What’s a Remarried Catholic to Do?

To write a biography of Avery Dulles is to enter the vitriolic conflict over interpretations of the legacy of Vatican II, the current state and future prospects of Catholicism in the United States, and the health of Catholic theology. There is much to be said for Carey’s way of organizing the myriad events and scholarly works in the life of a very public intellectual. Yet it finally fails to capture the complexity of the figure that emerges in the pages of this book.

A Pastoral Opportunity Like No Other

Any time the Obama administration touches issues related to the Catholic Church, it seems to get itself caught in a rhetorical and moral crossfire that leaves all involved wounded and angry. This is what's happening in the battle over how contraception should be covered under the new health-care law.

The small-government movement has created resistance to the reasonable proposals in the recent Vatican statement on financial reform. Yet, separate from the many strengths of the statement and the many problems in the way it’s been received in this country, there remains a significant hole in official Catholic social teaching on the economy.

Twenty-five years ago the U.S. bishops issued their last comprehensive commentary on the moral dimensions of our political economy. The anniversary of their Economic Justice for All arrives during the nation’s most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, at a time when Americans yearn for a positive vision of an economy that can support struggling families, restrain private greed, and provide resources for enriching the common life.

Boyhood Memories of an Ordinary Bigotry

Seldom have the man and the moment come together more felicitously than in the life of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). His furrowed brow and intense, arresting gaze were perfectly suited to the midcentury years of world war and Cold War, of mutual assured destruction and agonizing reappraisals. He may have been born with gravitas; certainly he had acquired more than his share by middle age.

When one thinks of Marshall McLuhan—literary scholar, communications theorist, celebrity—Catholicism doesn’t necessarily spring to mind. Not that his biographers have avoided it. The prevailing versions of McLuhan as Catholic include: ardent convert; heir to G. K. Chesterton; religious reactionary opposed to Vatican II; apocalyptic visionary or Catholic Cassandra. Yet McLuhan’s Catholicism is not so neatly categorized.

Finding good resources for adult faith formation isn't easy. For years, the field has been wide open for someone who could combine actual substantive content with an engaging yet adult-worthy teaching style. Into this breach comes Catholicism.

How a rectory saved me

How persuasively is the church making its case against gay marriage?

In the second part of the interview, Cardinal Francis George discusses the recent study of the "causes and context" of the sexual-abuse crisis, the bishops' role in assessing the Catholic identity of institutions, and retirement.

An interview with Cardinal George

As the 2012 presidential campaign is about to begin, Cardinal Francis George offers his new book, God in Action, in which he attempts to limn a politics informed by the Catholic philosophical tradition.

The trouble with the new Roman Missal

The liturgical wars heat up

The second John Jay report & the Vatican's letter to bishops

The bishops & Elizabeth Johnson

When a Philadelphia grand jury found "substantial evidence of abuse" committed by 37 priests in ministry, it criticized the archdiocese's review board: "In cases where the...review board has made a determination [about those cases], the results have often been even worse than no decision at all.” What happened?

We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress have not-so-stealthily declared a “war on women”?

When a Catholic college resists a union

How not to write about the cardinal & his time

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan on 60 Minutes

Last month, the USCCB issued a statement claiming Elizabeth A. Johnson's latest book “contaminates the traditional Catholic understanding of God.” Regrettably, the bishops' statement reflects, among other problems, a theological failure to take evolution seriously.

If George Weigel had lived in nineteenth-century France, he would have been termed an ultramontane—one who looked beyond the Alps to Rome. Instead, he looks from Washington to Rome.

The abuse crisis resurfaces in Philadelphia

Relativity without Relativism

The latest demonic possession movie, The Rite, is The Exorcist for sissies.

A thirtysomething compares the world after Facebook & the world before it.

A review of Peter Seewald's book-length interview with Pope Benedict XVI

Secularism & Democracy

Remembering Wilfrid Sheed

A homilist's education

Garry Wills's 'Outside Looking In'

Moral teaching after ‘Humanae Vitae’

It was in Rome during the heady days of Vatican II. There was to be a meeting of the Consilium, the commission for the reform of the liturgy, where the subject of deaconesses was raised—and not one woman was in the room.

