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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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John F. Desmond, Kevin Tortorelli, Thomas L. Kuhlman
Not a Reset Button
Thomas L. Kuhlman
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Catholic social teaching, whether promulgated by Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century or Benedict XVI in the twenty-first, has always been contextual. The themes emphasized, although consistent in their fundamental doctrinal commitments, have...
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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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A recent address by Pope John Paul II regarding the care of patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) has left many people—Catholics and others—scratching their heads.
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Lutheran bishop Peter Rogness recently decried our national loss of awareness that government is self-government, and warned that political discourse “to rally people against their own government...is like an immune system run amuck that eats the...
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Irving Greenberg, Jim Forest, Nancy A. Dallavalle, Richard P. McBrien, Stanley Hauerwas, Terrence W. Tilley
The death of John Paul II, and the outpouring of affection and admiration it has brought forth from every corner of the globe, has reminded all of us what a remarkable individual he was and what a singular institution the papacy is.
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Much is being made of rumors that the Vatican will soon issue a decree mandating that the priest celebrate the Mass ad orientem (“toward the East” and, presumably, with his back to the people). I would like to support that, but only if we take the...
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In life, John Paul II evoked powerful reactions. Books by George Weigel and John Cornwell represent sophisticated versions of those reactions. In Witness to Hope, Weigel was nearly hagiographical. His writing on John Paul II is adulatory in the...
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In the last chapter of my Gifford Lecturers (With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology), I suggested that the great Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder and John Paul II represent the theological politics necessary...
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The Vatican's decision to speed Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood aroused great elation—and a backlash among Catholics who see the rush as unseemly. There is an obvious remedy that could bring contending Catholics together and send...
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In the Catholic media today, it is becoming harder all the time to keep a free space for public opinion inside the church. A fictional letter from a hierarch may help to illustrate the pressures. He is writing to the editor of an independent...
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Whether you love him, hate him, or can’t quite figure him out, there is no denying that Pope John Paul II has left his mark on both the church and the world during the last twenty years. Certainly one indication of the pope’s stature...
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A biblical flood of ink has been spilled trying to assess the significance of John Paul II’s recent actions. During Mass on the first Sunday of Lent, the pope made an unprecedented apology for the historical sins committed by Catholics. He...
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Robert Louis Wilken, Susan A. Ross
Robert Louis Wilken
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One of the more remarkable expressions of the openness and the atmosphere of universal communication in Western society is that religious figures are judged by their impact on other religious communities as well as their own.
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Pope John Paul II will be remembered for his service as a public witness who, by the strength of his personality and intellect—and the scope of his office—was able to command the world’s attention. Simply by traveling, as pope, he reinforced the...
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From the outset, John Paul II had a two-fold mission as pope: to bring the insights and values of the suffering church of the East (especially Poland) to the comfortable churches of the West, and to bring an end to what conservative cardinals and...
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In April 1977, as general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, I received an urgent phone call from Buenos Aires with the news that Adolfo Perez Esquivel, leader of Argentina’s human-rights movement Servicio Paz y Justicia,...
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The death of Pope John Paul II has unleashed an outpouring of grief and gratitude for a man who may well have been the most widely recognizable human being of our time. This pope’s virtually unparalleled charisma and productivity and the length of...
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This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Mulieris dignitatem, Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter on the dignity of women and a lynchpin of his effort to formulate a “new feminism.” Reaction to the pope’s prop
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John Rawls is widely recognized as the most important American political philosopher since the mid-century. His book A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, 1971) redefined its discipline and, in so doing, aroused controversy on every side.
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Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was not an ambitious man. Anyone who might be tempted to think him a careerist would be forced to conclude that he was a singularly inept one. Not only did he not choose or even actively seek the steps that defined his...
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Whatever one thinks of Pope John Paul II, no one doubts that he is a passionate man. Passionate about his native land; passionate about the church; and especially passionate about the truth of Jesus Christ. That passion infuses his fourteenth...
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About a decade ago colleagues and former students of Avery Dulles published a volume in tribute to him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The book’s title, Faithful Witness, both defined what the chief task of theology is and expressed our...
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Later this month the church’s 184 cardinals will gather at the Vatican for the sixth consistory of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate. The subject of this meeting, the first since 1994 when the pope broached the idea of issuing an apology for historic...
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In his 1995 Letter to Women, Pope John Paul II calls for a dialogue about the situation and challenges facing women. He addresses himself to all women, not just those who are Catholic, and still less to that subset of Catholic women who agree with...
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[Editors’ note: In the October 10, 2003 Commonweal, the editors took stock of John Paul II on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his papacy.]
John Paul II, who marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of his papacy October 16, has been the only pope...
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Pope John Paul II was a force of nature, a man of iron will and passionate spirituality, who was also blessed with a quick wit, a magnetic personality, and a fearless moral temperament.
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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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