1. Pope Francis, Advocate for Economic and Social Justice, Dies at 88, Pontiff urged grassroots activists around the world to bridge the gap between rich and poor, By Francis X. Rocca, The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2025, 4:11 AM
Pope Francis, who sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice rather than traditional moral teachings but presided over growing divisions in the church and struggled with the lingering scandal of clerical sex abuse, has died, the Vatican said. He was 88.
The pope’s death came after he spent weeks in the hospital earlier this year to treat a serious bout of pneumonia. His health remained fragile after he returned to his residence in the Vatican.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a pope of firsts. He was the first pope from the Americas, the first from the Jesuit order, and the first to take the name Francis. He was the first in almost six centuries to become pope after his predecessor resigned. Francis also gave the papacy a less formal and more approachable image by spurning regal attire, riding in compact cars and making headlines with blunt comments at news conferences.
He was openly political, urging grassroots activists around the world to bridge the gap between rich and poor while calling on wealthier countries to better protect the environment. As Western politicians moved to close their borders to refugees, Francis advocated for them and other migrants.
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During 2019, Francis responded to criticism with a number of high-profile initiatives against sexual abuse. They included a global summit of bishops on the topic, rules to make it easier to discipline bishops who abuse or cover up abuse, and a relaxation of secrecy rules for church documents relating to abuse, making it easier for church officials to cooperate with police and prosecutors. However, advocates for abuse victims criticized the process for investigating and disciplining bishops as lacking in transparency.
But Francis’ biggest legacy for the church could be his focus on social and economic issues, especially in the global south. Whether that continues will depend on how the coming papal conclave votes. If so, it would be a fitting legacy for a pope who described himself as coming from the “ends of the earth.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/pope-francis-advocate-for-economic-and-social-justice-dies-at-88-103eeff3
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2. With abortion stance, Pope Francis disrupted easy narratives of both left and right, By John J. Miller, The Boston Globe, April 21, 2025, Opinion
When Pope Francis died on Monday at 88, the world lost its most powerful voice for the unborn.
Both his progressive allies and his conservative critics in the United States may overlook this simple fact as they think about how to commemorate the man who has served as the head of the Catholic Church for the last dozen years.
Progressives will probably eulogize Francis’s concern for the poor and for refugees. They’ll praise his overtures to LGBTQ people. They’ll cheer his recent rebuke of the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
Many conservatives, by contrast, will probably grumble about his legacy. They’ll say he tried to weaken the church’s teachings on everything from divorce to priestly celibacy. They’ll complain about his fixation on climate change. They’ll condemn his restrictions on the Latin Mass.
The side that usually supports abortion rights will ignore or downplay the pope’s firm opposition to them. The side that generally opposes abortion won’t give him enough credit for his uncompromising stance.
That’s because Francis’s views disrupted the easy narratives of each side, whether it was Francis the liberal reformer or Francis the threat to orthodoxy.
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For Francis, there were no compromises. His compassion extended into the womb. His orthodoxy embraced the vulnerable and marginalized outside of it as well.
If American progressives and conservatives have trouble making sense of this, it’s because they’re in the grip of groupthink. They view everything through a lens of left and right.
Meanwhile, Francis was thinking about up and down.
John J. Miller is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/04/21/opinion/pope-francis-abortion-life/
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3. Pope Francis oversaw a steep decline in the Vatican’s global influence, By George Weigel, The Washington Post, April 21, 2025, Opinion
When Pope Francis was elected on March 13, 2013, the Vatican’s reputation as a forceful, effective global advocate for basic human rights and a humane world order was at its apogee, thanks to the work of Francis’s two papal predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Francis, who died Monday at age 88, does not leave a similar legacy. It will be up to his successor to rebuild a Catholic global witness now in disarray.
Francis was much appreciated for his personal warmth and many public displays of compassion for troubled souls. But the Vatican’s declining influence on the world stage was another, and lamentable, feature of his papal tenure.
Admittedly, his immediate predecessors set a daunting standard. John Paul was widely acknowledged to have helped inspire the Solidarity movement in his native Poland, which in turn helped trigger European communism’s more comprehensive 1989 collapse. But John Paul’s influence on the politics of nations was not confined to east-central Europe. In 1978 he initiated a Vatican mediation that prevented a war between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel, and later helped accelerate the transition to democracy in those two countries. The communist tide in Central America receded after the pope’s 1983 pilgrimage there, and he was a stalwart supporter of Corazon Aquino and Filipinos’ resistance to the authoritarianism of Ferdinand Marcos Sr..
Benedict’s contributions to world affairs were in the order of ideas. In 2006 he correctly identified the key issues to be resolved if troubled Islamic states were to live in peace with the world: Islam had to develop its own rationale for religious tolerance, and for the institutional separation of religious and political authority. (The lecture prompted violent protests in some Muslim countries; Benedict later explained that his words had been misinterpreted.) At Berlin’s Bundestag in 2011, the German pope praised his countrymen’s passion for the environment, urging them to “listen to the language of nature and … answer accordingly.” Yet there was also, he emphasized, an “ecology of man” to which attention must be paid if humanity were not to self-destruct in Promethean arrogance.
