One hundred fifty-five years ago, when the freshly minted Kingdom of Italy conquered the rump of the Papal States and Pope Pius IX withdrew behind the Leonine Wall as the “prisoner of the Vatican,” elite […]
Why are so many American colleges and universities in crisis? Drew Gilpin Faust, an accomplished Civil War historian, gave the answer, perhaps unwittingly, at her 2007 inauguration as the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University. Noting […]
Rhetorical restraint is not prominent in Washington these days. Given the volatile personalities involved and the escalatory effects of social media, one hesitates to declare that the apogee of apoplexy has been reached — or […]
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 Vatican basilica, I received an email […]
The riddle of Japanese Catholicism has long fascinated me. At the end of World War II, Catholics were less than 1% of the population of Japan. Today, eighty years later, Catholics are less than 1% […]
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 translated into French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, and […]
During the March 2013 interregnum following the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI, and in the conclave itself, proponents of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, as Benedict’s successor described him as an orthodox, tough-minded, courageous reformer […]
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 bishops in the Church. But the Franco-Prussian […]
Editor’s note: This essay was published originally on November 18, 2020, and is reposted in response to the news that McCarrick died recently at the age of 94. From the day it was announced that […]
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 may seem in his or her […]
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