Most images of saints today show the lingering style of 19th century technique and sentimentality, which is ... not great. They’re disconnected from the reality of these great saints and bathed in a saccharine glow established in perhaps the worst century of Catholic artistic endeavor. From holy cards to statues, Catholics really need to step up our game and starting showing these great men and women either as they were...

Pope Leo XIV does not intend to overturn Pope Francis' limits on celebrating the traditional Latin Mass but will grant two-year dispensations to bishops who ask, a nuncio said. Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, the apostolic nuncio to Great Britain, told bishops Nov. 13 that Pope Leo told him he would not abrogate "Traditionis Custodes," Pope Francis' 2021 letter greatly restricting...

Pope Leo XIV during an address at the Vatican on Thursday called for the “prudent” evaluation of supernatural phenomena to avoid falling into superstition. “To avoid falling into superstitious illusion, it is necessary to evaluate such events prudently, through humble discernment and in accordance with the teachings of the Church,” the Holy Father said to participants...

Archbishop Alexander Sample has been elected chairman of the US bishops’ Committee for Religious Liberty after an unusual tie in the conference vote. The plenary meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops delivered an unexpected moment when the routine election of a committee chair ended in an extraordinary stalemate.

In 2015, on a flight back to the Vatican from the Philippines, Pope Francis told journalists: “There is a book ... it is called Lord of the World. The author is Benson. ... I suggest you read it. Reading it, you’ll understand well what I mean by ideological colonization.” He went on to describe the novel as prophetic, especially in regard to modern developments such as secularism, relativism and the notion...

It is the age between our Lord’s first coming and His last. We live in the new world begun by His life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension, by the sending of His Spirit upon the Church. But we await the day when He will come again in glory. “Lo, the day is coming,” Malachi warns in today’s First Reading. The prophets taught Israel to look for the Day of the Lord, when He would gather the nations for judgment (see Zephaniah 3:8; Isaiah 3:9; 2 Peter 3:7). Jesus anticipates this day in today’s Gospel...

Within the walls and corridors of an academic institution that proposes to convey and reaffirm the teachings of the Catholic Church, prudence would dictate that the institution's teachers be consistent in their articulation and dissemination of the Catholic faith. Even more, it would be imperative that anyone charged with echoing the teachings of Jesus Christ be acutely aware of the responsibility to deliver a clear message of both the Gospel of Christ and its content, the Creed. Hence, any teacher would champion the importance of clarity and fidelity to the Christian message conveyed to students to avoid any spiritual or moral confusion...

Feast date: Dec 01

Edmund Campion was born in London on January 25, 1540. He was raised as a Catholic, and had such a powerful and flamboyant intellect that at the age of only 17, he was made a junior fellow at Saint John’s College of Oxford University.

On visiting the university, Queen Elizabeth I was so taken by Edmund’s brilliance, as were a few of her dignitaries, that she bid him to ask for anything that he wished. The exaltation and praise of so many fed his vanity and eventually led him away from his Catholic faith. He took the Oath of Supremacy and acknowledged the Queen as head of the church. He also became an Anglican deacon.

However, his brilliant intellect and his conscience would not allow him to be reconciled to the idea of Anglicanism for too long. After staying a period of time in Dublin, he turned back to his Catholic faith and returned to England.  At this point, he was suspected of being too Catholic, and was shaken when he witnessed the trial of a soon to be martyr. It carried him to the conviction that his vocation was to minister to the Catholic faithful in England who were being persecuted. He also felt the call to convert Protestants.

He set off to Rome barefoot, and in 1573, he entered the Society of Jesus. He was ordained in 1578 and had a vision in which the Virgin Mary foretold him of his martyrdom. When he returned to England he made an immediate impression, winning many converts.

On July 17, 1581, he was betrayed by one of the faithful who knew his whereabouts, and was thrown into prison. The queen offered him all manner of riches if he would forsake his loyalty to the Pope, but he refused.

After spending some time in the Tower of London, he was sentenced to death by hanging, drawing and quartering. His martyrom in Tyburn on December 1, 1581 sparked off a wave of conversions to Catholicism. He was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

The Union of Superiors General of men’s religious institutes held a three-day conference in Rome, “Connected Faith: Living Prayer in the Digital Age.”

Millions of people “cry out their loneliness, their suffering, their need for meaning, no longer out loud, but in the deafening silence of social networks, forums, and chat rooms,” said one of the speakers, Brother Pascal Ahodegnon, the superior general of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God. “Our mission is not to resist the digital age, but to transfigure it, transform it, and inhabit it with our charism.”

Pope Leo XIV addressed participants on November 26, the day before his departure for Turkey and Lebanon.