It is impossible to overstate the tone-deafness of America’s Catholic bishops in recent years. They seem determined to give the Catholic Church a black eye. The Theodore McCarrick scandal — he was a prominent cardinal in Washington, D.C., who preyed…
Anybody who bothers to slog through the Vatican’s mountainous report on the McCarrick scandal will not emerge from the experience enlightened. The report’s revelations, to the extent they exist, are inadvertent. The chief one, evident in the feckless epistolary back-and-forth…
In a remarkably uncharitable display, Washington, D.C.’s Archbishop Wilton Gregory lashed out at President Trump and at the staff of the John Paul II Shrine in Washington, D.C. His unfair words were widely echoed by an appreciative liberal press and…
This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) held its annual meeting in Baltimore. The bishops gathered at the four-star Marriott near the city’s inner harbor, a mark of the event’s spiritual unseriousness. The bishops could save the…
Shortly after his elevation to archbishop of Washington, D.C., Wilton Gregory made a great show of promising to listen to a “wounded” laity. It was total BS. Gregory is notorious for freezing out lay Catholics and priests who dare to…
In the latest revelation about Donald Wuerl — that, contrary to his claims of ignorance, he knew about McCarrick’s misconduct for at least 14 years — he emerges as the amoral but self-protective bureaucrat, undone by his own pass-the-buck-style record-keeping,…
My encounter with Cardinal Joseph Tobin last week was too brief for extensive questioning. I wish that I had had time to ask him why Francesco Castiglione, the Italian actor whom he admitted lived at his rectory until I reported…
As I walked outside the hotel in Baltimore where the bishops gathered last week for their annual Fall conference, I noticed a couple of bishops taking a smoke break. One was puffing a cigar, the other a cigarette. I overheard one…
In late September, I started getting calls from concerned Catholics in Newark, New Jersey that Cardinal Joseph Tobin “had an Italian actor living at his cathedral basilica rectory.” The callers identified the actor as Francesco Castiglione. They said that Castiglione…
