There is a sentence at the head of Paul’s angriest letter that ought to have settled the whole quarrel about apostolic succession before it was fairly begun, and which has instead been tiptoed past for the better part of two thousand years. The apostle is introducing himself to the Galatians, and he does it by naming, with some heat, everyone from whom he did not receive his office:‍ ‍

Paul, an apostle — not from men, nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.‍ ‍

Ask an ordinary believer where grace comes from, and you will most often be handed a choice: from the Church, he will say, or from the Holy Spirit — as though these were two shops on the same street, and one had to be preferred. It has assumed that the Church and the Spirit are rivals for the same office. Confuse the steward with the source and you will build an empire. Distinguish them, and the empire dissolves into what it always was: a household of servants entrusted with a treasure they did not mint.

There is a word in the Roman lexicon that has been worked half to death. It is hauled out of bed at all hours, made to stand in every doorway, set upon every passing stranger, and expected—poor exhausted thing—to do the labour of an entire theology with none of the dignity. The word is schism, and one begins, after a while, to feel a certain tenderness for it. It has the haunted look of a servant who has been told that everything is his fault: the burnt toast, the falling empire, the weather. Read further…

There is a sentence in Sacerdotalis Caelibatus that Paul VI plainly did not intend to be read the way I am about to read it. Defending the law of clerical celibacy against every objection he could muster the courage to name, he concedes that the young man who embraces it is walking a road that leads, “on the one hand … to a certain physical and psychic void.”… Read further…

The Roman Catholic Church likes to describe herself as mater et magistra — mother and teacher — an institution whose scale and antiquity are supposed to make possible a patience no smaller body could afford. Whatever verdict history eventually renders on the theology of the Society of Saint Pius X, the documentary record of the eleven months preceding 1 July 2026 does not show that patience being exercised.

King Charles III, the Coronation Oath, and the Incoherence of Royal Pluralism
There is a certain kind of confusion that presents itself as magnanimity. It speaks warmly of inclusion, of tolerance, of the spiritual richness of diverse traditions — and it does so with complete sincerity. What it does not do, because it cannot, is think the position through to its conclusions. King Charles III is a man of genuine religious curiosity and evident personal piety. He is also, on the specific question of his role as Defender of the Faith, in a position of irresolvable self-contradiction — and the coronation oath he swore before God in Westminster Abbey in May 2023 makes that contradiction a matter of public and solemn record.

Called, But Not Yet Certain

A guide to vocational discernment for the Canons Regular of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

There is a peculiar feature of a genuine vocation: it does not wait to be convenient. It arrives — quietly, persistently, sometimes inconveniently — not as a thunderclap but as a steady accumulation of quiet certainties. Newman captured something of this when he wrote of God creating each person to do "some definite service" that no other can do in quite the same way.

SSPX vs. Holy See: There is a word the English keep for a certain genre of marital combat: the domestic. It is the row the neighbours hear through the partition wall — the raised voices, the slammed door, and, at the climax, the unmistakable timpani of crockery making contact with plaster. Nobody calls the police. Everybody listens. And the next morning, over the fence, the verdict is delivered: Did you hear them last night?😁

So, fear no one. Take whatever has surrounded you this week, whatever has whispered “terror on every side,” and look at it the way Jeremiah finally did—as something real, but smaller than the God who is standing beside you. And then do what the prophet did. Turn your complaint into a song.

The breathless claim that Bill C-9 “criminalises the Bible” is not quite true, and pretending otherwise will only get a well-meaning believer into trouble of a different kind. The more sober reality—that the Act removes a specific, named protection and shifts the whole question onto general defences and the discretion of prosecutors—is quite serious enough without embellishment. Sobriety here is not timidity; it is the prerequisite of useful advice.

