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On April 12 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty released a statement, “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” calling on Catholics and others to resist what the bishops characterize as unprecedented
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Testifying before Congress about religious liberty last February, William Lori, archbishop of Baltimore, proffered an analogy.
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On April 12, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops published “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” its latest statement decrying alleged governmental attacks on religious freedom.
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Recently, a group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post cast as an "open letter to 'liberal' and 'nominal' Catholics." Its headline commanded: "It's Time to Quit the Catholic Church."
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Beginning in Advent of this year, the language of the Mass will be very different. A new translation of the Roman Missal—the book of prayers used in the Mass—will be put into use in all Catholic churches in the English-speaking world. Some who have...
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In the memorable opening lines of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the bishops proclaimed their solidarity with “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age.” One...
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Conservative Catholics complain that too many liberal Catholics instinctively greet every statement from the Vatican with suspicion, skepticism, or derision. It’s a fair point. The motives and judgment of those who appear unthinkingly hostile to all...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
What are the U.S. Catholic bishops really arguing about with the Obama administration? Is it religious liberty, as they insist? Is it contraception and sterilization, as the headlines in my archdiocesan paper stress?
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The Obama administration has rejected appeals to exempt religious-affiliated institutions, such as hospitals and universities, from the mandate issued by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring all health-insurance policies to include...
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In a March 14 statement (“United for Religious Freedom”), the Administrative Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly reaffirmed its opposition to the contraception mandate in the Affordable C
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In 2003, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ National Review Board put together a request for proposals for two studies of the church’s sexual-abuse scandal. One study would examine the “nature and scope” of the crisis.
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In July, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny delivered a stinging indictment of the Vatican’s handling of the sexual-abuse scandal in his country.
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When the German journalist Peter Sewald recently asked Pope Benedict XVI whether the Catholic Church was “opposed in principle to the use of condoms,” the pope replied that under some circumstances the use of a condom could be a “first step” toward...
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The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive...
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1963: Vatican II allowed the use of “the mother tongue” in the liturgy, entrusting bishops conferences with overseeing translations, which Rome would then approve. Bishops conferences throughout the English-speaking world established the...
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Churches that preach the immorality of contraception are excused from federally imposed obligations to promote the practice. But federal law will soon require that the employees of hospitals and other charitable institutions run by such churches—...
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History & Mystery: John C. Cavadini reviews the second volume of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth
Ratzinger at Vatican II, by John Wilkins
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Cardinal Francis George, OMI, archbishop of Chicago, was president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2008 to 2011.
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The Italian word dietrismo translates literally as “behind-ism,” but it means more than that. It expresses the Italian belief that things are never as they seem, that there is always a story behind the public story. The powerful know what’s really...
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The aftershocks of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to certain elements of recent health-care legislation are still being felt in the church months later.
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When is the Catholic Church being “political”? When is it being “too political”? During the recent election season, Minneapolis–St. Paul Archbishop John Nienstedt mailed a DVD to every Catholic household in Minnesota, urging the enactment of a...
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New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S.
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If you work in bioethics, are of a certain age, and have a degree from the University of Virginia, colleagues are likely to assume you studied with James Childress, the legendary teacher who co-authored Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a...
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Many years ago I started looking for a copy of Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Highlights of Vatican II, then long out of print. Copies were as rare and as prized as gold dust, but eventually I found one in Chicago, among the office bookshelves of a...
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On the Wednesday after Easter, nine hundred Notre Dame students serenely walked into the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center to see a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. “Is Religion the Problem?” was the question. About two hours...
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Cardinal Avery Dulles (1918–2008) was probably the most respected Catholic theologian in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The author of twenty-four books and more than eight hundred articles, Dulles was widely known...
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With regret and some trepidation, Commonweal and many other prolife Catholic commentators and organizations, including the Catholic Health Association, disagreed with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops about the health-care-reform bill that...
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I’m tired of being nice about it, tired of being politically correct when this issue comes up. So I’ll be blunt. Someone just left my parish to join one that has an altar on wheels, and I’m angry about it.
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Twenty-five years ago the United States bishops issued their last comprehensive commentary on the moral dimensions of the American political economy.
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The following sidebar is part of the longer article Fabricating Bernardin, by Peter Steinfels.
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According to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, in the first century AD the Roman emperor Caligula “wrote his laws in a very small character, and hung them upon high pillars, the more effectually to ensnare the people.” Twelve...
