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Columns
Cardinals, archbishops and bishops have many ways to communicate with Vatican officials and even the pope himself, outside of occasional personal meetings.
In the digital age, one blunt way to reach Pope Leo XIV is to write a candid letter and post it online. That's what Bishop Robert Mutsaerts of the Netherlands, auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of 's-Hertogenbosch, did recently.
"Holy Father," he began, with "reverence for the office entrusted to you as successor of Saint Peter, and in communion with the Church which Christ built upon the apostles, I address you with this open letter. I don't do so lightly."
What followed was one bishop's heart cry for the pope to speak candidly about why believers should cling to ancient truths, even while struggling with the riptides of modern life.
Peter, the first pope, "received from Christ not only the commission to unite the brothers, but also to strengthen them in the faith," wrote Mutsaerts. "Ultimately, the world gains little from a Church that merely repeats what the world itself already thinks."
After years of "synodality" meetings built on dialogue with modern Catholics and church critics, the bishop offered hard questions: "Not: how many reports were written? Not: how many people participated? But: has faith become stronger? Has Christ been proclaimed more clearly? Has Catholic identity deepened? Have more people come to convert? Is Sunday Mass better attended? Are there more priestly vocations? …Has greater reverence for the Eucharist emerged? Has the moral teaching of the Church become clearer? Has missionary courage increased?"
The auxiliary bishop's superior, Bishop Gerard Johannes Nicolaus de Korte, quickly distanced himself from these words, while debates continued online.
The context for the Mutsaerts letter is larger than headline grabbing debates about the use of the Latin Mass, bleak attendance trends in Western nations, Catholic politicians clashing with church teachings and same-sex union blessings in many European Catholic churches.
For most of the 20th century, the typical American church had a room containing rows of chairs, shelves stacked with music and cabinets full of robes and contrasting stoles for sopranos, altos, tenors and basses of various sizes.
This was a "choir room" and these singers were led by a "choir director."
Times have changed. These days, most up-to-date churches have "praise bands," with a few skilled vocalists, guitarists, drummers and keyboardists with stacks of synthesizers. And most church members have smartphone calendars with zero room left for a choir.
"It's often about time, now more than ever, especially for 20- and 30-somethings. A lot of them have children, but people had children in the '60s," said Mark Cabaniss, president and CEO of the Jubilate Music Group, near Nashville. "That was a different era and a different world. It's hard to even get kids into children's choirs, today. … They're too busy playing soccer or T-ball or whatever."
Cabaniss has directed choirs for 40 years, while composing and arranging music for ensembles of all kinds. He joined a choir at age 6 and began directing church choirs in college.
"You have to be very sensitive to people's time," he stressed, reached by Zoom. "The days of two-hour rehearsals are over. Even a 90-minute one is a tough stretch. … It's all about time, time, time, if you're trying to recruit people into the choir."
While the COVID years were a disaster, the trends -- shrinking choirs, with mic'd up praise bands on stage -- had been clear for several decades.
In 1998, the National Congregations Study said the number of U.S. churches with choirs was already down to 50%, noted Will Whittaker, writing for Baptist News Global. He is the author of the book "Cultivating Intergenerational Worship."
Churches with choirs fell to 40% by 2019 -- before the pandemic.
In her student days, Ann Widdecombe's first Oxford Union presentation was an attack on censorship, even if practicing free speech turned out to be risky or painful.
A half century later, the former Conservative MP and outspoken Catholic returned to the legendary debate club to address the same subject, at one point explaining why she once agreed to share a speaker's platform with an Irish Republican Army activist.
"So, you wanted to blow me up," Widdecombe said in 2019, referring to the 1984 Grand Hotel bombing in Brighton, England, that killed five people and injured 31. The target was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the assembled Conservative Party conference.
Widdecombe said the IRA supporter responded: "Well, I didn't want to do it myself."
Enemies of free speech are "snowflakes and totalitarians," said Widdecombe, in the brash style that made her one of England's most loved, and hated, public figures. "Nobody has the right to live their lives being protected from offense, or from insult, or from hurt feelings. It is an occupational hazard … and if you really cannot take it, become a hermit."
Widdecombe, 78, was found dead on July 9 after what police first called a burglary that led to murder. The case is now being investigated as terrorism. The accused attacker drove nearly 300 miles to her isolated Devon home, where he struck her in the head 21 times with a hammer during an encounter that appears to have lasted two minutes.
A key question: Was she killed because of her beliefs?
