The Dispatch
Awake! Repent! Rejoice!
Readings: • Is 35:1-6a, 10 • Ps 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10 • Jas 5:7-10 • Mt 11:2-11 First, awaken. Then repent. Now rejoice. Those have been [...]
“The Best Books I Read in 2025”
Books
Dear Readers, With this list, we enter a third decade of the “Best Books I Read…”, which is both difficult to comprehend and heart-warming to ponder. This yearly feature began with the simple belief that [...]
Equality and the American Founding: A Catholic perspective
Columns
“All men are created equal!” Perhaps more than any other principle, this phrase captures the transcendent ideal that inspired the Founders to declare their independence from Great Britain. The triumph of the principle of equality [...]
Features
Rome and the Church in the United States
Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste for shocking people via undiplomatic language. In a conversation with the great historian John Tracy Ellis, Curley, who [...]
Features
Rights group criticizes Bishop Kukah over comments about genocide in Nigeria
The Executive Director of the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety), Emeka Umeagbalasi, has strongly criticized Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, questioning the cleric’s impartiality in addressing claims of a Christian [...]
Chapp's Schtick
Vatican II at 60
Today is the 60th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council—and one can be excused perhaps for feeling a little exhausted by the entire topic. After all, it was a council that, by [...]
Essay
Mary’s Immaculate Conception, explained by the Saints
The world was shocked when Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. While Protestants rejected the teaching outright, even many Catholics objected to the pope’s decision. Exalting the role of [...]
Essay
The Artificial God
Modern politics began in the seventeenth century with a technological ambition: to build an “artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural,” an “automaton that moves by springs and wheeles as doth [...]
Columns
What Benedict XVI taught us about Israel—and why it matters now
When devout Catholic young people start approaching you, troubled by the possibility that God has abandoned the Jews and that they somehow stand behind our social ills, it becomes clear that something has gone deeply [...]
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“All men are created equal!” Perhaps more than any other principle, this phrase captures the transcendent ideal that inspired the Founders to declare their independence from Great Britain. The triumph of the principle of equality [...] -
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The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith released today a “Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles regarding Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation” (Mater Populi Fidelis), and it has raised a few eyebrows along with [...] -
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Athanasius:
There is no "right reason" involved when defending Palestinian atrocities. Doing so is actually evil.
Peter D. Beaulieu:
"Dei Verbum"?
