Sightings Articles
Psychoanalysis's Influence on Pope Francis
March 13, 2018, marked five years of both Pope Francis’s pontificate and commentary upon it, with little signs of either flagging. In fact, scattered moments from the past few years indicate a still-underappreciated psychoanalytic influence on thi...
March 29, 2018
Pope Francis Fallible?
Between or after sessions at Vatican II, a circle of us “guests” were conversing with—which meant “listening to”—the Pope. (How’s that for name-dropping on a wintry day?) In one exchange, as my late colleague Robert M. Grant recalled it, the Pope mis...
January 22, 2018
The Pope, the Mafia, and the Rest of Us
This past June, the Pope spoke critically of the Mafia, and did so in its heartland region in Italy. He threatened to excommunicate anyone who was part of this international crime syndicate. So here we have the unquestioned leader of the largest reli...
September 18, 2017
Many Sightings of Hope
For more than a year I engaged in the visual and oral analog to “fasting.” Fasters discipline themselves not to eat. I chose not to comment on the election campaigns. A digital word-search will find no mention in 50 Monday Sightings of any presidenti...
January 2, 2017
Infallibility and Heresy
Not since certain American Protestants were publicly anti-Catholic, as older readers may remember them having been, have we read as many headlines with words like “infallibility,” “heresy,” papal “plots,” “schism,” etc., as we do these days. My late ...
December 5, 2016
Saint Lonelyhearts
On September 4th the world witnessed a Holy Mass said by Pope Francis as Mother Teresa was elevated to sainthood. She is now known to the faithful as St. Teresa of Calcutta. While Mother Teresa was rightly celebrated for her care of the poor in the b...
October 20, 2016
Convulsive Ingatherings
The text for our mid-year, mid-decade Sightings has been with us from the beginnings of The Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Science...
June 27, 2016
Infallibility: Time To Find Another Term for This Doctrine?
This is not the first time that Küng has sought to encourage open and frank discussion of the doctrine of papal infallibility....
June 2, 2016
Conscience
“Surprised!” is the rarest response of almost everyone to the long-awaited papal document on the joy of love (Amoris Laetitia). So devotedly had Pope Francis and Catholic episcopal leadership pondered and worked on the new 256-page document on the fa...
April 11, 2016