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.
In a pastoral letter on March 15, Bishop Mark Seitz urged immigration enforcement agents not to follow illegal orders and denounced the “grave moral evil” of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Erik Varden, born in Norway in 1974, doctorate holder from Cambridge University, monk and eventually abbot of the Trappist monastery of Mount St. Bernard in England, and, since 2020, bishop of Trondheim, Norway, is a figure who resists easy classification. He is a member of a contemplative monastic order who also serves in an apostolic ministry. He is a scholar of early and medieval monasticism who writes for a broad audience and draws readily upon modern history and literature. He is committed to the traditional teachings of the Church and approaches those who do not live according to those teachings with sympathy and compassion. Pope Leo’s choice of Varden to lead the Vatican’s Lenten spiritual exercises this year has raised his profile and will no doubt suggest to some the urgency of classifying Varden, since this will help them classify Leo, which is currently a popular sport among professional Catholics.
St. Patrick’s Day and the call to stand with today’s immigrants
Each year around St. Patrick’s Day, parishes across the United States fill with green vestments and prayers of gratitude for the witness of St. Patrick, a missionary who crossed borders, carried faith across cultures and helped shape the church we know today.
It is a joyful feast. But it is also, if we allow it to be, a mirror.
As the proud daughter of Irish immigrants, I grew up with stories of sacrifice, resilience and hope. Like so many who came before them, my parents arrived seeking opportunity, safety and the freedom to build a life rooted in dignity. They were welcomed by a church that spoke their language. It nourished their faith and helped them find community in a new land.
The Irish immigrant experience is now woven into the fabric of American Catholicism. Yet we would do well to remember that Irish immigrants were not always welcomed. They faced suspicion and open hostility. Newspapers mocked them, and powerful voices insisted they did not belong. Yet they carried on, held steady by faith and by the quiet certainty that they, too, belonged to the American story.
The nature and accessibility of technology today easily can form us into perpetual observers of other peoples’ lives and listless consumers of information.
It is almost a cliché at this point. Yet, the metrics on my own phone show me that, to my horror, six hours of my day are dedicated to Instagram, YouTube and other corners of the internet. On social media, curated influencers pepper my feed with sourdough starters and gym routines, which are followed by news reports about ICE, controversy around the latest sporting event or reality show or chilling tidbits on the Epstein files. It should feel overwhelming to consume this amount of content all at once. And yet I don’t stop because this is what online culture has trained us to do.
