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In late May, Trump administration officials at the highest level, frustrated by what they regard as Vladimir Putin’s incomprehensible obstreperousness over his war on Ukraine, suggested that their patience...

One hundred fifty-five years ago, when the freshly minted Kingdom of Italy conquered the rump of the Papal States and Pope Pius IX withdrew behind the Leonine Wall as...

Why are so many American colleges and universities in crisis? Drew Gilpin Faust, an accomplished Civil War historian, gave the answer, perhaps unwittingly, at her 2007 inauguration as the...

Rhetorical restraint is not prominent in Washington these days. Given the volatile personalities involved and the escalatory effects of social media, one hesitates to declare that the apogee of...

Within a few hours of the election of Pope Leo XIV and his masterful presentation of himself to the Church and the world from the central loggia of the...

The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics were less than 1 percent of the population of Japan. Today, eighty...

In 2005, I published a small book entitled The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God. It had a fair sale in the U.S. and was...

During the March 2013 interregnum following the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, and in the conclave itself, proponents of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J., as Benedict’s successor described him...

Last Christmas, I borrowed a thought from the English spiritual writer Caryll Houselander and suggested in this space that the wood of the manger anticipates the wood of the Cross: that...

After defining, within strict limits, the infallibility of papal teaching on faith and morals, the First Vatican Council intended to take up the parallel question of the authority of...

The Catholic Church is prudently patient in awarding the title “Doctor of the Church” to her greatest teachers. However luminous someone’s explication of the truths of the Catholic faith...

Woke,” shorthand for what was once known as “political correctness,” helped fuel a grievance-based progressive politics that did immense damage to the American body politic, while filling young minds...

DuPage County is one of the collar counties bordering Chicago. For years, it had the great good sense to send to the U.S. House of Representatives a man the...

The National Catholic Reporter recently saw fit to mark Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s seventy-fifth birthday by perpetuating two myths—falsehoods, really—about events in contemporary Church history in which...

On December 20, 2002, I was at lunch in the papal apartment when the wide-ranging conversation John Paul II always encouraged took an unexpected turn, with the pope asking...