Full disclosure, up front: Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver is an old friend; the Archdiocese of Denver syndicates this column to Catholic papers throughout the country; I played a (very) minor role in introducing Archbishop Chaput to my friends at Doubleday. So I’m not exactly a disinterested party in the matter of the archbishop’s new […]

It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious time for the reception of a papal encyclical on the morally appropriate means of family planning than the summer of 1968. Now, 40 years after it was issued, Pope Paul VI’s letter, Humanae Vitae, may finally be getting the hearing it deserves. Why? Because the developed world is […]

In 1850, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman wrote his fellow-Englishmen from Rome, announcing that Pius IX had restored the diocesan hierarchy in England and that he, Wiseman, would be cardinal archbishop of Westminster. “From Out the Flaminian Gate,” a pastoral letter longer on baroque rhetoric than ecumenical diplomacy, caused a perfect storm in Protestant England. Queen Victoria […]

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 on May 18, Dr. Al-Subh had the following to say about the current president, whom […]

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” and “Terminology to Define the Terrorists” urged government officials and U.S. diplomats to avoid “Islamism” […]

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 publicity generated by that debate put Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, chairman of the drafting committee, on […]

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 negotiated the post-World War II peace treaty with Japan. Avery Dulles’s uncle, Allen Dulles, was […]

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 the Church and John Paul II had helped accelerate the demise of European communism. (That […]

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 be canonized as a martyr. John Paul the Great, agreeing with the many Poles and […]

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 educators was what it was not: a dressing-down. Still another president cooed that she felt […]

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 countervailing tensions of the building’s stonework as metaphors for the life of the Church, was […]

“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 exception to Professor Lilla’s argument, although those who think they have a direct, specific, divine […]

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 Book of Revelation, read during the next four weeks of the Easter season. I was […]

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 as an architect.
On the face of it, my architectural fantasies are quite absurd. I can’t […]

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 into play at the highest level of our national politics. Fulton J. Sheen gave Catholicism […]

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 amendment defining marriage as the stable union of a man and a woman, H.3190, was […]

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 alleged problems between the Jesuits and Pope Benedict XVI; any notion of a rift with […]

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 town in the French Pyrenees, was about as backwater as backwater gets. Today, as for […]

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. There, while reflecting on his September 2006 Regensburg Lecture and his December 2006 visit to […]

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 Volkspolizei once goose-stepped, Starbucks now brews. In 1987, you could walk two blocks to either […]

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 a basic human right, and that democracy is the form of government most likely to […]

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 Alex Rodriguez's MLB record for career home runs? Author of the Great American Novel? Victor […]

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 her a list that included the late Dorothy Sayers's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. […]

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 Pot's Cambodian killing fields; the civil war in Spain managed a mere 500,000 killed. In […]

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 can have a nasty edge to them is just as obvious, and just as deplorable. […]

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 cause mass starvation and other global catastrophes were rewarded by a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, […]

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 ecumenism on the part of Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien. In fact, the controversy points 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 School of Economics, that he couldn't out-argue British development economist Peter Bauer.
So unlike others who […]

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 was released in a media-savvy rollout in several world capitals and was welcomed with enthusiasm […]

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 of him were frozen in a kind of memorial amber.
It's hard enough to picture […]

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 how the Church and John Paul II had helped accelerate the demise of European communism. […]

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 easily bracketed when they put on their hats as public servants. "Does ontology mean nothing […]

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 us to see things as they are.
What can't we not know?
We can't not know […]

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, I have remained Jewish as did the Apostles. I have as my patron saints Aaron […]

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 appropriately blue-collar ending:
"After the third out the two Ripkens ran off the field, same pace, […]

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 the federal government, in fact to a typically controversial part of the federal government — […]

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 the liturgy by promoting, as self-evidently desirable objects of the Lord's attention, various planks in […]

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, and soon, this glacial pace in the appointment of bishops is going to create a […]

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 Ganni. The broken English of the Iraqi's e-mail conveys the force of the scene better […]

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 legal sanction implies, however, certain responsibilities. One of them is to distinguish rigorously between what […]

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 the new translations of Mass texts being developed by the International Commission on English […]

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 before; student protests against the Vietnam War were heating up; the once-staid Catholic University of […]

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 Code (of Canon Law). It is simply part of Church law that the killing of […]

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 problems and its prospects.
CELAM meetings have tended toward the rambunctious. The meeting in Medellin, […]

At Mass on the morning of April 17, hours after a shooting spree at Virginia Tech had left dozens dead (including the shooter), the homilist spoke of the "tragedy" that had unfolded in Blacksburg the day before. I had no sooner gotten home from church and checked the e-mail than I found a communication from […]

On April 16, 2005, the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith hosted a small party for the congregation's prefect, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Cardinal Ratzinger turned 78 that day; the conclave to choose a new pope would be sealed on April 18; so a combination birthday/bon voyage party seemed in order. It […]

Last December's visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople revived speculation that the millennium-long division between Rome and the Christian East might soon end. That was certainly the dream of Benedict's predecessor, the Servant of God John Paul II, who really did seem to believe that Rome and Constantinople could achieve […]

On a recent day off occasioned by some evil thing fastening upon me and laying me temporarily low, I re-read Chaim Potok's two wonderful novels, The Chosen and The Promise, the pleasures of which happily compensated for my indisposition.
The Chosen is a modern classic, a brilliant story of fathers-and-sons evocatively set in a distinctive […]

Last September, on a lovely afternoon during what Poles call "Golden September," a friend took my wife and me to Jamna, in the forests of southern Poland between the Beskidy Mountains and Cracow. You won't find Jamna on many maps — it's that small. Despite its obscurity, though, Jamna is indelibly imprinted on the spiritual […]

About nine months ago, a reporter from the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire called and asked whether the rash of "atheist books" being published in the U.S. suggested a new trend in American culture. I replied that I didn't think so. Publishing was a bit like hemlines and tie widths, I suggested: there are fashions, and the […]