When Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’ was head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s external relations department, he would occasionally come to Washington, where the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, a distinguished historian of Russian culture, would host a small dinner for him. I was a guest on one such occasion, and the impression Kirill left that night remains in my mind...

Earlier this week, Pope Leo did something no pope has ever done. He recorded a video message for World Mission Sunday, making a direct appeal to Catholics across the world to “help me help missionaries across the world.” The video is a little over a minute long, making it easy to share on social media, in parish and diocesan email blasts, on websites and other means...

Three months after Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez said the Vatican had identified the judges who would form the tribunal in the canonical trial against Slovenian Father Marko Rupnik on charges of spiritual and sexual abuse, the judges were formally nominated.

When James Schloegel took his vows as an Augustinian friar this summer, he knelt before the altar in a Chicago church, surrounded by friends, family, and fellow friars. At 32, he had spent years discerning his calling to religious life — a journey rooted in prayer, spiritual study, and community.

In Mark 9, we hear about a man unaffiliated with the disciples who casts out demons in Jesus’s name. This same episode is also recorded in Luke 9:49-50, while St. Matthew’s Gospel includes a variation on the warning Jesus delivers to His disciples: “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.” For Catholic readers of the Gospels, the exorcist passage raises some interesting questions...

It can be understood with a sincerity of mind and heart that the purpose of education is to prepare the student to engage life. The entire educational establishment, based on a Judeo-Christian ethos, would focus on the spiritual and educational transformation of the student to help him respond to truth, beauty, and goodness. This premise presupposes that the educator views the student as a child of God...

Classical K-12 education has a mind-heart problem. We know and love C. S. Lewis’s “Men without Chests,” and we find his analysis of the culture of British intelligentsia circa 1948 to be compelling. We laugh at the fatuous “sophistication” of the intellectual pygmies responsible for the Green Book; we chuckle at the mental picture of their tiny, anemic bodies attached to their oversized...

A German news outlet reported last week that a bishop who took early retirement last year has contracted marriage civilly, despite claims that he resigned over health reasons. The Holy See press office announced last July it had accepted the resignation of 63 year-old Bishop Reinhold Nann, the German-born prelate who led the Peruvian territorial prelature of Caravel.

The murder of a 21-year-old Italian man after trying to break up a fight has prompted two southern Italian archbishops to sound the alarm against the rise of Mafia-style killings among young people. At a prayer service Oct. 18 for Paolo Taormina, who was killed one week ago outside the family-owned bar where he worked, Archbishop Gualtiero Isacchi of Monreale, Italy, told the faithful present...

How strange that almost everyone will obey worldly authority with such unqualified zeal, particularly when it is evil men in charge who give the orders. Yet speak of the necessity of submission to God, and these same people who usually are willing to do slavishly as they are told act suddenly as if they have never heard of duty. When in the Acts it is said that the early Christians were described as...