Francis’s pontificate, by contrast, created the impression that the Vatican would not even defend the persecuted people of the church, while the pope’s commentary on world affairs muddled rather than clarified the moral stakes in play.
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What accounts for this dramatic change in the Vatican’s approach to world affairs? While Jorge Mario Bergoglio brought a limited life experience to the papacy, he did carry with him the resentments and shibboleths of left-wing Argentine Peronismo. As pope, Francis surrounded himself with advisers unwilling to challenge his preconceptions of world politics and economics. That combination did not conduce to a robust Vatican witness on the global stage.
The cardinals electing Francis’s successor will want to keep this unhappy, even tragic, record in mind.
George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/21/pope-francis-human-rights-reputation/
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4. What happens after the pope dies? From tolling bells to conclave smoke., By Niha Masih, Vivian Ho and Chris Alcantara, The Washington Post, April 21, 2025, 5:12 AM
The death of Pope Francis sets in motion a carefully orchestrated transition aimed at ensuring the stability and continuity of the Roman Catholic Church, with its nearly 1.4 billion followers around the world. The process is steeped in history and governed by formality — though Francis toned down certain aspects in guidance issued last fall. Here’s what to know. The pope’s death is certified by the Vatican’s director of health and hygiene, under the supervision of American Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who serves in the role of the “camerlengo” and facilitates the papal transition. In accordance with tradition, Farrell will direct the sealing of the pope’s apartments with a red ribbon, wax and a Vatican stamp. It also falls to the camerlengo to arrange for the destruction of the lead papal seal and the papal ring, which are unique to each pope. That destruction prevents forgeries and symbolically signals that the church has entered a period of “sede vacante,” when the throne of St. Peter is empty.
The tolling of the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica accompanies the public acknowledgment of the death of the pope.
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A pope’s funeral typically takes place four to six days after his death and marks the start of nine days of mourning. The Mass for Pope John Paul II in 2005 was three hours long. But the Mass Francis led for Pope Benedict XVI in 2023 was 90 minutes. Church watchers expect Francis — although a sitting pope and not a retired one — would have requested a similarly reduced service for himself.
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Fifteen to 20 days after the pope’s death, red-cloaked members of the College of Cardinals will gather in the Sistine Chapel, beneath Michelangelo’s painted ceiling, to choose the next pontiff. It’s an exercise cloaked in secrecy, though sometimes depicted in popular culture, most recently in the film “Conclave.”
The term conclave comes from the Latin phrase cum clave, “with a key,” as the cardinals are locked away in the Vatican and forbidden from communicating with the outside world until they produce a result. Both Francis and Benedict were selected on the second day of voting. But more cardinals are eligible to participate in this conclave — 136 compared to 115 — and there is no front-runner, so it could take longer.
Although there is no requirement that the pope be selected from the College of Cardinals — Catholic canon requires only that candidates be male and Catholic — the group has not selected anyone outside its members since 1378.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/21/what-happens-after-pope-francis-dies/
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5. Pope Francis pulled the Catholic church into the 21st century, The Washington Post, April 21, 2025, 5:15 AM, Editorial Board
Pope Francis, who died at the Vatican on Monday at age 88, was one of the most consequential pontiffs in modern history, and also one of the most surprising.
An ascetic Jesuit and the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere, Francis was initially expected to focus mainly on cleaning up a scandal-plagued Vatican. Instead he fashioned a profoundly reformist papacy, deeply divisive within the Roman Catholic Church, that sought to fundamentally reorient the institution as more liberal and less beholden to its own hierarchy, which he left less White, less Eurocentric and less bound by tradition. These shifts made the church decidedly more global, modern and inclusive, open as never before to new thinking and dialogue — if not new policies and doctrine — about LGBTQ people, priestly celibacy, abortion and divorce.
He was, in many ways, an iconoclast, a modernizer — and a breath of fresh air. His new thinking triggered resentments and fury from traditionalists, who saw him as abandoning core church principles, as well as despair from some liberals, who wished for an even more sweeping and substantive overhaul.
As an Argentine cardinal before he was selected as pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was regarded as anything but a revolutionary. But once he took charge at the Vatican, succeeding two socially conservative popes who had led the church for more than three decades combined, he quickly stunned the hierarchy, and the world, with his openness and refusal to hew to what had been the Holy See’s default messaging.
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The extent to which Francis’s legacy will endure is likely to be determined largely by the selection of his successor. He will be chosen by members of the College of Cardinals under the age of 80, a cohort now dominated by prelates picked by Francis himself — many of them, like him, from Africa, Asia or South America.
