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.
Over the last two years, whenever I’ve been invited to speak at events or on podcasts, invariably I would be asked about the rise of Christian nationalism. A second question would follow: why aren’t other Christians doing more to present a compelling alternative?
Scholar Phyllis Zagano is widely known as the leading authority on the history and theology of women deacons. Her latest book, The Vatican and Women Deacons (Orbis Books), offers a thorough analysis of the Vatican’s engagement with the issue, including during the Synod on Synodality. Recently, Polish journalist Dawid Gospodarek interviewed Zagano about her scholarship for the journal Tygodnik Powszechny. In the interview, Zagano argues that the barriers to restoring the women’s diaconate today are not theological, but cultural. U.S. Catholic was granted exclusive permission to share the interview, in its English translation.
Pope Leo has finally come home! One million people in Chiclayo, Peru, cheered and welcomed the smiling pope as a hero, many with yellow and white balloons—the Vatican colors—along the road as he drove the nine miles from Chiclayo airport to the Pampas de Pimentel, a flat, almost desert area outside the city of Chiclayo, to celebrate Mass—his first public act on returning to his former diocese.
Though American-born, Pope Leo had served as a missionary in Peru from 1985 to 1998, and returned to the country as the bishop of the Diocese of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023. He became a citizen of Peru in 2015.
Almost a decade ago, I spent months investigating the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or FOCUS, a national college-outreach and evangelization program that, at the time, was operating on 137 campuses around the country. My three-part series reported on the group’s substantial influence on young people, noted its ties to traditionalist and conservative organizations, and revealed its plans to expand into parishes. Sources told me about the damage FOCUS’s relatively untrained missionaries could do in students’ lives and how the organization was decimating existing campus-ministry programs.
“I am returning to my homeland,” Pope Leo XIV said at the Gran Teatro Nacional del Peru, in Lima, the capital city of this majority-Catholic nation of 37 million people, on the evening of Nov. 11. “I am very pleased to be back in Peru,” he continued, speaking to an audience composed of Peru’s civil and religious authorities, as well as representatives of its business and cultural communities, and the diplomatic corps.
