On Feb. 11, 2013, Pope Benedict XVI announced a decision that will have far-reaching implications for the modern church.

The modernist crisis and the death of a magazine.

At the time of his violent death, Charles de Foucauld had had founded no congregation nor attracted any followers. And yet his witness endured.

Seventy years ago a fateful meeting occurred in Rome. The Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), and Germany’s vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, formally signed a concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich on July 20, 1933.

Maybe the devil made me do it, but after reading Bishop (now Cardinal) Walter Kasper's essay "On the Church" (reprinted in America, 4/23) for the second or third time, I went back through the text and conducted a little test.

Cardinal Walter Kasper on the relationship between the universal church and local churches.