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Articles
The USCCB’s Just War Error
Just war is again being discussed in the public square by policymakers and prelates alike. Recently, the chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine, Bishop James Massa, made a...
A Gracious and Modest Punch to the Gut
For Instanceby rhina p. espaillatwiseblood books, 126 pages, $18 Dominican-American poet and translator Rhina Espaillat, at ninety-four, has spent decades examining life and then, graciously and modestly, punching us...
An American Pope at a Time of War
When it comes to papal matters in Rhode Island, I am often interviewed on the local news. Thus, I get my “fifteen minutes of fame” whenever a pope dies...
The Almost-Greatness of Donald Trump and Leo XIV
Reading—for obvious reasons—Henri Daniel-Rops’s The Church in the Dark Ages, I have been repeatedly struck by the truism that moments of institutional crisis demand genuinely great leaders. Movements, forces, trends...
The Smoke Clears in Budapest
On Sunday night, after a heated and chaotic election campaign, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party lost in a landslide after sixteen years in power. The...
An Open Letter to Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J.
Your Eminence: In an article recently published by a major German Catholic website, you suggested that the question of whether the Church can ordain women has not been definitively...
New York Is Bullying Nuns Who Care for the Dying
New York governor Kathy Hochul recently made headlines for decriminalizing assisted suicide, claiming as motivation her compassion for the terminally ill. Now her state’s public health agency has targeted...
Reviving Orestes Brownson
Who is worth remembering? Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, though so destructive to Christian thinking, are household names. But Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), America’s most profound Catholic thinker and a...
The Myth of the Independent Girlboss
Is the independent girlboss dead? Maybe she never existed to begin with. The release of Lindy West’s latest cringeworthy memoir, Adult Braces—about how her husband out-woked her into becoming...
From Male to Man
Nicholas Tobias (a pseudonym) had already finished a master’s degree in history at Oxford and was wrapping up another terminal master’s at Princeton when he was disillusioned by the entitlement and naivete . . .
Not So Evil Empire
Reformed thinkers have recently been debating whether or not civil officials should endorse Christianity and promote and protect the church. James Baird’s King of Kings concisely assembles a biblical...
Dorothy Day’s Complicated Cause for Sainthood
Twenty-six years ago, John Cardinal O’Connor launched Dorothy Day’s candidacy for sainthood: “It has long been my contention that Dorothy Day is a saint—not a ‘gingerbread’ saint or a...
When Rhetoric Becomes Reckless
Though it seemed to be an opening bid in a negotiation that, mercifully, ended in a provisional ceasefire, President Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday morning was a moment...
What the Wall Street Journal Didn’t Print
On March 21, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy profile of the pope as its “Saturday Essay.” The subtitle—“Pope Leo XIV pushes back against President Trump. Can the...
Looking for the Real Catholic Church in New York City
Young Catholics are on the rise in New York City, according to the Washington Post, the New York Post, and social media influencers who sell the faith with an...
