According to a Reuters poll, a majority of Americans disagree with President Donald Trump about firing those football players who kneel during the national anthem. It is wrongheaded to look to celebrities — in the arts or in the world of sports — for political wisdom, to be sure, but compared to the current occupant of the White House. … On this controversy, the best comment I heard was this: You know what is disrespectful to the American flag? The Confederate flag.
At Word on Fire, Bishop Robert Barron gives an embarrassingly effusive recommendation to George Weigel's latest book on Pope John Paul II. In fact, one of the hurdles the U.S. church still faces is the degree to which so many people receive Weigel's interpretation of the complex pope as the authoritative one. That is a mistake. Whatever you think of the late pontiff, he was not the American neo-conservative Weigel makes him out to be.
For those still in a lather about Amoris Laetitia, I went back to unearth this commentary by Catholic News Agency, no bastion of liberalism, about the time Pope Benedict XVI said that the use of a condom might be a first step in the right direction. That relativist! Catholic News Agency tried to walk the comment back, but it only stood out in all its pastoral reality no matter how hard they tried.
Advertisement
At Politico, a look at the Alabama GOP primary in which Sen. Luther Strange lost to Judge Roy Moore, whom me might deem Sen. Very Strange.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller thinks the pope should appoint a group of cardinals to debate the "dubia" submitted by four cardinals regarding Amoris Laetitia. Bad idea. The church is not a debating society. We had two synods. The pope is the pope. Does anyone else remember the days when it was conservatives who regularly invoked the maxim "Roma locuta est, causa finita est"?
[Michael Sean Winters covers the nexus of religion and politics for NCR.]
Editor's note: Don't miss out on Michael Sean Winters' latest! Sign up to receive free newsletters, and we will notify you when he publishes new Distinctly Catholic columns.