Lisa Sowle Cahill’s middle way

Benedict & condoms

If we forget the Bible, in what sense are we Christian?

 ‘Three Faiths’ at New York’s Public Library

The flight into Egypt has been a popular theme for artists for many centuries. The art has often been sublime, but the theology less so. The flight was by no means an idyllic excursion. It was a poor young family’s desperate escape from a tyrant king—an experience that has relevance for millions of refugees in today's world.

Everyday suffering, everyday sanctity

My mother said, “Why didn’t they tell us these things in school?” I had just come into her room. “Like what?” I said. My mother is in an assisted-living facility run by our church. “Well,” she said. “Did you know that after the Blessed Mother gave birth to Jesus, she went into the desert, to a place God had prepared for her? She was there for twelve hundred and sixty days. It’s in the Bible. Did you ever learn that in school?”

The church in the public square

In a church without enemies, what are they to do?

My devotion to the Sacred Heart

We were as close to God as we were to our animals or as close to our animals as we were to God. I was born on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin in 1933 where I lived with my parents, two brothers, two sisters, twenty-five cows, sixty chickens, one three-legged dog, and three semi-feral cats. It was a life of religious labor.

A review of The Divine Sister, a loving sendup of convent pictures 

One out of every three Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. That dwarfs the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler. Thomas Reese, SJ, recently described that loss as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”

Why some devout Catholics are leaving the church

Could the vogue for Herbert McCabe portend a renaissance of liberation theology and the revolutionary spirit of the ’60s? His admirers have not linked his Catholic faith and his socialist politics, and McCabe himself denied an intrinsic connection. Still, there exists a bond between his theology and his radicalism, a bond particularly worth examining today. 

A short & unfinished history 

The legacy of Avery Dulles

When bishops speak about health-care policy, Catholics don't have to agree

Might the USCCB be wrong about the health-care law?

Extending the argument against sex-selective abortion

The Catholic vision of Canadian author David Adams Richards

In his new book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Fr. James Martin tries to introduce a new generation of spiritual seekers to the Jesuit tradition.

A pope who can and cannot change

How the bishops conference gets health-care legislation wrong

A selection of articles from Commonweal on Benedict XVI.

A profile of the ethicist Gilbert Meilaender

What should a twenty-first-century cathedral look like? Forget the stained glass of Chartres, the sculpture of Amiens, the soaring vaults of Beauvais, the spire of Strasbourg. None of that seemed right for California, where Evangelicals have built modern mega-churches and a crystal cathedral, and where Mormon temples glisten in the sunshine.

No, this “Year of the Priest” has not been the best for priests or for any Catholics. Just when some of us thought we might be turning the corner, moving on, re-establishing some level of trust, it turns out the wounds are far deeper and much more widespread than we thought.

Stanley Hauerwas & the Christian Difference

The New York Times's worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic worldview. But what makes the Times unique is that it is not just the nation's self-appointed newspaper of record. It is, to paraphrase Chesterton, an institution with the soul of a church.

In praise of Rep. Bart Stupak's courage

Much of Pope Benedict's good work in addressing the sexual-abuse crisis is now likely to be brushed aside as the history of his own negligence in handling an abusive priest when he was archbishop of Munich thirty years ago comes to light.

The bishops' take on the health-care bill is wrong

In a fit of radical judicial activism, the Montana Supreme Court has ruled that physician-assisted suicide does not violate state law, making Montana the third state (after Oregon and Washington) to legalize the "procedure." 

Certain modern readers have tended to reconstruct Teresa according to today’s cultural norms—a recent Publisher’s Weekly headline labeled her “a mystic for our times.” But to understand Teresa’s achievements and appeal, it is important to acknowledge that she was, first of all, a woman of her own times.

David Tracy has God in a box. Or is it the other way around? For Tracy, long regarded as one of the most distinguished and adventuresome contemporary Catholic theologians, such a dilemma might be intriguing, even amusing, were it not so personal.

Making sense of Rome's 'pastoral provision' for Anglicans

Beware those authorities who criticize the independent Catholic press on the ground that pluralism equals relativism. What they really favor is monopoly. They want a single joint blast on the trumpet, or an orchestra in full flow. What they do not like are the discordant notes.

