The last month was an eventful one in the Church, to say the least: the final days of Lent, the Triduum, and Easter; the death of the Holy Father, Pope Francis, on Easter Monday; a funeral attended by more than 200,000 people, a burial, and a period of mourning before the papal conclave starts next month.
Darkness, to light, to darkness again, then to waiting, expectation, and hope.
And this is to say nothing of the world at large, which in parts is still torn by war, struck by famine, weighed down by economic uncertainty, political tension, unrest.
There is no way to succinctly describe this mosaic of alternating shades of darkness and light–profound suffering, then resounding joy–without resorting to platitude. But I was struck by something our own Matt Franck wrote about hope in his recent Bookshelf column: “hope, as we must remind ourselves, is not optimism; it is inseparable from a faith that all will be put right in the end, though that ultimate justice arrive long after our own brief span.”
April in Review:
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Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.- We published a week of essays reflecting on Pope Francis’s life, legacy, and pontificate, and what his death and the impending conclave might signal about the Church’s future. We started with this insightful piece by Jeffrey Pojanowski, where he urges the Church to view itself as a concrete, incarnate place of encounter: “As banal as it sounds, the mission of the Church today boils down to being there: being there for a dislocated and disembodied world that needs to know that Being is there.” Other essays in the series can be found here, here, and here.
- Therese Cory, Terence Sweeney, and Edward Feser discussed, in three separate essays, their varying views on immigration. Cory and Sweeney shared their responses to Feser’s recent take on the Catholic view of immigration.
- In the same vein, Matt Franck reflected on President Trump’s controversial executive order on birthright citizenship.
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What We’re Reading Around the Web
- Darel E. Paul, “Feminism against Fertility,” First Things
- Charles T. Rubin, “AI, Governance, and Our ‘Utopian’ Future,” Law & Liberty
- Patrick Brown, “Adam and Eve After the Vibe Shift,” Fairer Disputations
Until next time, thanks for reading PD.
