Hierarchy and vulnerability are seemingly incompatible ideas. Hierarchy (in the Catholic imagination) signals status, power, privilege and the ability to control. Vulnerability, on the other hand, ...

For the first time since the end of the Civil War in 1939, Spain’s Roman Catholic hierarchy has issued a joint pastoral letter to the faithful. The 38-page letter, redefining the relations between ...

Reader responses were in support of making a clear distinction between the word "church" and the word "hierarchy." First read the original argument from Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese. The following letters ...

After decades of broken promises to clean up the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse scandal, American bishops made another attempt at reform last week. Unfortunately, the new measures adopted by the ...

THE main contention of my American Freedom and Catholic Power was that the system of power developed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy is encroaching upon certain non-devotional areas of American ...

AS a Catholic clergyman with 25 years pastoral service in Northern Ireland, I am appalled beyond words to learn that a Catholic priest was involved in the Claudy bombing in 1972. AS a Catholic ...

At the time of the American Revolution there were about 18,000 Roman Catholics in all the colonies. Today, according to the hierarchy’s figures, they number 34 million. In less than 200 years the ...

Cardinal Bernard Law died on Wednesday, Dec. 20, in Rome. Law was Archbishop of Boston, a position of prestige in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. He had wide political connections, ...