The September 2 issue of The Spectator featured a cartoon of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak riding an ascending rocket. Inside, the lead article – a preview of the G-20 Summit […]
It’s a rare occasion when the word “unprecedented” can be used for a Church whose history extends over two millennia. Yet something unprecedented happened in the Polish village of Markowa on September 10, when an […]
I wish all those who find themselves concerned, depressed, befuddled, or angry at the present state of the Church could have spent July 3-21 in that city of saints, Cracow, along with my students and […]
“Pope Francis has just given the Vatican his Ratzinger,” declared one July 2 headline; “Pope Francis Finds His Ratzinger,” announced another, four days later. Both quickie assessments of Argentinian Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández’s appointment as […]
The latest self-inflicted blow to the Vatican’s China policy came in mid-July, when the Holy See announced that Pope Francis had “recognized” Bishop Joseph Shen Bin as Bishop of Shanghai — despite the fact that […]
Westerplatte, a narrow peninsula framing the Bay of Gdańsk, was the scene of one of the first battles of World War II in Europe. On Sept. 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on […]
In mid-May, I spent two intense days in Lisbon, where a new Portuguese edition of my Letters to a Young Catholic was being prepared as a catechetical resource for World Youth Day-2023. In and around […]
Pope Benedict XVI often said that, in today’s skeptical and cynical world, the saints make a more persuasive case for the truth of Christianity than the most sophisticated arguments. One has to wonder, then, why […]
One of the worst of contemporary hymn-texts bids us to “Sing a new Church into being.” Not only does this injunction debase the noble hymn-tune “Nettleton;” it teaches a pseudo-Christian hubris that is contrary to […]
The first words of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church — one of the council’s two most important texts — signaled a decisive development in Catholic self-understanding. Rather than begin its reflection […]
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