"She was the most prominent British Catholic politician whose faith actually informed her politics," noted philosopher Joseph Shaw, of the Catholic Answers organization.
Gathered near the patient, the priest helps the worshipers prepare for Holy Communion, using a new liturgy prepared by the Anglican Church of Canada.
The text offers this introduction: "We gather today in a space that may be foreign to us. There are sounds, lights, and activity outside of this room that can distract and take us away from this space. But God meets us here, in this time and place, a thin-space that is sacred. We gather as friends and family [and health care professionals] with our hopes, our dreams, and our differences.
"While some of us may not always agree with the choices of others, we are united in our common love and compassion for [name]. May we know the presence of God as we pray together. … May God's purpose steady us."
The Divine Liturgy text openly discusses tensions that loom over this rite, since it is drawn from "Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying," approved in June by the denomination's Council of General Synod.
The document's preamble tells clergy: "Medical Assistance in Dying evokes strong and opposing views amongst some persons and communities, including amongst health care providers and amongst Anglican Christians. Some Christians, including clergy, find that MAiD violates their understanding of the ethical values to which Christians are called. …
"The Anglican Church of Canada is not of one voice on the topic, but leaders generally are in agreement that the Church has a duty of pastoral care to all. … Regardless of how people arrive at the decisions they do regarding their end-of-life plans, all persons should be able to call upon the pastoral ministry of the church at the time of their dying."
The Medical Assistance in Dying option was legalized in 2016 and many Canadians -- over age 18, eligible for public health care, with a grievous condition and mentally competent to grant consent -- have allowed medical professionals to end their lives. At the end of 2024, Health Canada officials reported 76,475 approved MAiD procedures.
The Anglican Church of Canada is a poignant church to develop these liturgies, since it has already lost 75% of its membership since the 1960s.
Vatican watchers rarely scan papal speeches looking for links to Hollywood.
But, at the Vatican Summer Youth Camp, Pope Leo XIV offered an unusually timely update on faith in a digital age.
"The family that is together, it is not enough that we are all there. Each, they look at his phone," the pope said. Even if believers "have the Bible and some prayers in the phone, God doesn't want to look at the phone: God wants to look at our hearts, our life. And therefore, be free from these things that in themselves can be fun, a help, a nice thing."
After all, he added: "We are not all plugged into a cable. We are human beings."
That June 22 talk came three days after "Toy Story 5" reached theaters, with Sheriff Woody, Buzz Lightyear and cowgirl Jesse urging their young owner, Bonnie, to escape the grip of her digital Lilypad tablet.
The pope's words were "remarkably Toy Story-coded," wrote Alyssa Murphy, of the National Catholic Register. In Pixar's parable, Bonnie's parents took a stand and deleted the social-media app that mean girls were using to mock her affection for old-fashioned toys.
That's the good news, noted Murphy. The bad news? "Currently sitting on store shelves nationwide is a physical 'Lilypad' device … marketed to preschoolers between the ages of 3 and 5. … As a beginner device, the item description reads: 'Stay connected with Jessie, Buzz, Woody and the Tech Trio by texting them.'"
Meanwhile the Australian Psychological Society has published a survey of international research showing that most children, by age two, have access to digital devices, including some babies as young as six months old. By age four, 75% of children have their own digital devices. In the end, the more time children gaze at screens, the less they play, talk, sleep and, thus, develop their minds and bodies.
Year after year, faith-based colleges produce waves of upbeat brochures, social-media appeals and videos for parents and their children.
The presidents of these institutions should study these materials closely, said Houston Christian University President Robert B. Sloan, Jr., at the January 2026 conference of the International Alliance for Christian Education.
"All of the brochures in the world, declaring in glossy print the Christian claims of an institution, cannot overcome the failures of personnel to embrace, expound and affirm the Christian identity of the institution," said Sloan, who led Baylor University, his alma mater (and mine), before his 2006 move to Houston. "If the recruiting materials and fundraising newsletters do not match what really goes on in the classroom or in student life, you may expect not only disappointment but cynicism and, eventually, conflict."
Thus, presidents must have courage when hiring faculty, he stressed.
"When you hire someone," said Sloan, "you should never accept their mere consent, no matter how good their credentials are academically, to 'appreciate' or 'be sensitive to' your culture and character. I used to know of a situation where an interviewer would refer to the 'expectations of our constituents' and then ask, 'Are you all right with that?'"
Close is not good enough, stressed Sloan. It's crucial to learn, "Does the candidate want to be at an institution like yours? … Or do they simply want a job?"
