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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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I have been a religious sister for more than thirty years, part of a community that has been active in this country for over a century, and whose work centers on teaching and health care. Our order belongs to an umbrella organization, the Leadership...
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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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Few tools in the historian’s kit are as fundamental as periodization. By naming distinct stretches of time, historians give shape to history’s flow: the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration (or, alternatively, of...
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René Page died on February 2, 2010. He was eighty-six. His obituary did not appear in the New York Times or, as far as I know, in any other newspaper.
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Marcel Breuer would have been proud. So would Baldwin Dworschak. And maybe even St. Benedict as well.
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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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The papacy is an institution that matters, whether or not one is a religious believer. The succession of the popes, all 262 of them, is the world’s most ancient dynasty.
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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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John Kalawa, the softspoken grandson of a Limba king, tells me, “I will come to collect you at 5:00.” “Fine,” I say. I don’t know where we’re going; I know only that it will be an adventure. In Makeni, Sierra Leone, everything is an adventure.
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Playwrights and screenwriters have had several years to mine the clergy sexual-abuse scandal, but it is only with John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Doubt that someone has written something of lasting artistic value.
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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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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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As Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan have repeatedly demonstrated, it’s hard to look your best in a mug shot. Even so, I could see from the photograph in the paper that the years hadn’t been kind to the man whom I had last seen decades ago in the...
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The idea that the universe is ultimately without meaning—an idea advanced by many of the new atheists—has often struck me, and other believers, as nihilistic and even antihuman.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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To write a biography of Avery Dulles (1918–2008) 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 h
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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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Michael kneels on concrete just behind a row of empty folding chairs. One by one, others enter quietly and join him. A few kneel, others sit. All seem to be in an attitude of anticipation. They are accustomed to waiting.
The wail of a steam-powered...
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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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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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I met the theologian Fr. James Alison in the blogosphere. I’d written a post presenting his fascinating suggestion that Benedict XVI was slowly preparing the way for a change in church teaching concerning homosexuality.
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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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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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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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My monsignor uncle, Fr. Jack, and Aunt Gert, his sister, were something of a cliché in the Irish-Catholic universe in which I grew up: the unmarried sister who serves the priest brother, in this case as his live-in cook.
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The following sidebar is part of the longer article Fabricating Bernardin, by Peter Steinfels.
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On a hot fall day in Rome not long ago, I crossed the vast expanse of St. Peter’s Square, paused momentarily in the shade beneath a curving flank of Bernini’s colonnade, and continued a little way beyond to a Swiss Guard standing impassively at a...
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Grown-Up Men
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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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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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Their number is not legion, and it continues to dwindle. The few remaining Second Vatican Council Fathers alive today are in their nineties, and their able theological experts—the periti—not far behind.
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Public expressions of grief, even at their most authentic, are a kind of performance.
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From junior high school through college, I drifted from the church. But after college and before I was about to move out of state for graduate studies, I experienced a dramatic spiritual awakening.
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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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It was a Mass celebrating a major anniversary of the parish and I was right in the middle of the homily. It was also one of those exquisite moments when the message and the congregation connected to such a degree that you could hear a pin drop. I...
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The fact that Francis of Assisi hated to be put on a pedestal does not stop us from doing so as his annual feast arrives today.
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I went to a Catholic school where everyone went to daily Mass.
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I’ve changed my mind about the outcry against sex-selective abortion. Since the 1980s, when the issue emerged here in India and neighboring China, I’ve been skeptical of feminist objections to aborting baby girls on the basis of their sex.
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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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“Nothing changes” is one definition of ritual. And top to bottom the Mass is still a ritual, with little room for deviation. The priest now does a few things he did not do before Vatican II, but the list of changes is quite small and the essence of...
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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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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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The story begins on a bright afternoon many years ago, one I remember as though I’d seen it. (This is natural enough in a family like ours, with its canon of approved stories.
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By Friday afternoon, when most teachers are looking forward to the weekend, I am already gearing up to spend most of Saturday preparing my Sunday homily. My Sundays are spent celebrating Mass at the parish run by my religious order in Brooklyn, or...
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This month marks the beatification of John Henry Newman (1801–90), long considered a saint by some and even worthy of being declared a doctor of the church.
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People have been explaining themselves, their relationship to the gods, and what life means with myths for thousands of years, before language began to be written down and ever since. One of the first epics to be recorded, the Babylonian tale of...
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Monica Mignone, a twenty-four-year-old educational psychologist and an active Catholic, was abducted from her family’s apartment in Buenos Aires on May 14, 1976. I had known her father, Emilio Fermín Mignone, in the mid-1960s, when he worked in...
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John F. Haught’s comments (“Unevolved,” April 7) on the criticism of Elizabeth A. Johnson [PDF] by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are clearly right in part. Haught argues that not all suffering can be attributed to human sin.
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Raimundo Panikkar died at his home near Barcelona on August 21. He was ninety-one.
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What should we say, amid a culture in which marriages evaporate like mist, about the sacramental status of divorced and remarried Catholics? What should we do?