Francis was something new and, for the church, badly needed — a man who saw clearly that a new century had dawned and that the world had evolved. He pushed a massive institution to evolve with it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/21/pope-francis-consequential-surprising/
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6. Francis, the First Latin American Pope, Dies at 88, After decades of conservative leadership, Francis tried to reset the course of the Roman Catholic Church, emphasizing inclusion and care for the marginalized over doctrinal purity, By Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, The New York Times, April 21, 2025, 4:35 AM
Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died on Monday at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta. He was 88.
The pope’s death was announced by the Vatican in a statement on X, a day after Francis appeared in his wheelchair to bless the faithful in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday.
Throughout his 12-year papacy, Francis was a change agent, having inherited a Vatican in disarray in 2013 after the stunning resignation of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, a standard-bearer of Roman Catholic conservatism.
Francis steadily steered the church in another direction, restocking its leadership with a diverse array of bishops who shared his pastoral, welcoming approach as he sought to open up the church. Many rank-and-file Catholics approved, believing that the church had become inward-looking and distant from ordinary people.
Francis reached out to migrants, the poor and the destitute, to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy members, and to alienated gay Catholics. He traveled to often-forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world.
After some early stumbles, he took strong steps to address a clerical sex abuse crisis that had become an existential threat to the church. He adopted new rules to hold top religious leaders, including bishops, accountable if they committed sexual abuse or covered it up, though he did not impose the level of transparency or civil reporting obligations that many advocates demanded.
In his final years, slowed by a bad knee, intestinal surgery and respiratory ailments that sapped his breath and voice, Francis used a cane and then a wheelchair, seemingly a diminished figure. But that was a misleading impression. He continued to travel widely, focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/world/europe/pope-francis-dead.html
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7. Francis Worked to Make Catholic Church More Inclusive, By Jason Horowitz, The New York Times, April 21, 2025, 4:23 AM
The cardinals who will choose Pope Francis’ successor face a critical decision: Will they follow his path toward a more welcoming, global and collegial church or restore the more doctrinaire, traditional approach of his predecessors?
That will be the subject of intense debate among the cardinals, and Francis leaves behind a complicated legacy for them to argue over.
Early hopes that a “Francis effect” would bring the faithful back to the pews mostly failed to materialize as church attendance continued to fall in the secularized West even as it grew in the global South.
Although Francis made considerable strides in addressing the church’s sexual abuse crisis and tackled its murky financial culture, the path he put the church on for the future will be the most contentious issue.
His willingness to debate major theological issues such as divorce, the possibility of married priests, acceptance of same-sex couples and an increased role for women thrilled liberal Catholics after more than three decades of conservative papacies. Yet many complained that Francis only set in motion a process that a less reform-minded successor could scratch out, while others accused him of diluting church doctrine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/world/europe/pope-francis-catholic-church-legacy.html
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8. What to Know About Pope Francis’ Death, The pope was released from a lengthy hospital stay less than a month ago for a life-threatening respiratory condition, By Elisabetta Povoledo and Jason Horowitz, The New York Times, April 21, 2025, 8:06 AM
Pope Francis died on Monday, aged 88, at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta.
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How did the pope die?
The Vatican has not announced the immediate cause of Pope Francis’ death. But he recently spent weeks in the hospital in critical condition with a life-threatening respiratory infection.
After being released, the pope resumed a limited schedule. A day before his death, he met with Vice President JD Vance and blessed the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for Easter Mass.
He had made several public appearances over the past week. But his weak, raspy voice was reminder of his frailty.
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What happens when a pope dies?
Time-honored rituals have been drafted and refined over the centuries to ensure secrecy and an orderly transition. The carefully choreographed pageantry provides order to a church in its most dramatic moment of flux.
The Vatican said in a statement that Francis had died at 7:35 a.m. on Monday.
A pope’s death is confirmed by the head of the Vatican’s health department and the cardinal chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church, who becomes the Vatican’s de facto administrator. The pope’s body is dressed in a white cassock and brought to the pope’s private chapel.
The cardinal chamberlain, camerlengo in Italian, is a position now held by Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell, a 77-year-old American of Irish origin. He and other officials, along with members of the pope’s family, congregate in the chapel for a ceremony. The body is placed in a coffin made of wood and lined with zinc. The pope is dressed in red, his miter and pallium placed next to him.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/pope-francis-death-health-problems.html __________________________________________________________
9. Baby Bonuses, Fertility Planning: Trump Aides Assess Ideas to Boost Birthrate, By Caroline Kitchener, The New York Times, April 21, 2025, 6:46 AM
The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children, an early sign that the Trump administration will embrace a new cultural agenda pushed by many of its allies on the right to reverse declining birthrates and push conservative family values.
One proposal shared with aides would reserve 30 percent of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children.
Another would give a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery.
A third calls on the government to fund programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles — in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.
Those ideas, and others, are emerging from a movement concerned with declining birthrates that has been gaining steam for years and now finally has allies in the U.S. administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk. Policy experts and advocates of boosting the birthrate have been meeting with White House aides, sometimes handing over written proposals on ways to help or convince women to have more babies, according to four people who have been part of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Administration officials have not indicated what ideas — if any — they might ultimately embrace. But advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda, noting that President Trump has called for a “baby boom” and pointing to the symbolic power of seeing Mr. Vance and other top officials attend public events with their children.
