Editorial Commentary & Church News
Advancing the conversation behind the writing
Editor-in-Chief · Jose Manuel R. Empleo
A new encyclical letter from RITL considers why the Church has never mistaken God's silence for His absence, and what that distinction asks of those who wait.
Most of the Christian life is lived neither at Easter nor at Christmas, but in what the liturgical calendar calls Ordinary Time the long, unmarked interval between one feast and the next. It is here, the letter argues, that faith is most tested and least dramatized.
The letter, written by Jose Manuel R. Empleo and featured as this issue's lead encyclical, traces the difference between silence and absence through Scripture and the tradition of the Church's mystics, arguing that the two are routinely confused to the detriment of ordinary belief.
"The Church has never treated God's silence as His absence a distinction that changes everything about how we are asked to wait."The RITL Press, summarising the letter's central argument
What is remarkable is not merely the argument, but the register in which it is made. RITL is a Catholic journal founded on the premise that faith and serious letters belong together.
The letter unfolds in two movements. The first examines the biblical pattern of divine hiddenness, from the psalms of lament to the dereliction on the cross, arguing that Scripture refuses to resolve the tension between God's promise and His apparent absence. The second turns to the practical question of formation: how a believer is meant to hold faith and doubt together without collapsing into either presumption or despair.
For readers formed in a culture that prizes visible results, the letter's central claim is countercultural: that waiting without answers is not a failure of faith but frequently its clearest expression a disciplined patience the Church has practiced and taught for two thousand years.
Faith and letters face a reckoning. RITL contributors examine what it means to study tradition rigorously when the ground beneath it keeps shifting.
Across institutions of every kind, the question of which texts, traditions, and historical events deserve sustained attention has become intensely contested. The Church, long the custodian of a long memory, is being asked to account for how it reads its own past.
Within RITL's Collected Articles, contributors engage difficult questions not by abandoning rigour, but by insisting on it. The premise guiding their work: that the most powerful response to contested narratives is not relativism, but more careful thought and better writing.
Catholic letters are undergoing a generational renewal. Writers at RITL are learning to inhabit uncertainty and to find clarity within it.
For much of the twentieth century, Catholic letters have had to contend with a narrative of steady secular progress, each generation assuming the last had been superseded. The renewal of interest in theological and literary tradition has complicated that narrative in ways that are only beginning to be felt.
RITL's Books imprint provides a space where writers engage these questions with the seriousness they deserve publishing work that reflects genuine intellectual and spiritual risk.
Serious theological and literary writing is no longer confined to seminaries and universities. RITL contributors are proving that rigorous Catholic inquiry can begin anywhere.
The Church faces a formation challenge that is simultaneously an editorial opportunity. The habits of careful reading, clear argument, and theological seriousness are increasingly accessible to motivated writers if the editorial scaffolding exists to support them.
RITL's Essays category is precisely that scaffolding: a considered venue where contributors publish work of genuine literary and theological merit, formed by editors committed to raising the bar from the outset.
No serious editorial project sustains itself on motivation alone. The infrastructure that allows a contributor to produce a considered essay or a careful encyclical letter is, above all, a formation infrastructure one that must be carefully designed and continuously maintained.
RITL's approach positions editors not as gatekeepers but as interlocutors: readers who hold contributors to the same standards of precision, honesty, and theological care that govern publication anywhere serious. The result is not an imitation of writing but writing itself, produced under conditions of genuine accountability.
The RITL Formation Program is the formal expression of this philosophy a structured pathway through which the journal identifies, supports, and develops its most committed contributors across all five editorial categories.
There is a curious grace at the heart of essay writing done outside the academy. Because contributors exist outside established professional incentive structures, they are often freer to ask the questions that specialists find inconvenient.
The RITL Essays category has benefited from this freedom. Its pieces engage the discipline of ordinary fidelity, the theology of waiting, and the tensions between faith and reason questions that matter urgently and that deserve the care this category demands.
One of the most common questions the RITL Press receives from prospective contributors concerns what editorial review means for this journal. The short answer: it means the same thing it means anywhere else external evaluation of a manuscript's argument, clarity, and theological care by editors competent in the relevant area.
RITL does not operate a diluted or simulated review process. Pieces submitted to the journal's categories are assessed against genuine editorial standards. Authors receive substantive feedback. Revisions are expected. The resulting publications are ones their authors can stand behind with confidence.
Submissions across all five categories remain open. The RITL Press invites prospective contributors to review the submission guidelines and engage directly with the Formation Program before submitting.
The RITL Press exists because faith and letters do not fully live on the page of the encyclical alone. A piece of writing however careful, however original is a concentrated form of thought that requires context, conversation, and a wider readership to reach its potential. The Press is that wider readership's invitation into the work.
We are, at our core, a press office in the oldest and most serious sense of that phrase: a venue where the questions animating RITL's editorial categories are explained, contextualised, and placed in dialogue with the broader currents of Catholic thought in our moment. We write for readers who are serious but not necessarily specialists for the curious reader unsure where to begin, and for the wider community of faith and letters that benefits from knowing this tradition is very much alive.
In this inaugural edition, we have chosen to anchor the front page with our featured encyclical letter not because it is the only work of significance in our categories, but because it represents something we want to name clearly: that the ambition of this journal need not be modest. It is, we believe, a signal of what becomes possible when the editorial infrastructure, the formation, and the literary culture are built with sufficient seriousness.
The category dispatches, the thematic commentaries, and the sidebar notices in this issue reflect the full breadth of RITL's editorial life. We publish across five distinct categories not to be comprehensive but to be honest about the range of serious questions that motivate our community. Future editions of the Press will develop long-form profiles of the editorial process, interviews with contributors, and critical engagement with the tradition our categories are joining.
We are grateful for your readership. The conversation has begun.