A glimpse at what faces the next president of the United States can be gleaned from a speech by Dr. Attah Abu Al-Subh, culture minister of Hamas, which controls the legislative council of the Palestinian Authority. Speaking on Al-Aqsa TV…

In late April and early May, the blogosphere was in an uproar over two documents circulated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is charged with strategic coordination among federal agencies of the war against terrorism. “The Words That Work”…

Twenty-five years ago, in early May 1983, the Catholic bishops of the United States approved what many imagined would be a historic public policy statement: The Challenge of Peace (TCOP). The debate during the drafting of TCOP was intense; the…

If the United States had a nobility, Avery Dulles would have been born into it. His great-grandfather, John W. Foster, and his great-uncle, Robert Lansing, both served as Secretary of State. So did his father, John Foster Dulles, who also…

When you add it all up, I’ve spent more than a year and a half of my life in Poland.

My Polish adventures began sixteen years ago, when I went to Warsaw, Cracow, and Gdansk in June 1991 to learn how…

Prior to Maximilian Kolbe’s canonization in 1982, there was considerable debate in higher Church circles about whether this Polish Franciscan, who had sacrificed his life in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz to save the condemned father of a family, should…

Benedict XVI had barely left the Catholic University of America on April 17 when the Catholic higher education establishment’s spin machine shifted into high gear. One university president said that what most impressed him about the papal address to Catholic…

Amidst some splendid Catholic theater, there were a lot of ideas to chew on in Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States. The pope’s sermon in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in which he used the stained glass, the harmony, and the…

“Political theology” is a controversial term, these days. In The Stillborn God, Columbia professor Mark Lilla argues that political theology is lethal for democracy, because democracy requires a public square scoured of religious reference points. Needless to say, I take…

One of the more jarring transitions in the liturgical year is the rapid switch from the beautiful pastoral exhortations of the First Letter of Peter, which the Office of Readings prescribes for Easter Week, to the high drama of the…

In my Walter Mitty life, I’m not turning two with Cal Ripken at Camden Yards, or playing the Emperor Concerto with the National Symphony; I’m not even writing the Great American Novel. No, when I imagine a different life it’s…

John Paul II arrived in Warsaw on June 2, 1979; there and then, he ignited the revolution of conscience that would give birth to the Solidarity movement, the Revolution of 1989 and the end of European communism. Distinguished secular historians…

Who were the most publicly influential American Catholics of the twentieth century?

By shaping Vatican II's teaching on Church-and-state, Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ, helped turn Catholicism into the world's foremost institutional advocate of religious freedom. John F. Kennedy put Catholics…

I regret having to revisit this matter, but as a point of personal honor has been raised, I must.

In early 2003, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts engaged in a vigorous public debate over the definition of marriage. A proposed constitutional…

In the early 1990s, I was given lunch at the Roman headquarters of the Society of Jesus by two very — no, make that extremely — high-ranking Jesuits. The table-talk turned to a fascinating question: Are there permanent religious charisms in the Church? Most religious congregations die within a century of their founding; our Lord might delay his return for tens of thousands of years, so that we are the "early Church." Given that fact and that possibility, could we, today, judge that there are permanent religious charisms in the Church, gifts of the Holy Spirit that will endure institutionally in religious orders?

At the beginning of Lent, I was sent a moving account of the recent funeral procession of a young American soldier, which took place near his hometown in the South. The most striking section read as follows:

"[T]he most incredible thing happened following the service on the way to the cemetery. We went to our cars and drove to the cemetery escorted by at least ten police cars with lights flashing…Everyone on the road who was not in the procession pulled over, got out of their cars, and stood silently and respectfully, some with their hands over their hearts.

A Canadian friend recently alerted me to an international petition being organized by Avaaz.org, a "community of global citizens who take action on the major issues facing the world today." (According to the organization's polyglots, "‘avaaz'…means ‘voice' or ‘song' in…Hindi,…

In his book, Without Roots, Pope Benedict XVI deplored the addiction to historical self-deprecation rampant at the higher altitudes of European cultural and intellectual life: a tendency to see in the history of the West only "the despicable and the destructive." The same problem exists on this side of the Atlantic; in our universities and among our cultural taste-makers, the healthy western habit of moral, cultural, and political self-critique can dissipate into forms of self-loathing. Perhaps a civilization can afford to think of its past as pathology when it has no competitors. That is manifestly not the case today, when the West is being challenged by radical Islamist jihadism and by the new and market-improved authoritarianism of China.

Last month, the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus elected Father Adolfo Nicolas, a Spaniard, as General of the order. A few days later, Father Nicolas gently chided Roman journalists for running some "not so helpful" stories about…

One hundred fifty years ago, on Feb. 11, 1858, an illiterate, impoverished 14-year-old girl received the first of 18 visions of Mary, who eventually revealed herself to Bernadette Soubirous as "the Immaculate Conception." In mid-19th century Europe, Lourdes, a small…

While the diplomatic maneuvering between the Holy See and Muslim leaders has taken several striking turns in recent weeks, the Vatican's strategic purpose in this conversation has been clear since Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 Christmas address to the Roman Curia.…

I'd not been in Berlin since 1987 - before the Wall came tumbling down — so I eagerly accepted an invitation to speak at an international conference there this past November. The change is dramatic. Where the dreaded "Vopos" or…

There's been a lot of chatter since 9/11 about Islam's need for a Martin Luther, a Muslim reformer who would accelerate this great world religion's acceptance of two key planks in the platform of political modernity: that religious freedom is…

2008 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Chair of Unity Octave, which has evolved into an annual pan-Christian week of prayer running from January 18-25. Prayer, it seems, is what is most required in the early 21^st century quest for…

As my too-cute-to-be-true grandson, Master William Joseph Susil, careened around the house over Thanksgiving, exercising his rapidly expanding vocabulary and wreaking havoc on unsecured objects in his path, I couldn't help but imagine possible futures for him.

