Not every word or phrase that pops into your head while you are praying is coming from God. But occasionally, we are free enough that God enters our consciousness with words or phrases that startle in their immediacy.

The alleged papal puppy putdown raised the question: Is there a spiritual component to owning an animal?

The Rev. Júlio Lancellotti is São Paulo’s designated vicar for street people. He has been posting images of spikes and other elements of hostile architecture gathered from cell phone photos or video from all over Brazil.

“That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t go to live in the papal apartment, because the popes before me were saints and I couldn’t do it—I’m not so much a saint,” the pope said on Feb. 6 during a primetime Italian talk show.

Recovering the history of black Catholics is an important challenge for all black Americans and for their churches.

I wonder at the rage we seem to have at the ready when it comes to our favorite pieces of pop culture.

Pope Francis, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar and President Biden issued statements emphasizing the need to recognize that all people are brothers and sisters and are called to live together as such to achieve peace.

Patrick Collins gives a close read of Thomas Merton’s correspondence in “A Focus on Truth: Thomas Merton's Uncensored Mind.”

Currently in production on its third season, “Evil” is Paramount+’s hidden gem and the next Catholic horror hit fans of “Midnight Mass” have been waiting for.

In “The Deep Places,” Ross Douthat relates how an experience of illness and suffering can lead to a search for answers to more transcendent questions, including the meaning of suffering and the gift of perseverance.

Is the church really interested in listening and learning from former Catholics? Or is it only “listening” to get them to come back to Catholicism?

This week on “Inside the Vatican,” host Colleen Dulle and veteran Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell discuss Gerry’s interview with Hans Zollner, S.J., a leading abuse prevention expert based at the Vatican.

Father Zollner is the president of the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Center for Child Protection. He has been one of the few people in Rome willing to speak on the record about the Munich report.

Behind (almost) every tattoo is a story. The church should start listening to them.

The report landed on French Catholics like a bomb. French bishops had never considered sexual abuse a serious problem. “We have been in denial for 20 years,” Father Goujon said. “The bishops said that [that kind of abuse] could never happen here.”

It is horrifying to think that some people would believe we are living in a simulation. But even more horrifying is the reality that we all actually spend most of our lives behaving like we are.

Akash Bashir, a 20-year-old volunteer security guard who was killed by a suicide bomber in 2015, is the first Pakistani to be given the title “servant of God,” an initial step on the path to sainthood.

Since the end of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, much of the world has turned its attention away from geopolitical conflicts in the region. But these issues have not disappeared.

“For some priests, it would be better if they were married—not just for sexual reasons, but because it would be better for their life and they wouldn’t be lonely,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx said in a newspaper interview.