Welcome to the CORPUS Blog. CORPUS is a faith community affirming and rooted in a revitalized church including an inclusive priestly ministry. Please visit our web site: www.corpus.org Our Blog will be a portal to news, articles and resources enabling you to keep up-to-date in the Catholic Reform process.
What a year this week has been. By late February, as President Donald Trump accelerated a build-up of U.S. military capacity in the Middle East, it still seemed hard to believe that after the disastrous Iraq experience, the United States could consider launching another war in the region. Yet here we are, a few weeks later, once again engaged in what St. John Paul II memorably called the “adventure with no return.”
In one of the most highly anticipated cases of last year’s Supreme Court term, a 6-3 majority of the court held that parents have a constitutional right to withdraw their children from religiously objectionable instruction in public schools. Widely viewed as a victory for religious-liberty advocates, Mahmoud v. Taylor is likely to inspire future litigation that seeks to curtail state officials’ broad discretion over the content of school curricula. Should such efforts continue to find welcome reception at the high court, proponents of “parental rights” will have a surprising—if largely forgotten—historical phenomenon to thank: twentieth-century anti-Catholicism.
In recent months, I’ve become increasingly uneasy as I watch pro-migrant groups employ the tools of the oppressor: mockery and dehumanization. Certainly, widespread resistance to violent ICE tactics is important and necessary at this moment. This resistance makes it clear that Americans don’t think federal agents abducting their neighbors makes their communities safer. I’m a big believer that there are many ways to make change, and they are all important. Yet as a follower of Christ, I’m worried about what hate met with hate does to our collective humanity.
The mission of the church moves at the speed of trust among its members. But last year, Catholic University’s National Study of Catholic Priests, based on a survey of over 1,000 U.S. priests, found that only 52 percent of diocesan priests in the United States said they trusted their own bishop. According to the researchers, this figure was slightly higher than the 49 percent in their 2022 survey, but it was “significantly lower” than what other surveys found in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This is more than a workplace issue; it is also a deep pastoral and missionary challenge. According to my own doctoral research, conducted independently from the Catholic University study, when trust between a bishop and his priests is high, the priests are more likely to describe their diocese as “vibrant” and “mission-oriented.”
