Christian charity is more than simple philanthropy, Pope Francis said in his Angelus address Sunday. Speaking from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square Aug. 23, the pope said: “Christian charity is not simple philanthropy but, on the one hand, it is looking at others through the eyes... Read more

Image: stefania57 | us.fotolia.com Thinking out loud about a return to “Sunday normal,” a veteran pastor recently told me that he thought it would take one year for each month of lockdown/quarantine/ shelter-at-home for Mass attendance to return to where it was in February 2020. I said I... Read more

Pope Francis’s headline-grabbing words last year – “inequality is disastrous for the future of humanity” – reflected the long doctrinal dialectic following Vatican Council II.  At the Council, the focus of social justice increasingly shifted from the tenets of Rerum... Read more

The rise of divorce and the decline of marriage following the sexual revolution have destabilised the family life of two generations and have been the source of much unhappiness both for children and parents. We have lamented these trends often enough on MercatorNet, and a new movie dramatises... Read more

May 1 is the Optional Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker. It coincides in many parts of the world with May as “International Labor Day,” a communist-inspired observance, given that communism purported to be the advocate of the worker. Work is an important element of Catholic social... Read more

In a recent First Things column, editor R.R. Reno confirmed that the magazine founded by Father Richard John Neuhaus has substantially revised its hitherto generally positive view of the market economy. This formal shift toward what I’ll call “One Reluctant Cheer for—and Many Doubts... Read more

The Brazilian man who received the miracle allowing for Mother Teresa’s canonization says that he and his wife were ordinary believers who received an extraordinary sign of God’s mercy. “From the beginning, the diagnoses weren’t good and they seemed only worse. (But) from that... Read more

Churches open up to shelter people, neighbors start to clean out each other's houses in wake of Harvey. Texans and sympathetic Americans continued to help survivors of Hurricane Harvey Wednesday, as the diminished but still very wet storm made its way eastward, inundating Port Arthur and... Read more

MUMBAI, India - A German nun known as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan” will be given a state funeral, according to Prime Minister Shahid Abbasi, after dying Aug. 10 at the age of 87. Sister Ruth Pfau died in Karachi in a hospital affiliated with the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center, which she... Read more

When newly-minted French President Emmanuel Macron made his rather generous assessment that Africa’s problems are “civilizational,” and chalked some if it up to the fact that Africa has “seven to eight children per woman,” the internet went onto one of its time-honoured, increasingly... Read more