“I just think this administration is inherently pronatalist,” said the activist Simone Collins, referring to the movement to reverse declining birthrates.
Ms. Collins, along with her husband, Malcolm Collins, sent the White House several draft executive orders, including one that would bestow a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children.
“Look at the number of kids that major leaders in the administration have,” Ms. Collins said, adding: “You didn’t hear about kids in the same way under Biden.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/baby-bonuses-fertility-planning-trump-aides-assess-ideas-to-boost-birthrate.html
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10. Easter and Passover Lesson: It’s Never Too Late, Consider the story of the good thief in Luke, and the Jewish idea of teshuva, or returning to goodness, By Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2025, Opinion
This being Holy Week and Passover, a small reflection on Scripture. There are stories and moments in the Old and New Testaments that grab hold of us, some from the first time we heard them, and stay. One, for me, is the story of the good thief.
Christ is on the cross, being put to death between two common criminals. The soldiers jeer. The thief on the left bitterly mocks him. “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The criminal on the other side rebukes him. “Have you no fear of God, when you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this Man has done nothing criminal.” He looks at Christ and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus answers, “Amen I say to you, this day you will be with me in paradise.”
Always hits me like a punch. They’re minutes from death. One thief goes out the way he’d always likely been, insolent and mean. The other thief has a heart for justice—we deserve what’s happening to us, but he doesn’t—and asks for mercy. Christ tells him, essentially, you’re not forever alone, soon we’ll be together in Heaven.
The story, in Luke’s Gospel, is understood as a moment of grace and redemption, and it is those things, but it’s also a story involving the simple idea that it’s never too late. Famous words—we say it’s never too late to learn physics or go to Machu Picchu—but this story is about the infinitely more important idea that it’s never too late to become a better human being.
When I asked New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan why the story moves so many of us, his response sounded like a merry devotional poem. “I’m ecstatic at your interest / In my buddy St. Dismas.” (The good thief became known as Dismas, no one’s sure why, and has been called a saint from the first centuries.)
“I love him,” the cardinal said. “I’ve always had a deep devotion. When I was a kid at Catholic school, Sister called him ‘the thief who stole Heaven.’ ”
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“Christians believe this season is one of resurrection, Jews a time of rebirth—a rebirth in the natural world, but also coming out of Egypt into freedom. This is a fruitful time to ask the questions about what we want to be. We are on a journey, all of us leaving a narrowing, constricted place for a place of freedom. This is a narrative that happens in every generation, and in each of our lives.”
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/easter-and-passover-lesson-its-never-too-late-ec9d00ef
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11. A Pro-Natalism for Normies, Conservatives who want to stabilize birth rates should drop the weird stuff, By Patrick T. Brown, The Dispatch, April 16, 2025, 3:28 PM
As fertility rates continue to decline both globally and in the U.S., efforts to revive them face a headwind generated from within: Some of the loudest voices trying to boost birth rates are, well, just plain weird.
Take Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most prominent pro-natalist, who has personally addressed his concern about “mass extinction” by fathering at least 14 children with four different women. One of his children accused him of relying on IVF, rather than more traditional methods of creating children out of wedlock, to ensure he would have male children.
Maybe he’s just trying to keep up with Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of Telegram, who has offered to pay for IVF for women under the condition they use his sperm, and claims to have fathered more than 100 children. They are far from the only tech minds interested in pushing the envelope of human reproduction in novel, even dystopic ways.
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For the movement to make American parenthood great again to succeed, they will need to be clearer about drawing lines, realizing that failing to do so is more likely to make persuadable or undecided observers tune out concerns about declining birth rates as the province of misogynists, racists, or worse.
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Maybe these types of initiatives don’t go viral online because they don’t have a natural enemy. You can’t “own the libs” by championing family-friendly parking spaces or boosting the child tax credit. There are real political and financial incentives to agitating on social media rather than solving societal problems. But if we’re going to reverse the birth dearth, it’s going to be through changing the minds of those who don’t see our fertility trajectory as a problem. The answer, if it comes, will be a pro-natalism for normies, not for the very online.
https://thedispatch.com/article/a-pro-natalism-for-normies/
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12. Vance Meets Francis Ahead of Papal Easter Message Urging Compassion for Migrants, By Margherita Stancati, The Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2025
Pope Francis met briefly Sunday with Vice President JD Vance, the Vatican said, before the pontiff in his Easter message called for better treatment of migrants and other vulnerable and marginalized people and urged a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine.
The brief but symbolic meeting showed a desire by the Vatican and the White House to ease tensions after a public row earlier this year over the Trump administration’s plans for large-scale deportations of immigrants.
