Yes, the name has changed–from the equally sanctimonious (and tongue-in-cheek) “Benedictions”–but the blogger has remained the same: David Gibson, author of the “Benedictions” blog that covered Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the U.S. in April.
You all helped make the site (and the visit) a success, and Beliefnet has asked me to stay on with a redesigned blog to provide an ongoing forum for Catholic concerns and conversations. To that end, we also broadened the blog’s mission to include not only church news and intrigue, but also faith and culture and the wider world of the past, present, and future as engaged, embraced–and often eschewed–by Catholics and Catholicism.

So now we are “Pontifications”–no less fallible than before, and no less interesting, I trust, with posts in the spirit of oldies from “Benedictions” like the one on the Catholic League’s Bill Dononhue or the post on that other alien, E.T, who the Vatican astronomer says may also have a soul.
But with you help I’d like to make “Pontifications” more even informative, interesting, and just plain enjoyable. As you’ll see below, I like to include everything from the sublime (the Pope’s Risotto) to the ridiculous (denying a church wedding to a parapalegic because he is impotent), as well, of course, as the tragic and the maddening–in the case of the response to the Myanmar cyclone–that should galvanize us to pursue justice as well as charity.
And while the blogosphere is too often a clearinghouse for mudfights and whining, I hope we can also provide a modicum of consolation and inspiration, which will likely come in the words of others, like the Jesuit priest Tom Reese, whose Pentecost homily from back in March conveys the Spirit better than I ever could, and bears re-reading throughout the year.
The blog can be found on Beliefnet’s Catholic page (where another Jesuit, Father Jim Martin, has an essay on the Father Pfleger/Barack Obama dust-up) and it can also be found in the index of the site’s other blogs.
As my spiritual mentors in the Society of Jesus would say, AMDG. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.