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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In mid-November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops discussed a report detailing an extensive “review and renewal” of its domestic-poverty program, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
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The nation's Roman Catholic bishops will make an important decision this week: Do they want to defend the church's legitimate interest in religious autonomy, or do they want to wage an election-year war against President Barack Obama? And do...
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The Catholic Church is strenuously—some would say obsessively—opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. How persuasively is the church making its case? Is the church right to emphasize the issue in the uncompromising way some of its most...
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Hardly anyone had expected that Pope Benedict XVI would confront the scandal of clerical sexual abuse in the direct way he did during his recent U.S. visit, referring to it four times in five days. In another development that had not been...
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The gracious tone of Sen. John McCain’s election-night concession speech was both impressive and reassuring, especially his call for Americans to bridge abiding differences and forge the “necessary compromises” the nation requires. Unfortunately,...
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I bought my first rosary in 1960. It was plastic and pink, and it cost a dime. Our Catholic school had mandated that all first-graders purchase a rosary from the principal’s office on a certain day. But when that day came, only three of us arrived...
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I respect Peter Quinn’s work, but along with Dimitri Cavalli (Letters, May 7), I must object to his treatment of the proposed canonization of Pius XII (“Why the Rush?” March 12).
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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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Politicized culture wars are debilitating because they almost always require partisans to denigrate the moral legitimacy of their opponents, and sometimes to deny their very humanity. It's often not enough to defeat a foe. Satisfaction only comes...
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Around these parts, the “Year of the Priest” has been as much of a nonevent as the opening of Al Capone’s vault or spending New Year’s Eve with the Y2K bug. Although Pope Benedict XVI officially began the observance last June, it wasn’t until eight...
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In the past nine years, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been invoked, distorted, and exploited to serve a variety of political and ideological agendas. But no such effort has been quite as shameful as the current campaign against...
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In late October 1866, a young student and poet named Gerard Manley Hopkins boarded a train in Oxford and took the sixty-mile journey north to the industrial city of Birmingham. There he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry...
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It is hard to know what is more exasperating, the ill-informed statements of Catholic prochoice politicians about the church’s teaching on abortion, or the response of certain bishops, whose criticism of politicians sometimes seems designed to be...
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Sometimes, when talking to younger audiences, the theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill will describe herself as a “relic” of the distant and benighted era before the Second Vatican Council.
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Cardinal Francis George, OMI, archbishop of Chicago, was president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2008 to 2011.
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Compromise is not a dirty word in democratic politics, nor is the balancing of conflicting goods foreign to the church’s tradition of casuistic moral reasoning. So why do so many American bishops appear to spurn both in their prolife advocacy? Do...
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Last month, the Committee on Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a critique [PDF] of theologian Elizabeth A.
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Stanley Hauerwas is the most immediately likable bombthrower I have ever met. I first encountered him and his essays during that part of the 1970s I spent in the newly hatched field of bioethics.
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On May 20, 2010, the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement supporting H.R. 5111, sponsored by Congressmen Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) and Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.). H.R.
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During a parliamentary debate this summer over the Catholic Church’s handling of sexual-abuse allegations, Ireland’s Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, railed against the “dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, and narcissism” of the Vatican—strong words from any...
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Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Luke Timothy Johnson
In late March, the Committee on Doctrine of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a critique [PDF] of theologian Elizabeth A.
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There has been a lot of loose talk about the current crisis facing the Catholic Church and the Vatican in particular.
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Marc Ouellet, primate of Canada and archbishop of Quebec City, has a new job. Two, actually. Last month, Pope Benedict named him prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
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Late in her life, the Vermont historian Abby Maria Hemenway recalled that, while she was a young girl in the early 1840s, she had a vision of Our Lady in a field behind her house in Ludlow. Not a common occurrence for a Yankee Baptist girl, you...
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The candidate to be ordained deaconess is presented to the bishop.... As she bows her head the bishop imposes his hand...praying:
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Too often when someone proposes the reform of church structures, the reformer is attacked for borrowing from the secular political field, as if this were necessarily a bad thing. But throughout history the Vatican has often imitated the organization...
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Che Guevara once wrote that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. For some—especially those over fifty—that remark will call up the illusions of the 1960s, when many a callow undergraduate succumbed to the charms of revolution...
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Pope Benedict XVI has put ecumenism high on his agenda. Right from the start of his papacy, he has reached out to other churches and stressed the unity of all Christians. Yet despite good intentions, fault lines in his approach are beginning to show...
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While I took Lent and Easter more seriously than ever this year—in terms of prayer, Scriptural reading, reflection, and discipline—I didn’t go to Mass. In fact, I haven’t been since Christmas.
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