Also on Sunday, the pope—still frail after a near-fatal bout of pneumonia this winter—called for a cease-fire in Gaza and for an end to the wars in Ukraine and Sudan.
“I would like us to renew our hope that peace is possible,” Pope Francis said in a message read out by an aide to a crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
The meeting between Francis and Vance drew global attention because of the pope’s outspoken recent criticism of U.S. immigration policies.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/vance-meets-francis-ahead-of-papal-easter-message-urging-compassion-for-migrants-c3056b11
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13. Gender Storytime at the Supreme Court, If elementary schools read children’s books with LGBTQ themes, can parents opt out?, The Wall Street Journal April 21, 2025, Editorial
Does the First Amendment give parents a right to opt out of gender ideology at the local public elementary school? The Supreme Court will consider that Tuesday in Mahmoud v. Taylor, and what a sign of the times. Consider two of the storybooks that parents in Montgomery County, Md., say the district added to its reading curriculum:
“My Rainbow” is about an autistic child named Trinity who says, “I need long hair,” because, “I’m a transgender girl.” It ends with a surprise gift from Trinity’s mother: a teal, pink, and purple wig.
“Born Ready” is about Penelope, who tells her mother: “I don’t feel like a boy. I AM a boy.” After this single discussion, the mother answers with unquestioning affirmation: “Yes. We will make a plan to tell everyone we love.”
Teachers in Montgomery County were also given guidance on replying to classroom questions and comments. One idea was to “disrupt” students from “either/or thinking” about the sexes. If a child suggested it’s “weird” to say a girl can become a boy, the proposed response was to explain how this comment is “hurtful,” and that when each of us is born, “people make a guess about our gender.”
They can’t? Public schools accommodate a lot, including students who are disabled or learning English as a second language. Part of living in a pluralistic society is that some families might reject, say, ideas on evolution. Their children can still benefit from learning algebra and “Romeo and Juliet.” How hard would it be for Montgomery County schools to announce that “Born Ready” will be read in three weeks, and students can be excused?
This gets to the parents’ second argument, which is that the district’s policy isn’t neutral, and the ending of opt outs was targeted. Their brief cites a member of the school board saying it’d be an impossible disruption if teachers had to “send out notices so white supremacists could opt out of civil-rights content.” The implicit comparison is between religious families and racists. Who needs a tolerance lesson?
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gender-storytime-at-the-supreme-court-first-amendment-parental-rights-opt-out-04a15281
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14. Conservative Catholicism Stages a Resurgence in the MAGA Era, By Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner, The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2025, 9:00 PM
The Catholic Church is struggling in St. Louis. Two years ago, the archdiocese closed or merged dozens of parishes due to declining attendance and a scarcity of priests.
But just outside town, on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, conservative Catholicism is flourishing. Last year, the Augustine Institute, a Catholic seminary that emphasizes a return to the rigors of scripture and tradition, paid around $20 million for a 284-acre campus that Boeing had used as a retreat and executive training center.
Augustine, which was founded in 2005, moved in after outgrowing its space in a Denver office park. It is still in the process of changing the artwork—from aviation prints that celebrate the miracle of flight to portraits of saints who performed actual miracles.
Its ascendance is part of a broader shift in American Catholicism: While the Church has been in decline for decades, a conservative brand of the faith is staging a resurgence.
“You judge a tree by its fruit,” said Timothy Gray, Augustine’s president, as he reflected on the institute’s growth from his perch in a library lined with carved wooden panels harvested from a 16th-century English monastery.
Across the country, adherents to this conservative style are reviving old practices, including the traditional Latin Mass and women wearing veils. Their ranks have been infused with the zeal of young, brainy converts like Vice President JD Vance, who was baptized in the Catholic Church in 2019, at age 35. Vance spent Easter weekend at the Vatican, where he held a brief meeting with Pope Francis.
While their numbers may still be small among the universe of Americans who identify as Catholic, they are increasingly influential, say observers—in the struggle for the Church’s future and that of the nation.
The conservatives are more likely to be kneeling in pews on Sunday and managing parish affairs while others stay home. There are echoes of their beliefs in the Trump administration’s policies—most recently, its introduction of sweeping tariffs. And they are building a network of universities and media outlets, like the Augustine Institute, to educate future cadres.
“Vance is one of a legion of young people who have followed the same path from atheism to radical suspicion and rejection of liberal culture to a form of Augustine-inspired Christianity,” said David Deane, a theologian who gave a recent lecture on Catholicism and the new right. “The seminaries are increasingly populated by young men who think like this.”
A landmark 2022 survey of more than 3,500 U.S. Catholic priests carried out by the Catholic Project, a research initiative at Catholic University, confirmed this. Among those ordained since 2020, some 80% identified as “conservative/orthodox.” Those identifying as progressives and liberals were facing a “virtual collapse.”
“Among priests, it’s a massive shift,” said Stephen P. White, the Catholic Project’s executive director, who views the conservative Catholic renewal as “a piece of the populism that seems to be spreading not just in the United States but over most of the Western world.”
