Archive
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Articles
Hopes for a New Pontificate
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...
Ringing Out Hope in Nagasaki
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...
Europe and America
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...
Retrospect on a Pontificate
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...
On the Way of the Cross, in Ukraine and Hong Kong
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...
Synodality Against Episcopacy?
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...
Pope St. John Paul II, Doctor of the Church?
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...
Against the Politics of Grievance
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...
The Henry J. Hyde Federal Building, Please
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...
Demythologizing Some Recent Catholic History
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...
Lent and the Purification of Memory
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...
Putting Americans in Iron Lungs Again?
The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was transactional: RFK 2.0 abandoned his 2024 presidential campaign (which was drawing...
Cathedrals and Us
The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the nation’s capital is a magnificent neo-Gothic structure, based on fourteenth-century English models, that calls itself “Washington National Cathedral”:...
Russia’s Sacrilegious War on Ukraine
Today’s Russian Orthodox leadership is a theological, moral, and pastoral train wreck. U.S. foreign policy can’t fix that. Nonetheless, those responsible for devising U.S. foreign policy should recognize how...
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...