The guy who breaks…

A year ago, the formidable Dorothy Rabinowitz asked me for a Christmastide Wall Street Journal column, to be dubbed the "Five Best Books on Christianity." I suggested Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts; Dorothy demurred. So I simmered down and gave…

Judged by the standards of a century replete with political slaughter, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 can seem a relatively tame affair. Tens of millions died in Stalin's Ukrainian hunger famine, the Holocaust, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and Pol…

Thoughtful Americans across the spectrum of political opinion are rightly concerned about the degree to which our national politics has degenerated into the manipulation of consumer desires and passions, often by the seductions of the electronic media. That those manipulations…

Doomsday-mongering is a staple feature of the faux-intellectual life, occasionally influential and sometimes quite lucrative. The Club of Rome's dire certainties about the "limits to growth" shaped Carter Administration thinking and policy. Paul Ehrlich's tediously repetitious predictions that "over-population" would…

Some have suggested that the removal of the Rev. Ray Martin as pastor of several parishes in South Baltimore — for offenses that included officiating at a funeral Mass with an Episcopal priest — indicates a lack of commitment to…

A real piece of work: back in the day, that's what we'd have called my friend Nicholas Eberstadt. By his own confession, Nick left Harvard a convinced Maoist — only to find, during his early graduate work at the London…

On October 11, at the end of Islam's holy month of Ramadan, 138 Muslims from around the world addressed a letter to Pope Benedict XVI and numerous other Christian leaders. Entitled "A Common Word Between Us and You," the letter…

John F. Kennedy would now be 90 years old — a circumstance virtually impossible to imagine, for those of us alive on November 22, 1963. When Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets killed the 35th president of the United States, our memories…

When you add it all up, I've spent more than a year and a half of my life in Poland.

My Polish adventures began 16 years ago, when I went to Warsaw, Cracow and Gdansk in June 1991 to learn…

A philosophically-minded young friend recently sent me a fine rant, after having watched a presidential candidates' cattle call on CNN. The discussion had focused on religion.

Several candidates, who identified themselves as Catholics, had indicated that their Christianity was rather…

Six years after 9/11, there are certain things we can't not know. We may wish these things weren't true. We can try to ignore them. But safe passage through a moment in history fraught with both danger and possibility requires…

Visitors to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris will soon be able to ponder a commemorative marker carrying this inscription:

I was born Jewish. I received the name of my paternal grandfather, Aaron. Having become Christian by faith and by baptism,…

In Men at Work, George F. Will began his celebration of baseball defense with a tale of Cal and Bill Ripken turning a rally-killing double-play while their father watched from the visitors' dugout in Toronto — and concluded with an…

Tradition tells us that baseball is the national pastime. Economics tells us that it's pro football. Casual conversation makes it clear that the America's favorite sport is complaining about government. Herewith, then, something counterintuitive: an encomium to government, indeed to…

A while back, I noted with a touch of asperity that the "Prayer of the Faithful" too frequently deteriorates into serial sermonettes, an AmChurch innovation without foundation in the Church's liturgical tradition. I was particularly scornful of petitions that politicize…

Ah, the summer of 1967. A gangly young Australian priest named George Pell turned up at my Baltimore parish and became a family friend; none of us imagined him the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney four decades hence, but there it…

In The Joys of Yiddish, the late, great Leo Rosten noted with relish the classic definition of chutzpa: "Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his father and his mother, throws himself on the mercy of the…

As of June 1, 2007, the diocese of Birmingham had been without a bishop for two years, while the diocese of Pittsburgh (not to mention the entire state of Arkansas) had been bishop-less for over a year. Without significant change,…

In early June, I received a forwarded e-mail from a correspondent who's done several tours in Iraq. He, in turn, had just heard from an Iraqi fellow-Catholic, a former translator for U.S. forces there, of the death of Father Raheed…

The press was even more an unruly beast in 1787 than it is today; yet the Framers of the Constitution gave the fourth estate extraordinary latitude, convinced that the robust exchange of ideas was democracy's lifeblood. Journalism's virtual immunity from…

Writing in the May 21 issue of America, Bishop Donald W. Trautman of Erie, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on the Liturgy, called the lay people of the Church to the barricades, urging us to "speak up!" in response to…

Forty years ago this coming summer, some two dozen prominent Catholic educators met at a Wisconsin resort and issued the "Land O'Lakes Statement." Those were heady days in the academy: the Council of "openness," Vatican II, had ended eighteen months…

Flying to Brazil on May 9, Pope Benedict XVI was asked whether he supported the excommunication of Mexican legislators who had voted to legalize abortion. The Pope replied, "Yes, this excommunication was not something arbitrary, but is foreseen by the…

The day after the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial birth abortion ban by a 5-4 vote, the pseudonymous "Diogenes" offered a rather chilling commentary on the Catholic World News Web site:

"In her angry dissent in Gonzalez v. Carhart, (Justice)…

With Pope Benedict XVI heading for Brazil in mid-May to open the fifth general meeting of CELAM, the pan-continental conference of Latin American bishops, the focus of international Catholic attention will rightly turn to one-half the world's Catholic population, its…