The conservatives are bound together by a conviction that liberalism in its many guises—political, social, theological—has run aground. While it may have generated material wealth, they say, it has undermined communities and wrought the social “carnage” that President Trump invoked during his first inauguration in 2016.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/conservative-catholic-maga-pope-vance-b2a4497b
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15. The Face of Catholicism in the United States Has Changed. Here’s How., By Kate Selig, The New York Times, April 20, 2025
A lively Mass with mariachi music in San Antonio. A monthly potluck for Filipino Catholics in New York City. Parishes in Las Vegas so crowded that some attendees must stand.
These are some of the faces of the Catholic Church in the United States this Easter weekend. For decades, the share of American Catholics declined in the face of broader trends in secularization. But those numbers have stabilized in recent years, according to the latest survey data from the Pew Research Center, buoyed by growing immigrant communities across the West and the South and by broader societal changes that are transforming Catholic identity.
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About 78 percent of Asian Catholics in the United States were born outside the country, and another 14 percent are the children of immigrants — the highest proportion of any ethnic group for which Pew has sufficient data. While Asian Catholics now make up only about 4 percent of the U.S. Catholic population, that number has ticked up since the 2000s.
Younger Catholic priests in the United States now tend to be more conservative, surveys have shown — theologically, liturgically and politically. It is a change that marks a sharp shift from half a century ago, when newly ordained priests were more likely to describe themselves as politically liberal and theologically progressive.
This growing conservatism may further widen a divide between a conservative American faction in the church and Pope Francis, who has sought to make the church more inclusive and has not hesitated to criticize conservative Catholics. The pope remains frail after battling bronchial infections and double pneumonia earlier this year.
Msgr. Andrew Baker, rector of the seminary at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, said what is often perceived as conservatism among younger priests was instead, he felt, simply fidelity to Catholic teaching in a rapidly changing culture.
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As the Hispanic population grows in the United States, the share of Catholics who are Hispanic is rising as well — from 29 percent in 2007 to 36 percent in the most recent survey. This number has grown even as Catholicism is on the decline among Hispanic adults.
That shift has contributed to an increased demand for religious services held in Spanish and has driven inclusion of other forms of cultural expression. In San Antonio, Mission San Jose offers a mariachi Mass in Spanish on Sundays — a tradition that the family behind the mariachi band and choir has sustained for over 50 years. Musicians wearing the traditional mariachi traje and playing instruments perform alongside a choir of about 45 people throughout the Mass.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/us-catholic-identity.html
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16. Antoni Gaudí Was a Venerated Architect. Now He May Become a Saint., By Elisabetta Povoledo, The New York Times, April 20, 2025, Pg. A14
Pope Francis on Monday placed Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan modernist once called “God’s architect” for his work on the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s world-famous basilica, on the path to sainthood.
Francis recognized his “heroic virtues” and authorized a decree declaring him “venerable,” a move toward sainthood, the Vatican said in a statement. For the next step, beatification, a miracle attributed to him would have to be verified. After that, a confirmation of yet another miracle would be required for Gaudí to be declared a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. The process can take years, even centuries.
The basilica marked the pope’s decision by noting on its website that after Gaudí died at 73, a leading prelate at the time called him God’s architect, and that the Sagrada Familia “opens hearts to beauty with its beauty.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/world/europe/antoni-gaudi-architect-saint.html
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17. Pope meets Vance, then releases Easter message decrying ‘logic of fear’, By Natalie Allison, Anthony Faiola and Stefano Pitrelli, The Washington Post, April 20, 2025
Vice President JD Vance met with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, a remarkable encounter between the ailing head of the global Catholic Church and a high-profile convert to the faith who has publicly criticized some of the church’s social teachings.
The vice president’s meeting with the pope was not announced in advance but was widely anticipated as Vance made something of a Catholic pilgrimage to the Vatican over Easter, with Sunday being the faith’s holiest day.
The “private meeting” occurred at 11:30 a.m. at the papal residence, Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican said, and happened while Easter Mass was being said in St. Peter’s Square. “The meeting, which lasted a few minutes, gave them the opportunity to exchange Easter greetings,” the Vatican said in a statement. Vance also met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state and Francis’s No. 2, on Saturday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/20/vance-pope-francis-easter-vatican/
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18. Supreme Court to hear religious freedom case involving LGBTQ+ storybooks, By Ann E. Marimow, The Washington Post, April 20, 2025
The debate over parental rights and religious freedom returns to the Supreme Court this week in a case testing whether families have a right to pull their kids from public school lessons featuring LGBTQ+-themed books at odds with their religious beliefs.
The lawsuit over story time and books with titles such as “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” and “Love, Violet” touches on the type of diversity and inclusion efforts the Trump administration has targeted on college campuses, and in government and private businesses. It is one of three major religious-rights cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term.
The court will consider next week whether states can directly fund religious schools, in a closely watched case involving a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. The justices are also set to decide whether Wisconsin must extend a tax exemption to the social services arm of the Catholic Church — a decision that could have implications for other large, religiously affiliated employers such as hospitals.
