Larry Chapp, Author at Catholic Herald

Larry Chapp

May 06, 2021

"[A]mong misfits," writes Larry Chapp in this essay from the Chapter House vault, "the deepest pain is caused by the most casual verbal cruelties. One soon learns that the community of misfits includes us all."

Cantalamessa Should Have Preached to the Pope

April 20, 2021

In his Good Friday homily this year, the preacher to the papal household warned the Church against division. He should have turned around and spoken to the greatest source of it, Pope Francis himself.

Binding Prometheus

June 11, 2021

This column originally appeared on 23 June 2020. -Ed. This isn’t doomsday—not even the zombie apocalypse—but the stakes are still high. The late, great, Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce asserts that modern culture, like all cultures, is rooted in a defining narrative—a myth of origins if you will—but with the peculiar idiosyncrasy of being a

The World Is Not Enough

April 26, 2021

This essay for Chapter House first appeared on 1 June 2020. Pope Benedict XVI has claimed that the most salient feature of the crisis in contemporary Western civilization is our collective forgetfulness of God. Predictably, this claim has met with widespread ridicule and dismissal — often from within the Catholic household — as the typically

A Different Kind of Storm

October 27, 2020

“[T]he Lord has given us so many days of sun and of light winds, days when the catch was abundant; there were also moments when the waters were rough and the winds against us, as throughout the Church’s history, and the Lord seemed to be sleeping. But I have always known that the Lord is

The Burning Question of Bishop Barron

October 07, 2020

Chapter House regular Larry Chapp takes a swing at Bishop Robert Barron’s implacable critics. As a general rule I am not a fan of celebrity priests. They often operate outside the established structures of ecclesiastical discipline, packing unaccountable war chests and creating online followings that make it difficult for any bishop to rein them in.

Abhorrence of Politics

September 30, 2020

Larry Chapp is fed up. “It is your civic duty to be involved!” I suppose that is true, but how one defines getting “involved” is a matter of debate—one that is frequently intense and contentious in an election year. Dorothy Day didn’t even vote. She considered it a pointless gesture at best. At worst, it

(Im)mortals and Misfits

September 18, 2020

Death teaches us that we are no mere mortals. About a month ago I received in the mail something quite extraordinary and unexpected. A man I had known in seminary passed away and left me $1000 in his will. I left before being ordained a priest, and I had not seen or spoken to Bob

Travel Companions: On Pope Francis on Christian Discipleship

September 09, 2020

Pope Francis has come in for a good bit of grief over his insistence on “accompaniment” as an essential element of Christian life and the mission of the Church. While he may deserve some of that criticism, it is certain that he has not received the credit he deserves for kick-starting a needful conversation. “Accompaniment”

“Hineni, hineni”

September 02, 2020

Christ’s mercy is not a grace that comes cheap, nor does it imply the trivialization of evil. Christ carries the full weight of evil and all its destructive force in His body and in His soul. He burns and transforms evil in suffering, in the fire of His suffering love. The day of vindication and

Appetite for Destruction

July 02, 2020

Groups are calling on Facebook to police content: why does Facebook care? This past week we learned that many of the big corporate advertisers on Facebook have pulled their ads citing the social media platform’s failure to filter out racist “hate speech”. The suspensions come after calls from advocacy groups to bring pressure on the

Unfinished Business

June 18, 2020

There is work to do in America The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago. The conclusion of that great contest created the conditions for a prohibition on slavery to be written into our Constitution. Neither the War nor the subsequent round of Constitutional amendment and legislation, however, destroyed the casts of mind or

Exorcising Demons

June 11, 2020

As I have watched the events of the past weeks unfold, I have asked myself, “How could we not have seen this coming?” Should we not have known that there is still systemic injustice and inequality in our society, engendering deep resentment and anger waiting for an event to set off the fault lines running

Would the real Dorothy Day please stand up?

May 31, 2020

Dorothy Day’s spirituality of presence in the world was rooted in tradition & uniquely suited to the laity Dorothy Day was a Benedictine oblate. What most attracted Dorothy Day to the Benedictine way was the coming together of deep Christian faith with the tradition of hospitality. That tradition is written into the very rule of