A conversation with editors past and present

John L. Allen's The Future Church will disappoint some readers and exhaust others. It recapitulates much of what Allen has reported in recent years and offers an admittedly shaky premise on which to base a forecast.

The U.S. bishops & health-care reform

Catholics, the Church & the Culture Wars

If the priest is going to face east during Mass, so should everyone else.

Will Catholic schools become charter schools?

Can they be saved?

What did you miss at Commonweal Conversations 2009?

Why Is Rome Investigating U.S. Nuns?

Could the issue of abortion derail health-care reform legislation?

Solidarity and subsidiarity in Benedict XVI’s ’Caritas in veritate’

Bishops need to help heal the wounds of division, not deepen them.

  Visiting a priest behind bars.

  How window legislation in sexual-abuse suits could undermine our legal system.

  Catholic writing for a critical age

From the archives: a review of Archbishop Charles Chaput's Render unto Caesar

  Is there a double standard at work?

A young priest speaks.

  What do the sobering findings of a new study on religious belonging mean for Catholics today?

A diagnosis and prescription

How helpful is the U.S. bishops’ new statement on politics & church teaching?

  The Los Angeles Archdiocese’s historic clergy sexual-abuse settlement.

Is peace breaking out among Catholic scholars in the United States?

Why won’t the Catholic neocons who supported the Iraq war admit their errors?

A new series of financial scandals threatens to further erode the laity’s trust in their bishops.

The recent U.S. bishops’ statements contained wisdom, but left much to be desired.

Are U.S. seminaries turning out intellectually formed, mature priests? Not often enough.

  Catholic bishops are usually loath to acknowledge dissent within their ranks. So it was surprising when the U.S. bishops publicly released the results of an internal poll that showed them almost evenly split on new English translations for the Mass. The divisions among the bishops revealed that perhaps they do not walk in lockstep as much as conventional wisdom holds.

  “Catholics are everywhere,” writes David O’Brien. John Roberts is about to be confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Some of the most prominent members of Congress are Catholic. And much of the last presidential campaign was taken up with the issue of whether prochoice Catholic politicians could receive Communion. The Roberts nomination is an occasion for the church to put its social teachings into play in the debates about abortion, privacy, the family, economics, war and peace, and other issues.

The Editors of Commonweal on the dismissal of Thomas Reese as editor of America magazine: "It is hard to judge what is more appalling, the flimsy case made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)—apparently at the instigation of some American bishops—against Reese’s orthodoxy and stewardship of America, or the senselessness of silencing perhaps the most visible, and certainly one of the most knowledgeable, fair-minded, and intelligent public voices the church has in this country."

  Lent is a time to take stock, confess sins, and, when necessary, begin anew. It is fitting, then, that the U.S. Catholic bishops have chosen Lent to issue their reports on the church’s catastrophic sexual-abuse crisis. This year’s report from the National Review Board (NRB) and the Office of Child and Youth Protection (OCYP) was published February 12. It makes clear the ongoing need for such an accounting.

In the Editors’ open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops, clarification is sought from the bishops on their own teaching on abortion. They call for greater clarification on whether the bishops intend to translate Catholic moral teaching and enactment into civil law.

"Defending a Catholic politician’s access to the Eucharist is not the same thing as defending his or her support for unrestricted access to abortion. Sad to say, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s position on the legal status of abortion is extreme." The Editors address Kerry’s "Catholic problem."

  Who could blame the bishops for wanting to do something about abortion? Frans Jozef van Beeck asks. But denying Communion to prochoice Catholic politicians won’t do. This blanket condemnation smacks of the pastoral debacle of Humanae vitae.

What do bishops who propose refusing the Eucharist to prochoice politicians hope to accomplish?

  The U.S. Catholic bishops’ reports on sexual abuse in the church represent a landmark endeavor. Peter Steinfels goes beyond the numbers to lay out what we’ve learned and what we still don’t know. Fusce fermentum odio quis neque. Phasellus vitae lacus sed enim faucibus euismod.