A short text has been making the rounds in religious circles, presenting what it calls a straightforward historical argument: that one single, unbroken Church — founded by Jesus Christ Himself — has existed from the first century to the present day, and that history's finger points unmistakably toward Rome. The argument sounds reasonable, even compelling, on first reading. But on closer inspection, nearly every claim it makes either distorts history, makes unjustified logical leaps, or simply assumes the very conclusion it purports to prove. This article addresses those claims one by one.

A long, slightly irreverent, scrupulously honest tour of the Shroud of Turin — the carbon-dating fiasco, the bloodstains, the man who fainted in his darkroom, and the one question that has out-survived every expert who ever tried to answer it.

There are some questions a writer chooses, and others that choose the writer. The question of who may be ordained to the priesthood is, for me, very much the latter. It is a question that has followed me through years of ministry, study, and conversation — with seminarians, with fellow clergy, with faithful women who have felt called to serve at the altar, and with sceptics who simply want to understand why so many ancient churches still hold the line they do. The Male Priesthood: Precedent and Mandate is my attempt to set down, as carefully and as honestly as I can, what I believe the answer to be and why.

And if you are a pastor, a church leader, a chaplain, a deacon, a home group leader, a friend from the congregation who has been asked to visit someone in hospital — this article is especially written for you. Because the ministry of accompanying the sick is one of the most ancient, most sacred, and most humanly demanding callings in the life of any community of faith. It is also one of the least talked about, the least trained for, and the most feared.

Raise your hand if you've ever sat in a pew, a Sunday school class, or a late-night dorm room conversation and thought: "The Holy Trinity? Sure. Absolutely. Three-in-one. Totally got it." — while absolutely not getting it. 😂

Don't worry. You're in excellent company. Theologians have been wrestling with the doctrine of the Trinity since the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and the debate has been lively enough to make modern Facebook arguments look like polite tea parties. In fact, one bishop reportedly punched another bishop in the face over it. At a church council. Which, when you think about it, is an extremely committed way to do theology.

On the morning of Monday, 11 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV received participants in the eighth joint colloquium organised by the Holy See’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and Jordan’s Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. The theme chosen for this year’s gathering was “Human Compassion and Empathy in Modern Times.” In his address — delivered in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace, the Pope called Christians and Muslims to a common mission: “to revive humanity where it has grown cold, to give voice to those who suffer and to transform indifference into solidarity.”

There are conversations that polite society prefers to defer, always hoping that the urgency will somehow resolve itself. This is no longer one of those conversations. Churches have been set ablaze. Synagogues have been firebombed. Sacred art has been desecrated. And across European and North American cities, the accumulated heritage of two thousand years of Christian civilisation — its music, its sculpture, its literature, its architecture — is increasingly subject to demands, pressures, and acts of hostility rooted in a theological framework that considers much of that heritage to be, quite literally, forbidden. The name of that framework is haram.

“The stone had been rolled away not to let Jesus out,
but to let the witnesses in.”

Mary Magdalene, arriving in the pre-dawn dark, at first concludes the worst: that the body has been stolen. She weeps. She does not recognise the risen Christ when he stands before her. She mistakes him for the gardener. Even the disciples, when they first hear her report, dismiss it as idle talk. The Resurrection enters the world quietly — almost reluctantly — and it asks not for immediate acclaim but for the slow, deepening recognition that transforms fishermen into martyrs.

Holy Saturday is the quietest day in the Christian calendar. The crowds have gone. The disciples are hidden behind locked doors. The shouting, the trial, the agony, the death — all of it is over. And in a garden outside the walls of Jerusalem, a great stone has been rolled across the entrance to a tomb, and sealed.

We tend to rush past that sealed stone on our way to Easter Sunday. But it is worth pausing here, in the silence, and asking what that sealed tomb actually means — and why it matters so much for everything that comes next.

"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — is the opening line of Psalm 22. Attributed to David and composed around 1000 BC, this psalm was not an obscure text. It was well-known, regularly sung, and deeply cherished. Any observant Jew hearing those words would have immediately recognised them.