The NYT reports that the papal preacher, the Franciscan Cantalamessa, compared criticism of the hierarchy to anti-Semitic persecution: 

A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have [...]

[Read more →]

I earlier speculated that the seemingly lesser number of victims in Germany may have been the result of prosecutions in the 1930s. It looks like David Clohessy was correct: that was an illusion. The Church just opened a counseling hot line. Der Standard reports

Am ersten Tag versuchten 4460 Anrufer durchzukommen, nur 162 hatten Erfolg. [...]

[Read more →]