For the past decade or so, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s conservative majority have consistently ruled in favor of strengthening religious freedoms and expanding the role of faith in public life.
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/20/supreme-court-religious-rights-lgbtq-books/
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19. Pope, Vance exchange Easter greetings in brief face-to-face Vatican meeting, By Eric J. Lyman, The Washington Times, April 20, 2025
Vatican officials were not sure what to do with Vice President J.D. Vance.
Since taking office, Mr. Vance has earned the ire of Pope Francis, who called Mr. Vance’s controversial defense of the Trump administration’s migrant crackdowns and curbing of foreign aid a “disgrace.”
Yet Mr. Vance — just the second Catholic to serve as vice president (Joseph R. Biden was the first) — was in Rome for Easter, the most important date on the Catholic calendar. And the pope, who was hospitalized for 38 days in February and March with life-threatening respiratory issues, is clearly on the mend, appearing in public three times during Holy Week.
Snubbing Mr. Vance would have been unprecedented.
In the end, Pope Francis and Mr. Vance met at the pope’s residence on Sunday for “a few minutes in order to exchange good wishes on Easter Sunday,” according to a brief Vatican statement. A video the Vatican released showed that the frail pontiff barely spoke during the encounter, though the pope’s translator thanked the vice-president for his visit.
After the meeting, Francis delivered an Easter message denouncing what he called the “logic of fear” before touring St. Peter’s Square in his “popemobile” and waving to the tens of thousands of faithful on hand for the celebration.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/apr/20/pope-francis-jd-vance-exchange-easter-greetings-brief-face-face/
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20. Pope calls for peace, warns against ‘logic of fear’ in Easter message ‘urbi et orbi’, By AC Wimmer, Catholic News Agency, April 20, 2025, 7:12 AM
Pope Francis decried the numerous conflicts plaguing the planet and appealed to world leaders “not to yield to the logic of fear” in his Easter message “urbi et orbi” (to the city and to the world) on Sunday.
The pope’s traditional blessing, “urbi et orbi,” was read by Archbishop Diego Ravelli, the Master of Pontifical Liturgical Celebrations, as the 88-year-old pontiff, still convalescing, was present but physically limited.
Francis, who arrived at the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica in a wheelchair, greeted the faithful with a brief “Brothers and Sisters, Happy Easter” before asking Archbishop Ravelli to read the message on his behalf.
“I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development,” the message stated.
https://catholicnewsagency.com/news/263497/urbi-et-orbi-2025-pope-francis-easter-message-urges-world-leaders-not-to-yield-to-logic-of-fear
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21. No two saints are exactly alike; Jesus calls each of us as we are, By Father Jeffrey F. Kirby, Crux, April 20, 2025
The Lord Jesus came to seek and save the lost. He came to ransom sinners and heal what was broken. The Lord came to us as a man. He lived a holy life. He accomplished his saving mission by his incarnation, holy life, and preeminently by his Paschal Mystery.
Through his passion, death, and resurrection, the Lord Jesus removes the wall that was separating us from God and from one another. Through his glorious resurrection, the Lord reveals himself and make himself available to all.
The Lord calls each of us as we are. He knows our personalities, temperaments, talents, strengths, and weaknesses. When he calls, he calls us as we are.
God created us as we are and it shouldn’t surprise us that he calls us according to the different parts of our personhood. God will not call a man to approach him with a feminine spirituality. God will not invite an introvert to encounter him as an extravert. God will not call a Type A personality to engage in prayer as a Type B personality.
The person we are is the person who prays. There is not one version of us who prays and a second version of us lives in the world. We are who we are and we need to use all that God has given us to pursue him and encounter him.
As Saint Paul famously taught: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.”
…
The growth in prayer will be seen in vocal, meditative, and contemplative prayer. These are the three springboards of prayer.
The Catechism tells us: “This vigilance in keeping the Word and dwelling in the presence of God makes these three expressions intense times in the life of prayer.”
The Lord Jesus walked among us and rose from the dead. He calls us to be with him. He summons us to grow into who we are and to approach him as we are. Our life is a gift from God. In prayer, we grow in this gift and are able to give this gift to others.
https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2025/04/no-two-saints-are-exactly-alike-jesus-calls-each-of-us-as-we-are
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22. Bishop says Nigeria has ‘an invisible ocean of blood’, By Ngala Killian Chimtom, Crux, April 19, 2025
In the wake of the Palm Sunday attacks that left at least 50 people dead in Nigeria’s Plateau State, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto Diocese has lashed out at the lack of a comprehensive strategy to combat the terrorists.
On April 13 – the day Christians around the world celebrated Palm Sunday – Fulani herdsmen chose to storm the village of Zikke in Plateau State.
They killed at least 56 people, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Homes were destroyed, and thousands displaced.
