Archive
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Articles

Manners, Methods, and Greatness
Browsing Footprints in Time, the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a tale from eighty years ago with a lesson for American public life...

Catholics, Hippocrates, and Reforming American Medicine
I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; his daughter, my mother, was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law, a...

Joe Biden: When The Last Hurrah Met Catholic Lite
Four years ago, this column praised the courage of Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for his Inauguration Day letter...

From Doubting Thomas to Doubting Peter?
Ralph Fiennes is a remarkable actor. And if he wins an Academy Award for his brilliant performance in Conclave, this section of his masterfully delivered homily to the College of Cardinals, of...
Stacked Decks, “Conversation in the Spirit,” and the Catholic Future
Various cultures—English, Turkish, Chinese—claim to have invented the maxim, “The fish rots from the head down” (a favorite in your nation’s capital during the unhappy years when the Redskins/Commanders...
Jubilee 2025: New Year’s Resolutions and Resources
Jubilee 2025 began on Christmas Eve 2024, with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s in Rome, and will conclude on January 6, 2026, when that door...
Jimmy and the Patriarch, at Christmas
The post-Christmas liturgical calendar may seem a bit Scrooge-like, as the child-centered, innocent joy of the Nativity is quickly followed by three feasts of a different, even sobering, character. ...
Embassy Vatican: Some Demystifications
A change of presidential administrations typically leads to changes in U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad, especially at the ambassadorial level. This, in turn, leads to speculations, some of them zany,...
Books for Christmas—2024
A friend told me recently that bookstores were making something of a comeback. I hope that’s true, because browsing bookstores is one of life’s great pleasures. (For the ultimate...
“Luce,” Mascot of Dumbed-Down Catholicism
During his years as professor of fundamental theology at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, Salvatore “Rino” Fisichella was often cited by American seminarians as their favorite professor—an exponent of dynamic...

An Open Letter to JD Vance
Dear Senator Vance: As Americans celebrate a unique national holiday, the origins of which remind us that our democracy is an experiment in ordered liberty “under God,” let me...
A Great Christian Witness, Too Little Known in the West
The Venerable Andrey Sheptytsky, who died eighty years ago on November 1, 1944, was one of twentieth-century Catholicism’s outstanding figures, whose remarkable life and heroic ministry as leader of...
The Continuing Scandal of the Vatican’s China Policy
In the annals of historical boorishness, it would be hard to find something more egregious than the Holy See’s timing as it renewed its 2018 agreement with the People’s...
When Was Baseball’s Golden Age?
Amidst a presidential campaign in which many of our countrymen deplore the choices we face in November, let’s take a break, follow the counsel of Ecclesiastes 3:1 (“For everything...
Repurposing the Catholic Campaign for Human Development
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), rhetorically oversold as the “U.S. Church’s anti-poverty program”—Do no other such programs exist?—was an interesting idea in its time. That time has...