Last Take

Archbishop Wenski: The folly of ending a 60-year partnership with Catholic Charities

by Thomas G. Wenski April 29, 2026

A U.S. Border Patrol agent removes a wristband March 9, 2021, worn by an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum in the U.S. after he crossed the Rio Grande into Penitas, Texas. Credit: CNS photo/Adrees Latif, Reuters

The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami. This partnership began with Operation “Pedro Pan,” which, under the direction of a then-young Irish priest, Monsignor Bryant O. Walsh, helped resettle some 14,000 Cuban children sent alone to this country by desperate parents seeking to protect them from communist indoctrination.

This unflappable American

Julian Paparella

30 April 2026, The Tablet

Cardinal Robert Prevost greets the faithful on 8 May last year as just-elected Pope Leo XIV

Alamy/TTL Images, M Valicchia

Since his election a year ago Pope Leo has made dialogue, unity and communion his priority

There was a palpable joy on the floor of the Paul VI Audience Hall. Saturday 26 October 2024 had been taken up with voting, paragraph by paragraph, on the document that was the culmination of an extraordinary three-year “synodal process” of listening and discernment that had journeyed through parish, diocesan, national, continental and finally global levels.
As the clock ticked on past dinner time, just before the singing of the Te Deum, Pope Francis made the striking move to declare the Final Document his own, entrusting it back “to the holy faithful People of God”. Since the Second Vatican Council, every Synod of Bishops had been followed by a post-synodal apostolic exhortation. Not this time. Francis decided that what had come from the whole Church would be given directly back to the whole Church, and be part of the Church’s ordinary magisterium.

2 NCR writers win Religion News Association awards

 

News

2 NCR writers win Religion News Association awards

Jeromiah Taylor  ncr

Reporter's Notebook: A very literal reporter's notebook from the pope's trip through Africa

 

Reporter's Notebook: A very literal reporter's notebook from the pope's trip through Africa

Vatican

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  Justin McLellan

Gamifying everything threatens our souls and our humanity

 

April 30, 2026

Gamifying everything threatens our souls and our humanity

Daniel P. Horan  ncr

Podcasts

Father James Martin and Andrew Sullivan on the difficulty of describing religious experience

 by James Martin, S.J. April 27, 2026

In our conversation on “The Spiritual Life” this week, the author and social commentator Andrew Sullivan describes a moment of grace that he experienced on a beach during a moment of personal crisis.

I just felt something I’ve never felt before, which is not that God did not exist, though I was struggling with that, given so much horrible stuff had happened to so many good, innocent people around me. But it occurred to me for 15 minutes, [as] I knelt there in the sand, that God was evil. That’s the real alternative. And that was a dark night…. And all I can tell you, Jim, is that I got up after that and walked to the beach, and I did not get up of my own accord. I promise you that. I was picked up and told, “No, not evil.”

I was honored that Mr. Sullivan shared this personal moment of grace. But the words that caught my attention were “all I can tell you.” It was a reminder that no matter how articulate we are (and Mr. Sullivan, a former magazine editor, is probably one of the most well-known masters of the English language), in the end our spiritual experiences are mainly incommunicable.

 

Faith and Reason

Cardinal McElroy: Why the Catholic Church can and should judge the morality of the Iran war

by Robert W. McElroy April 28, 2026

A man carries a cross ahead of the caskets of Pierre Moawad, an official of the Christian Lebanese Forces Party, and his wife, Flavia, as mourners arrive in a funeral procession at St. Simon Church in Yahchouch, Lebanon, April 7, 2026. The couple was killed in an Israeli strike on an apartment east of Beirut late on April 5. Credit: OSV News photo/Yara Nardi, Reuters

In recent weeks there has been a vibrant and robust debate within the United States about the morality of launching and sustaining war against Iran.

Catholic moral teaching has been at the center of this national dialogue, and the statements of Pope Leo XIV on the war with Iran have been welcomed by many Catholics, recast by some and totally rejected by others. Because the war is a highly volatile issue in our polarized society, it is particularly important that Catholic teaching be clear and well understood as we seek to move forward to peace. For this reason, it is essential to identify and reject three major distortions of Catholic teaching on war and peace that have crept into our national dialogue.

 

Pope and President, at Odds Again?

Coincidental announcements on capital punishment underscore fundamental differences between Leo and Trump.

Heidi Schlumpf

April 28, 2026

Donald Trump

Pope Leo XIV

Religion

Politics

Please email comments to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.

Pope Leo XIV appears in a recorded video address to participants at a DePaul University event in Chicago that day marking the 15th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois (OSV News screen shot/Catholic Mobilizing Network, YouTube).

The subject was the same, but the timing was purely coincidental. Last Friday afternoon, the U.S. Justice Department announced an expansion of the federal death penalty, just hours before Pope Leo delivered a video statement urging U.S. Catholics to work for the abolition of capital punishment. Nevertheless, the dueling messages were inevitably seen in light of the ongoing contretemps between the Trump administration and the pope, underscored by the stark difference in the tone and content of the two announcements.