At this juncture in American political and religious history, John Courtney Murray has something to say for the Catholic Church trying to recover a sense of itself in the public square.

Massimo Faggioli: Some statues deserve toppling. But it’s not necessarily the most constructive way to build a different future.

When is it appropriate to criticize a reigning pope, and what implications does that question have for Catholic ecclesiology?

There is no question that the process for the appointment of bishops should be updated. But the election of bishops with procedures similar to democratic elections would only exacerbate all kinds of rifts in the Catholic Church today.

"Magnum Principium," the new apostolic letter released motu proprio by Pope Francis, is returning authority to regional bishops' conferences in matters of liturgical translation. But why and how?

It is very difficult for European Catholics to make sense of the polarization within the Catholic Church in the United States. I grew up in Northern Italy and studied and worked for almost 20 years at the University of Bologna, my alma mater and the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1088. In t