Month: April 2011
Special Report
The Enduring Popularity of Traditional Art
On March 19, 2007, a massive piece of traditional religious art was unveiled to delighted parishioners at Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano in Southern California. The Grand Retablo, or decorative altarpiece, stands 42-feet high by […]
Editorial
Anticlerical Week at La Sapienza
The poet Czeslaw Milosz once observed with wonder that by the end of the 20th century the only real defense of reason came from the papacy. Paralyzed by skepticism and relativism, academia had given up […]
Special Report
Pope Benedict’s Saints
By canonizing some of the faithful, i.e., by solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace, the Church recognizes the power of the Spirit of holiness within […]
Special Report
A Genuine Conversion or Act of Perjury?
There is still considerable fall-out in the United Kingdom from the announcement of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s conversion to Catholicism. His formal reception into the Church last December was not unexpected, given that his […]
News
A Christmas Nightmare
Last December, Christians in India’s eastern Orissa state suffered some of the worst persecutions in the country’s history—a Christmas nightmare orchestrated by Hindu bigots who run wild in the jungles of the state’s Kandhamal district. […]
The La Sapienza Lecture
Last January, Pope Benedict XVI canceled a lecture at Rome’s La Sapienza University due to a furor of student and faculty protests objecting to his visit (see World Watch, page 8 for report). The Vatican […]
The Wanderer Gets the Blues
Dion DiMucci is undoubtedly the first member of the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame to cite Pope John Paul II, Scott Hahn, and Christopher West as influences. The once-troubled singer-songwriter has returned to the blues on […]
Books
A Long and Rich History
Pope John Paul II canonized 120 Chinese Catholic saints on October 1, 2000. Yet Western works on the Church in China remain scant. In such a small field, this book is warmly welcomed, and has […]
Opinion
Hillary’s Catholic Crowd
On the issue of abortion, Senator Hillary Clinton is the most extreme presidential candidate ever. In a July 2005 analysis of her abortion views, the New York Times noted that the only part of the […]