The Narthex

In last week’s Gospel, Jesus called Himself the “sheepgate,” the sole legitimate entrance to the sheepfold. In this week’s Gospel, St. Peter calls Jesus the “cornerstone.” He also calls Him a “stone that will make people stumble and a rock that will make them fall” (1 Pt 2:8, quoting Is…

Writing about the Gospel for this past Sunday, Fr. Paul Scalia pointed out something we might be prone to overlook: Jesus describes Himself not as the “Good Shepherd” but as the “sheep gate.”  “I am the gate for the sheep…  Whoever enters through me will be saved and will come…

The Third Synodal Assembly of the Church in Italy marked a historic turning point in the pastoral approach to LGBT people. With the approval of “Yeast of Peace and Hope,” its Synodal Path Summary Document, the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) overwhelmingly approved proposals representing unprecedented openness toward homosexual and transgender…

Last Sunday’s Second Reading -- for the Exaltation of the Cross, which preempted the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time -- was St. Paul’s great hymn of Jesus’ self-emptying, his kenosis (Phil 2:6-11). One of the key texts in that hymn is verse 6, where Jesus is presented as treating divinity…

“Accompaniment” is a buzzword in the Francis papacy. It’s striking, then, that it appeared in the Gospel last Sunday, though not exactly in the manner to which current ecclesiastics have grown accustomed. Sunday’s Gospel wrapped up the Eucharistic teaching of Jesus we have been reading from John 6 these last…

Sunday’s Gospel recounted Jesus dispatching His Apostles, two by two, on their first missionary internship. They are dispatched to the neighboring villages in Israel and Judea, a fairly circumscribed venue considering they will ultimately be sent “to all nations” (Mt 28:19). That Gospel is instructive as to how the Church…

The past few years have seen a preoccupation in various ecclesiastical quarters about the Church’s “welcome.” It’s a strange preoccupation for an institution that has been around roughly two millennia and hitherto seemed to lack neither clarity about its welcome message nor success in its promotion. This year’s readings for…

The Church offers two formulae as options to be used during imposition of ashes, the sign of penance. The older formula is “Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you will return.” The newer one is actually not new at all, because it repeats the first public words…

After delivering a muddled set of remarks about assisted suicide which now the Pontifical Academy for Life claims do not mean what most people think they mean, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia wants us really to believe that he was merely engaging in a thought experiment about how Italian civil law should…