Sloan's address -- 11 theses for Christian higher education -- was timely, after years of headlines about faith-based schools closing their doors as experts warned about a looming "enrollment cliff" due to falling birth rates. It was also symbolic because Sloan died on July 4, after suffering a stroke at age 77.
That plenary address "was the best presentation I have ever heard him give. It will serve as a guide for IACE and for all Christian higher education for years to come," said Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President David Dockery, writing for Baptist Press.
A pediatrician recently asked one of Emily Harrison's children a logical question, during pre-exam paperwork: Do you have a smartphone?
Doctors often ask children practical questions, such as whether they're getting enough sleep, have seen changes in their appetites or have started playing sports. These days, they may ask about anxiety or depression.
A smartphone question makes sense after years of research into how these devices, and social-media programs, affect mental and physical health. The question is why church leaders are not discussing these issues in sermons and education programs, said Harrison, author of the "Dear Christian Parent" online newsletter.
"This is a safety issue, yet we're hesitant to say it's a safety issue," she said, reached by Zoom. In churches, that might sound like: "If you allow this then you are a bad parent." Thus, clergy may be reluctant to offer smartphone warnings, even though "we make statements on many other topics all of the time for kids inside the church."
Pastors seem to be "afraid of backlash. … I think church leaders are way out of touch on this, because what parents are looking for is somebody to give them a firm line, a stance to take," she added. In other words: "This stuff is not for kids -- period."
It's important that politicians in powerful states such as California and New York have banned, or severely restricted, student smartphone use during school hours, noted Harrison. It has become normal for these issues to be discussed openly, especially since the 2024 release of the "The Anxious Generation," by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University.
"There isn't a debate, anymore, about whether this is safe for kids," she said. "So, why won't the church say so?"
For most parents, said Harrison, the question is not "if" children get phones, but "when." In a recent essay, "On Giving My 15 Year Old a Cellphone," she walked readers through the digital, and moral, issues raised by the various devices sold by cellular-service providers.
First, there is an old-school option -- a "flip phone," with a tiny screen. However, Harrison discovered that most of these devices now have Internet browsers.
Freelance
It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies to tell the difference between a Southern Baptist church and an Orthodox church. You can get some pretty good clues just by walking in the door and looking around. But there are some similarities between the two that might be a little trickier to spot. For instance, let me tell you about what life is like on Sunday nights in a Southern Baptist congregation.
Baptists worship at several different times during the week -- at least they did in the old days when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist pastor's son. One of those times is on Sunday nights. Back in the early 1980s, I was active in a church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in which the typical Sunday morning crowd would be about 200 to 300 people, which is rather small for a Baptist church, but fairly normal for an Orthodox parish. Then the crowd on Sunday night would be from 40 to 45 people.
Now, that ratio should sound familiar to many priests who lead Vespers services. But the similarities don’t stop there.
Before the age of 30, I became a deacon and the finance chairman of that church -- which, in the Southern Baptist way of doing things, meant that I was the only person, not excluding the pastor, who saw the annual pledge cards. I was the only person in the congregation who knew who was giving what.
If there is an experience in life that will teach you the meaning of original sin, finance chairman is that role. What I discovered through that experience is that there is no connection whatsoever between how much a family gives to the church and how much money that family makes. Instead, I found that the key connection is faithfulness in worship. If you attend the Sunday night service at a typical Baptist church and look around at the 40 people there in comparison to the 200 or 300 in attendance on Sunday morning, you will find that about 80 percent of the church's giving is accounted for in that group.
The bottom line: The Sunday night experience in a Baptist church is very similar to that in Saturday evening Vespers services in an Orthodox church. As Bishop Antoun told me once, if you look at who attends Great Vespers and comes to confession, you are looking at about 80 percent of the service, the giving, and the energy in most parishes.
Who comes to Vespers? Who comes to confession? Who comes to the feasts, and why do they come? That’s where I would like to start as we consider this question: What do the converts want?
Originally posted on getreligion.org
Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.
They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.
One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.
A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don't. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don't get to see them. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.
I want to show you an an example -- a case study, if you will -- of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog that you are visiting (and we hope you come back often).
inter is over and it's time to pack away the shovels, down jackets, insulated boots and mittens until next year. The changing seasons teach different lessons and, this winter, I was reminded of a great truth about life. It goes something like this: There is a right way and a wrong way to shovel snow.
Perhaps you saw the headlines about the massive storms that hit the nation's capital, this past winter. Right after everyone calmed down from the Y2K scare, we were reminded that there are other ways to bring an entire region to a screeching halt.
