The Catholic Church’s German crisis
The 21st-century Church owes a lot to 20th-century German Catholicism: for its generosity to Catholics in the Third World; for the witness of martyrs like Alfred Delp, Bernhard Lichtenberg, and Edith...
View ArticleMen such as these: a Memorial Day reflection
Like most denizens of Washington, I pay too little attention to the sites other Americans make sacrifices to visit. Earlier this month, though, prompted by reading James Scott’s Target Tokyo, a...
View ArticleThe myth of Washington gridlock
“Gridlock” along the Potomac—the difficulties the Congress has in getting things done, the difficulties the Congress and the White House have in cooperating to get things done, or both—is regularly...
View ArticleThemes for surviving ‘Ordinary Time’
I’m fortunate to hear good preaching on a regular basis. But even the best Catholic preaching these days leans far more toward moral exhortation than biblical exposition. This strikes me as a missed...
View ArticleNow, the Kasper theory of democracy?
A few weeks ago, after Ireland voted to approve so-called “same-sex marriage,” a correspondent sent me an e-mail quoting Cardinal Walter Kasper’s comment on the result: “A democratic state has the duty...
View ArticleThe summer reading list
Fifty years ago, prior to my freshman year at Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin High School, the late Father W. Vincent Bechtel introduced me to The Summer Reading List, upper-case. Father Bechtel didn’t fool...
View ArticleThe Church and the “New Normal”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision, these sober thoughts occur: (1) The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] has rendered a decision that puts the Court at odds with the...
View ArticleThe Church and the “New Normal”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision, these sober thoughts occur: (1) The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] has rendered a decision that puts the Court at odds with the...
View ArticleCuban hopes for the papal visit
In early June, the distinguished Catholic editor Dagoberto Valdés Hernández, a leader of the Cuban democratic opposition, gave a lecture at Georgetown and reprised its main points later that day at the...
View ArticleProgressive Catholic authoritarianism: an enduring problem
Back in the day (the late 1960s or thereabouts), Father Andrew Greeley – the model of an old-fashioned liberal Catholic – accused Father Daniel Berrigan (the beau ideal of post-conciliar Catholic...
View ArticleFlannery O’Connor and Catholic realism
From this vale of tears, one can never be sure about the boundaries of acceptable behavior at the Throne of Grace. Is laughter at earthly foibles permitted? Encouraged? I like to think so. Which...
View ArticleThe amazing, and now Venerable, Father Al
At an inch or so over five feet and weighing, I would guess, something on the underside of 100 pounds, Sister Winnie, a soft spoken Filipina, is not your typical dinner speaker. Yet a few weeks ago...
View ArticleTaking the “long view” on Russia
Queried about the Holy See’s less-than-vigorous response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, senior Vatican officials are given to saying (often with a dismissive tone, as if the question came from a...
View ArticleThe perils of “preferred peers”
On Catholic campuses that aspire to Top Ten or Top Twenty status in publicity sweepstakes like the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, one sometimes hears the phrase “preferred peers.”...
View ArticleThe deeper issue at the Synod
Looking back on the controversy that preceded Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, I get the impression that there was an even deeper issue in play than the question of the morally...
View ArticleCatacomb time?
At Christmas 1969, Professor Joseph Ratzinger gave a radio talk with the provocative title, “What Will the Future Church Look Like?” (You can find it in Faith and the Future, published by Ignatius...
View ArticleAn epistolary romp through Catholicism
In 2003, Elizabeth Maguire, publisher of Basic Books, made a proposal: I should write Letters to a Young Catholic as part of a series she was doing that included volumes like Letters to a Young...
View ArticleRemembering “The Few”
Seventy-five years ago, on Sunday, September 15, 1940, Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine were driven from the prime minister’s country house, Chequers, to the nearby village of Uxbridge: a...
View ArticlePopes in these United States
The history of popes in these United States is full of surprises. And one of them, to begin at the beginning, includes the little-known fact that Blessed Paul VI was not the first pontiff to set foot...
View ArticleLessons from the Rough Rider for today’s political ruffians
Sitting at a writing-desk in the White House on December 11, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt was an unhappy camper. In previous letters, he addressed his correspondent as “Dear Maria.” Now, it was...
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