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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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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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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 lay Catholic movement Focolare got a boost last year when some of its ideas—including the “economy of communion”—were mentioned favorably in Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate. On Saturday it got another boost with the first...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill
The life of faith finds an enduring metaphor in the notion of the soul’s journey to God.
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Several Catholics I know and respect have recently chosen to worship in other Christian churches as a matter of conscience. I doubt that Pope Benedict XVI will move heaven and earth to accommodate their concerns, as he has done for Lefebvrists and...
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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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Charles Taylor’s remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something quite different from what other writers on secularization have accomplished.
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The generations that have been formed in the cultural revolution of the 1960s are in some respects deeply alienated from a strong traditional model of Christian faith in the West.
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Many people have written about Chicago and Chicago childhoods. For example, my college classmate Stuart Dybek churns out short stories in which forlorn children scrape out their ethnic existences against the city's infinite western horizon and bone-...