Or, perhaps you had to dig your way out of record-breaking drifts in some other corner of the country, this year. Or perhaps you live someplace where it's normal to see several feet of snow. Perhaps you're a pro.
I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, which is hardly a great place to learn how to handle snow. We were masters of mosquito control.
But, after college, I found myself in the frozen Midwest, where shoveling snow is an art -- right up there with boiling corn and planning tailgate parties. The snow started about Thanksgiving and, before long, I realized that it wasn't going away on its own.
Several weeks, and several backaches later, I started watching the local talent. This is when it hit me: I was not the first person in the history of the world to shovel snow. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. There I was, a youngster, slumping to the side of the path in exhaustion while gray- haired neighbors soldiered on.
What did they know that I didn't know? Well, yes, there were different kinds of shovels and different kinds of techniques and some folks were more doctrinaire than others. But there were common themes, such as bending your knees, not getting the shovel TOO full and never flinging the snow into the wind. There was a right way and wrong way to face this challenge and, I decided, only a fool would go it alone.
Eventually, I humbled myself and started asking questions. The elders took me in, showed me the ropes and handed down what they had learned -- a kind of oral snow-shoveling Tradition.
Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue?
(Copyright) The Poynter Institute Poynter Reports, May 2003
Lou Grant had a problem.
Actually, the city editor of the classic TV comedy had two problems.
First of all, the fictional Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor and no self-respecting journalist wanted the job. Second, Grant needed to ditch a lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter named Mal Cavanaugh.
Finally, Grant saw the light. He told Cavanaugh he was the new religion editor.
"That stinks! Before you stick me with a lousy job like that, I'd quit," said the reporter, before storming out of the room.
Grant's staff beamed. The religion beat was still vacant, but who cared?
That scenario rang true to the editors and religion reporters I interviewed while doing my graduate work at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, researching a project that reached the cover of The Quill in January, 1983.
Many religion-beat veterans were proud of their work, but felt like Rodney Dangerfield in their newsrooms. Editors kept saying that they knew religion was news, but that religion-beat stories seemed too boring, or too controversial, to warrant dedicated coverage.
That's the ticket -- too boring and too controversial.
Soon after John Grisham finished law school in 1981, he started hanging out at the DeSoto County Courthouse on the town square in Hernando, Miss. He had tried writing a book or two at the University of Mississippi, but nothing came of it. Then one day he overheard the horrifying courtroom testimony of a 12-year-old girl who had been raped. What would happen, he asked himself, if the girl's father became so outraged that he killed the rapist?
Grisham couldn't get this story out of his head. Soon he was getting up at 5 a.m. with a notepad, writing chapter after chapter of his first courtroom drama. It took three years to finish the manuscript, and another year of rejections by dozens of companies, before Wynwood Press published 5,000 copies in 1988.
But there was more to this process than telling a story that was in his head and heart.
"While I was writing 'A Time to Kill,' I read everything that was on the New York Times list," said Grisham, at a Baylor University conference called "Art & Soul" in March, 2000. "Most of it, I said to myself, 'I can do better than this.' A lot of it, I said, 'I'll never be that good.' "
Grisham realized that he was not writing the first legal thriller. So he read the competition and he learned the rules -- the writing style of the marketplace in which he would have to compete. He created a likable hero and then he ensnared him in a dangerous conspiracy. Then he carefully plotted a way to get him out of that mess, with as many entertaining twists and turns along the way as possible to create tension.
"I didn't invent that," said Grisham.
A Yale law professor -- and evangelical -- warns about the costs of political involvement.
God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics Stephen L. Carter Basic, 288 pages, $26
Reviewed by Terry Mattingly
During the 1992 Republican Convention, Vice President Dan Quayle shouted this question to a room full of delegates: "Who do we trust?"
The assembly yelled, "Jesus!"
Quayle had expected to hear, "George Bush!"
This anecdote appears early in God's Name in Vain by Yale law professor Stephen Carter. The question, of course, is whether this is a parable about Christians (a) selling their souls for a place at a worldly table or (b) bluntly confessing that eternal authority is more important than a political endorsement. The answer seems to be--both.
In this sequel to his breakthrough book, The Culture of Disbelief, Carter argues that believers--even fundamentalists and evangelicals--have every right to raise their voices early and often in the public square. He warns, however, that they will pay a high price for their covenants with political principalities and powers.
So, yes, the religious right has softened its rhetoric on moral and social issues in order to dance with the Libertarians in the gop tent.
