Karen E. Park

The young Francis of Assisi knew both the pleasures and dangers of male fraternity intimately. Eight hundred years after Francis' death, that story can give us a new lens on what fraternity can and should mean.

Long before the Catholic Church officially rejected capital punishment, Catholic stories and saints imagined divine mercy accompanying the guilty all the way to the gallows.

As a few U.S. dioceses restrict access to the precious blood, they are promoting a "newer vision of Catholicism in which restriction of the fuller sign of the Eucharist has come to signify holiness," Karen E. Park writes. 

There is a Catholicism that remains largely invisible not only in JD Vance's memoir Communion, but also in Bishop Robert Barron's recent conversation with the vice president about his faith.

As Catholics consecrated the nation to the Sacred Heart, speakers at the Zeale for America 250 rally emphasized America's greatness while largely avoiding the language of repentance traditionally associated with the devotion.

Whether James Talarico is vegan or eats Texas barbecue, the real question is: Why does a tradition that spent 2,000 years admiring fasting, abstinence and self-mastery now treat appetite as a sign of strength?

Once any embattled leader can be cast as savior, any comeback as resurrection, any survival as divine election, Christianity's central claim — that Christ is the unique mediator — loses its meaning.

In the Christian tradition, the violent language found in the imprecatory psalms can never be separated from Jesus' command to love one's enemies. Scripture can never, as Peter Hegseth does, be marshaled to sanctify hatred.

"If papal teaching is invoked to defend the sanctity of life, it should also be invoked to model the intellectual seriousness Catholic moral reasoning demands," writes Karen E. Park.