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Last fall, the Archdiocese of Boston released an ambitious plan designed to stem the decline it has experienced—in priests, Mass attendance, and treasure—since the 2002 wave of sexual-abuse scandals.
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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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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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Both presidential campaigns are calling this election a choice between two starkly different visions of America. At least on that score both are right. The crucial question has to do with the role and scope of government, especially in the economy.
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Catholics have been arguing about the Second Vatican Council—about what it did and didn’t do, about what it meant and still means or what it never meant and could never mean—for half a century.
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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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The sixty or so delegated observers at the Second Vatican Council, of whom I was one, were a privileged lot. Catholic bishops sometimes complained, and not always humorously, that we outranked them in terms of the council’s protocol.
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Martin E. Marty, Philip Kennedy, Robert P. Imbelli
On September 5, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the declaration Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church
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The late Methodist liturgical scholar James White once said: “Why teach ecumenism when you can teach liturgy?” White knew whereof he spoke, having taught for decades at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, and then at the...
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“Rome goes fishing in Anglican pond” was the BBC News headline on October 21, 2009, announcing the Holy See’s decision to establish “personal ordinariates” for Anglicans wishing to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church.
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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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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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In winning election as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio defied the papal pundits, even though they should have seen him coming. His rise marks the decisive shift within Roman Catholicism toward Latin America and the developing world. In...
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A little more than a year ago, in November 2011, Catholic and Muslim leaders from around the world convened in Jordan for the second forum hosted by A Common Word, an organization created in 2007 to promote interfaith engagement by highlighting...
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For the past fifteen years, my sister Meg Kaveny has worked with the homeless in Portland, Oregon. Many of them are mentally ill. Meg moved to the Pacific Northwest as a Holy Cross Associate, and stayed on to earn a graduate degree in social work.
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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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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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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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A tattoo of a cross shimmers on an African Methodist Episcopal minister’s calf, a few inches above her red stiletto sandals. A chubby-cheeked young rabbi and his newly pregnant wife dig into celebratory pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. A Muslim...
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Taking their inspiration from the Qur’an, Muslims refer to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and a harder-to-define faith community, the Sabians, as “People of the Book.” These monotheistic neighbors of Muhammad (c.
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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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We usually see the pictures hanging on our walls only out of the corner of an eye as we’re hurrying past them. But every once in a while, we pause, look up from our busyness, and find ourselves drawn to one of them.
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In the fall of 1965, I worked in the final session of the Second Vatican Council. A young priest and doctoral candidate, I was tasked with distributing documents and collecting votes and amendments from my assigned section of bishops.
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Sandra Dutton, Wayne Sheridan
Richard Ford is the author of the novels The Sportswriter,
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In a certain sense, every Christian is Jewish. This is something I could have told you years ago—I’m a scholar of religion, after all. But it’s possible to know a thing without fully comprehending it. While I knew that Christianity started out as a...
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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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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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Noticing that the words "Vatican II" evoked no response in her high school students, an Irish nun recently told me she asked them what Vatican II was. After some time and with much hesitation, one of them asked: "Would that be the pope’s summer...
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From the time of the ancient Greeks, we have been counseled: “Know thyself.” As if we could. And yet we know instinctively that the advice is right. We should know what moves us, what we truly desire, the limits of what we can know, what we really...
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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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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...