But what goes around comes around, notes Carter, who openly identifies himself as an evangelical believer in this book. Leaders on the religious left have also walked this tricky path. Long ago, the clergy who led the civil rights movement surrendered many of their most prophetic goals when they married the Democratic Party. How long has it been since anyone heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson preach a prolife sermon?
This would not have surprised C. S. Lewis, whose brief essay "Meditation on the Third Commandment" provides one of the central themes of this book. In it, Lewis argued against founding a "Christian" political party. If it were truly Christian, then it would preach the whole package of the Christian faith and, thus, would be too demanding to succeed at the ballot box. But if it were truly a political party, it would be driven to make the kinds of compromises needed to win elections. Thus, it would not be truly Christian.
Carter concludes, "Religious organizations making pragmatic compromises for victory should ask themselves two simple questions: If we win, what are we winning? And at what cost?"
Copyright © WORLD Magazine, November 2000
The Gen-X blond standing behind the Democratic Party placards gave me a tired smile election morning as I headed into my polling place a few miles from the D.C. Beltway.
Vote for the Democratic Party, said the signs.
Not this time, sister.
I smiled back, sort of. It was a sad smile. I'm a Democrat and have been all my life. That used to be a normal thing for people who grew up in middle-class Bible Belt homes. But I cast my first vote today for a Republican candidate for president.
Why? Because Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania is dead and I can't write in his name anymore, that's why. He's the old-guard Catholic Democrat who was banned from the 1992 Democratic National Convention floor, the man who told his party's platform hearings: "The national Democratic Party has embraced abortion on demand. I believe this position is wrong in principle and out of the mainstream of our party's historic commitment to protecting the powerless.... Abortion is the ultimate violence. Abortion on demand has, in my judgment, contributed significantly to an environment in our country in which life has become very cheap."
Powerful words, coming just a few years before Columbine High School and so, so much more.
Published in Again Magazine and a shorter version at WWW.Beliefnet.com
When I was a teen-ager, it took forever to get my hair right.There was this one place that was really bad, behind my right ear. My hair wanted to flip out. I wanted it to flip under. The longer I grew my hair out, the better, or the worse, this particular thicket would become.
It was incredibly important -- almost a life-and-death matter -- to have long-ish hair when you were a Southern Baptist preacher's kid in the late 1960s.
But there was no way, given the social and theological realities of the circumstances, for me to take the plunge and grow my hair out so far that gravity would take care of the tell-tale flip, turning it into a mere wave in a shoulder-length mane. What I needed was hair that was long enough to satisfy me and my friends, yet hair that wasn't longer than the hair on most of the heads of the sons of the deacons at the Proctor Street Baptist Church in Port Arthur, Texas. In many ways, it must have been easier to be a hippie than a Baptist.
After watching Christopher Nolan's take on "The Odyssey," Father Dwight Longenecker remembered a comment Steven Spielberg made in a movie commentary while discussing how viewers react to symbolism in cinema.
The legendary director, a progressive Jew, was responding to comments that prominent crosses in "Saving Private Ryan" cemetery scenes suggested that the hero was a Christ figure who suffered to save a lost soul. Spielberg replied: "I'm always fascinated, to learn about the things people see in my pictures that I never knew about."
Now, faithful movie lovers are debating whether Nolan's Catholic background soaked into his version of Homer's pagan epic. For example, how did an arrogant, brilliant, pagan Greek warrior develop a strong sense of guilt about his mistakes?
"Nolan is coming from a Catholic background and 2,000 years of Western Christian tradition," said Longenecker, a former journalist and screenwriter who leads Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina. A former Anglican priest, he converted to Catholicism with his wife and four children.
"He cannot help but bring, quote, 'Christian sensibilities' into his understanding of the story, even though he may not have done it explicitly," he explained, via Zoom. Guilt is a human emotion, "part of what C.S. Lewis called the 'Tao,' a universal sense of morality, the universal sense of right and wrong."
Nolan addressed this issue with political philosopher Zhuge Yiyang, during an interview originally posted on China's Bilibili video platform. Another question: How did the doctrine of "atonement" for sin get into this movie? Nolan said his film stressed what he called "Zeus' Law," the ideal of "mutual respect -- that I treat you the way I want to be treated."
Nolan added: "I think in a way we may be bringing our more modern sensibility to that. Insofar as [atonement is] there, it's not a deliberate attempt to Christianize it, but it's an outgrowth … of burrowing in on this philosophical idea of what happens when you break Zeus' Law."