MARK SHEA

As we have seen, Scripture warns repeatedly of separating knowledge from the love of God and neighbor. But that is not because knowledge is bad. It’s because knowledge, like all powerful and good things such as fire, must be wielded with love or it will destroy. The good news is that, wielded with love, knowledge can be a huge and potent force for good.

So again and again, Scripture urges us to “know the Lord” and promises us that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). We find that Solomon in the Book of Proverbs and elsewhere is interested in not only “religious” or “spiritual” knowledge but in...READ MORE

VATICAN CITY — Approval for the beatification of the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who ministered in China 500 years ago, depends to some degree on the Vatican’s relations with China.

“Part of the beatification depends on the political relations between China and the Vatican,” said Father Anton Witwer, the postulator of his cause.

“It’s possible to wait, even if all things are clear for a beatification, something like five years, to see if the political situation has changed and is more favorable for the cause,” he told EWTN News in a May 15 interview.

Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci was an expert in mathematics, cosmology and astronomy who helped spread the Gospel in China...READ MORE

Hubert Horatio Humphrey was vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969. At the dedication of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in 1977 in Washington, he made the following comment:

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

At that time, such a statement would not have provoked either dissention or controversy. It was a different era, one we may look back on with a feeling of nostalgia.

A decade later, Pope John Paul II saw fit to remind Americans of the moral ideal so eloquently expressed by...READ MORE

ROME — Even though Pope Francis is deeply concerned for the poor and has been praised by liberation theologians, there is a stark divide between the Pope and them, according to a Vatican analyst.

“There is a chasm between the vision of the Latin-American liberation theologians and the vision of this Argentine Pope,” Sandro Magister wrote May 16 in the Italian publication L’Espresso.

This is despite perceptions that “when, just three days after his election as Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio called for ‘a Church that is poor and for the poor’; his admission among the ranks of the revolutionaries seemed like a done deal.”

Liberation theology developed in Latin America in the 1950s as a...READ MORE

CAGLIARI, Italy — Father Giovannino Tolu said his heart began racing when he heard that Pope Francis will visit the shrine he oversees on the Italian island of Sardinia, making it the fourth time he has received a pope.

Pope Francis announced at the end of his May 15 general audience that he will travel to the city of Cagliari in September to venerate Our Lady of Bonaria at the basilica of the same name.

“Can’t you hear my heart going tick, tick, tick?” Father Tolu, the basilica’s pastor, asked in reaction to the Pope’s declaration.

“We still don’t know yet if Pope Francis will be here one day or if he will be here several days, because we just found out yesterday about this,”...READ MORE

VATICAN CITY — Addressing the participants of a plenary assembly of the International Union of Superiors General — which included some members of the U.S. Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) — on May 8, Pope Francis encouraged a strengthened focus on “the centrality of Christ and his Gospel, authority as a service of love and ‘feeling’ in and with the Mother Church.”

In his pointed remarks, which followed on the heels of complaints during the plenary assembly by the LCWR president, Sister of St. Francis Florence Deacon, that her organization had “serious misunderstandings” with the Vatican, the Holy Father affirmed that the leaders of women’s religious communities need to...READ MORE

VATICAN CITY — The Pope told Christians it is better to be “annoying” and “a nuisance” than lukewarm in proclaiming Jesus Christ.

“If we annoy people, blessed be the Lord,” said Pope Francis during his morning Mass at the Vatican on May 16.

“We can ask the Holy Spirit to give us all this apostolic fervor and to give us the grace to be annoying when things are too quiet in the Church,” he said at the chapel of the St. Martha residence, where he lives.

He celebrated the Mass alongside Cardinal Peter Turkson and Bishop Mario Toso, the president and the secretary of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace. Council staff and employees from Vatican Radio were among those attending the...READ MORE

Editor's Note: On Register Radio May 17, Jeanette De Melo will discuss the influence the Gosnell trial has had on the abortion debate in the U.S. in an interview with Susan B. Anthony List's president, Marjorie Dannenfelser. Listen online after 2pm Eastern today. 

As the trial of Kermit Gosnell exposed to the world the evil, ugly and indefensible truth of Big Abortion, Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly National Abortion Rights Action League) were quick to throw him under the bus, applauding his conviction and implausibly blaming the pro-life community for Gosnell’s house of horrors.

But that moment of sanity by America’s biggest proponents of abortion won’t...READ MORE