Paul Elie

1 day ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Paul Elie

The Last Supper, in the Christian scheme of things, is both an end and a beginning: the end of Jesus’ time with his disciples, and the beginning of the religion established with the breaking of bread and the pouring out of wine. The early eighties were both an end and a beginning, at least where the place of religion in American life is concerned.

2 days ago | catholicoutlook.org | Paul Elie

It doesn’t seem that long ago that Benedict XVI resigned unexpectedly—the first Pope to do so in six centuries—and Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected Pope.

3 days ago | newyorker.com | Paul Elie

Pope Francis smiled a lot, easily and broadly. He thrived on direct, informal encounters: phone calls, penned notes, hugs, audiences with small groups. He was impatient with protocol: he carried his own overnight bag, bused his own tray at the cafeteria, and answered reporters’ questions in his own words, extemporaneously. He was attentive, determined, testy, mercurial, sometimes deliberate, sometimes in a hurry, hard to read, and hard to pin down.

6 days ago | newyorker.com | Paul Elie

Every morning, a line forms at about six outside the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, on West Thirty-first Street, near Penn Station, as it has done (with a few exceptions) since 1930; on average, there are two hundred and fifty people, mostly men in various states of need. At seven, a bell is rung and meal bags—people can choose from oatmeal, fruit, a sandwich, nuts, juice, and coffee—are distributed by half a dozen volunteers standing at folding tables set up on the sidewalk.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Paul Elie

“Gandhi’s Scant Garb Bars Audience with Pope.” So read the headline of a New York Times report, from December 13, 1931, that the Vatican had cancelled a meeting between Pius XI and “the Indian nationalist leader” because the Pope thought he might be criticized “if he received the visitor in his usual scanty clothing.” Last December, ninety-three years later, the Times published an excerpt from Pope Francis’s autobiography titled “There Is Faith in Humor,” which related jokes told by and about...