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 […]
The National Catholic Reporter recently saw fit to mark Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s 75th birthday by perpetuating two myths—falsehoods, really—about events in contemporary Church history in which the cardinal was involved. As it happens, I was, too. So I’m […]
On December 20, 2002, I was at lunch in the papal apartment when the wide-ranging conversation John Paul II always encouraged took an unexpected turn, with the pope asking me how President Ronald Reagan was […]
The Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the nation’s capital is a magnificent Neo-Gothic structure, based on 14th-century English models, that calls itself “Washington National Cathedral”: a non-sequitur repeated by many others. […]
Browsing Footprints in Time, the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s longtime private secretary, John Colville, I found a tale from eighty years ago with a lesson for American public life today. The idiosyncrasies of the British government being […]
I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a physician; his daughter, my mother, was a medical technologist; my mother-in-law, a nurse. My brother is a physician; […]
Four years ago, this column praised the courage of Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, then-president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), for his Inauguration Day letter to President Joe Biden. In an entirely respectful […]
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