Peter Steinfels

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Articles

Discommoding a Sidewalk

Oct 23, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Charles McNamara |Stephen Pope |Regina Munch

For me, Holy Week 1971 was unusual. I spent it in jail. As a representative of Commonweal. It began with a group of seminarians, Protestant and Catholic.
Gravediggers of Democracy

Jul 10, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Paul Moses |Nick Fagnant |Jonathan Malesic

Ever since it became eminently clear that Donald Trump had MAGA-tized the Republican party and would become its presidential nominee in 2024, the image of a broad slab of highly polished black marble has been flashing through my mind. Trump’s name is carved into its surface on the upper left.
Hijacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Mar 27, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Thomas Geoghegan |Sharon Mesmer |Anthony Domestico

On Thursday, February 15, a group of gay, lesbian, and transgender activists briefly hijacked a funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. They filled the front pews costumed in carefully chosen funeral garb: the skimpy, the glitzy, the gaudy, and the drag.
Real Never-Trumpers Need to Do More

Jan 9, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Cathleen Kaveny |Alexander Stern

There are two kinds of Republican Never-Trumpers: those who see Donald Trump as a threat to the Republican party and its chances for victory in November, and those who see Trump as a threat to democracy. The first group can be divided further. Some Republican Never-Trumpers are mainly pained by what he has done to the political party they long called home—and they realize that a Trump victory would cement that transfer of ownership in place.
Do the Bishops Care About Democracy?

Nov 30, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Cathleen Kaveny |Alexander Stern

In November, the nation’s Catholic bishops issued, as they do every four years, their pre-election year document, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.” It was essentially the same text they have issued in 2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019. Not that it was without merit. But think: for a decade there has been a new pope with new encyclicals and new moral entreaties about climate change, poverty, migration, and synodality.
Scoring the Synod’s Working Document

Aug 24, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Mollie Wilson O’Reilly |Daniele Palmer |Santiago Ramos

Fr. Robert Imbelli does himself no favor by replying to my piece about his recent articles on the Synod with an air of aggrieved innocence. He calls my piece “polemical,” suggesting that his two articles were not. He says I failed to inform readers of his loyal citations of Pope Francis. But did his two articles not fail to inform readers of the language of faith throughout the Instrumentum? He says I have an “animus” against Sandro Magister.
False Fears about the Synod

Aug 9, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Peter Steinfels |Randy R. Potts |Jacqui Oesterblad |Nolen Gertz

Even in my undergraduate days—way back in the middle of the last century when JFK, Pope John XXIII, and Elvis Presley were still alive—I was made aware that Joachim of Fiore was one of the bad boys of Western history. Holy as he might have been, the twelfth-century monk and exegete was the Ur-millenarian whose apocalyptic vision, I learned, was responsible for the Jacobin Terror, Lenin’s Marxism, Stalin’s Gulag, and many lesser bloody follies. Writing on the website of First Things, Robert P.