William Francis Murphy, the emeritus bishop of Rockville Centre who died on March 26 at age 85, was not a household name in American Catholicism. He did, however, have a considerable impact on both the […]
My Lenten reading has included an interesting, if somewhat odd, book about the greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church: Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare, a philologist currently teaching at Bryn Mawr. The interesting part […]
The entire purpose of Lent, now past the halfway mark, is to prepare us for the glory of Easter and its revelation of the destiny that God first intended for humanity “in the beginning” (Genesis […]
Early Sunday morning, July 28, 2002, things were looking grim for the closing papal Mass of World Youth Day in Toronto. The previous four days had been a tremendous success, symbolized by hundreds of thousands […]
Forty-seven years ago, Pope John Paul II issued his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man). The first letter in the centuries-old encyclical tradition devoted to the Christian idea of the human person, Redemptor Hominis was also what […]
Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Vatican Secretary of State from 1979 to 1990—and before that, the architect and chief diplomatic agent of the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI—initially played hard-to-get when I tried to interview him for […]
Those who remember the epic pontificate of St. John Paul II may recall a tall, handsome layman with well combed, iron-grey hair, dressed in a black business suit, white shirt, and black tie, following the […]
There’s a steak house on East 50th Street in midtown Manhattan, to which Cardinal Timothy Dolan and I would sometimes walk for dinner after a pre-prandial or two in his sitting room. The restaurant was less […]
P.D. James’ detective novels, featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, are every bit as gripping as those penned by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edith Pargeter (who wrote as “Ellis Peters” when creating […]
Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American journals, writers were driven to distraction by the fanatical fact-checking characteristic of the magazine’s gimlet-eyed editors. But the old New Yorker ain’t […]
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