The people who are behind the curve of the Catholic future are the institutional-maintenance types.

The pope [Francis] knows that the marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world, and so is the family.

The Church in the United States turned a corner about three decades ago, and the idea that we're going back to the incoherence of the late Sixties and Seventies is, frankly, silly. Let's have a little faith in what the Holy Spirit has done among us these past 35 years.

The papacy is an impossible job. So the best thing Catholics can do for the pope is to pray for him.

When media "narratives" about [Pope] Francis get set in concrete, and act as filters bending or distorting (or ignoring) aspects of his vision and his teaching that don't fit the established story line, the Church has a problem.

The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.

In the Church the transformative power of the Eucharist is experienced through the dignified celebration of Holy Mass, and people are empowered for mission because of that.