Truth Nigeria reports that “the terrorists left behind the corpses of deceased women, children, and senior citizens in their homes, which they torched as they left the village. Relatives were traumatized since they had to bear the stench of the burned bodies of their loved ones from smoking compounds.”
The Palm Sunday attack came just a week after a similar attack in five villages to the south of Jos left at least 50 people dead.
“In less than one week, we have lost almost two hundred lives across the country,” said Kukah.
The Nigerian bishop described the attack on Zikke as “another tributary of blood” that will “link up with older tributaries and continue their flow slowly but surely into an invisible ocean of blood that now threatens to swallow the plateau.”
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-africa/2025/04/bishop-says-nigeria-has-an-invisible-ocean-of-blood
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23. The Miracle That Grew From the Ashes of 2018, One simple priest answered the call to lay down his life for God’s suffering flock, and we are reminded of what His love looks like, By Kevin Wells, Crisis Magazine, April 16, 2025
Damaging wind gusts, hail, and rain swept into Washington, D.C., on April 3—the 29th day of Lent, the day Theodore McCarrick stopped breathing, the day he stood across from Jesus Christ. Since no bishop dared to speak on his behalf, Mother Nature eulogized. When the storm lifted and the sun shone, I thought of Fr. John Hollowell, the priest on his way to becoming the first American recognized as having received a miracle at Lourdes, France.
I know of no one—on this earth—who responded to the Catholic Church’s 2018 Summer of Shame more directly, more bravely, or more strikingly than the priest raised in the quiet countryside of Indiana. When the Molotov cocktail of McCarrick’s secret life and landslide of Church sin exploded that summer, Fr. Hollowell descended a long, spiral staircase into the wilderness of the suicidal, the homeless, the meth addicts, the male prostitutes, the anxious, the alcoholics, the porn-addicted. He went to the valley of the ruined—the place of the victims of clergy sexual abuse. And he loved them there.
I’ve long waited to tell this story—a story of miraculous healing, now under investigation by the Lourdes Medical Bureau in France. The week of the Passion seems the perfect time to tell the extraordinary account of the priest who loved so well, so thoroughly, that he nearly became a victim of death himself.
And for Fr. Hollowell, that would have been okay. Because in 2018, a few days after speaking for the first time to a victim of clergy abuse, he found himself in his confessional at St. Paul’s Parish in Greencastle, Indiana, uncontrollably weeping. Then, he prayed: “Father, if I’m able to suffer for the victims—in imitation of You on the Cross—and offer my life in reparation for the crimes of priests, I do it willingly.”
Then his Passion began. Back then, he had no idea that God, it seemed, wanted him to feel the victims’ crucifixion. He didn’t know that when, in persona Christi, he turned to Jerusalem and offered to suffer and even die, he would become their cross and begin to endure the myriad manifestations of post-abuse torment in startlingly similar fashion.
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Faithful laity pray and hope for a few shepherds of the Church willing to forge a new path. They don’t seek a New Springtime, or a synodal way. They seek a reckoning, a purification through fire: the kind that burns everything sinful, unsacred, and worldly in the Church to the ground and brings it back to Pentecost day, A.D. 33, where willing saints like John Hollowell once roamed and willingly died to proclaim the resurrected Christ—where they still live today, like a miracle of light for these dark days.
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-miracle-that-grew-from-the-ashes-of-2018
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24. ‘One who shows the way’: Bishop Varden on the Triduum with Mary, By Luke Coppen, The Pillar, April 18, 2025
One thing is clear: it wants us to take part in the great services of the Easter Triduum, the three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. But what about the times in between?
Although the Triduum can feel like a frantic rush between church and home, and back again, sometimes there are quiet moments. What’s the best way to fill them?
One possible answer is the rosary: the ancient and ingenious Marian prayer using 59 stringed beads. As you pray, you meditate on events in the life of Christ, including those commemorated in the Holy Triduum.
How can the rosary lead us deeper into the events of Holy Week? The Pillar asked Bishop Erik Varden, a spiritual writer, Trappist monk, and Prelate of Trondheim in Norway.
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In the Holy Week Masses, in the offices of Tenebrae, in the Commemoration of the Passion and the Paschal Vigil, we have at our disposal a magnificent mystagogy, a careful introduction into the saving mystery that is at once sublime and wholly accessible.
Why not let ourselves be taken by the hand by the Church, our Mother? That way we shall appreciate the Marian dimension of our faith, not just as “devotion,” but as the atmosphere within which, as Christians, we live and move and have our being, where, with Mary, Christ’s Mother and ours, we learn to own and express our deepest grief and our most exultant joy, carried by a well-founded hope that is at once intelligent and visceral.
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/one-who-shows-the-way-bishop-varden
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TCA Media Monitoring provides a snapshot from national newspapers and major Catholic press outlets of coverage regarding significant Catholic Church news and current issues with which the Catholic Church is traditionally or prominently engaged. The opinions and views expressed in the articles do not necessarily reflect the views of The Catholic Association.
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