Those who remember the epic pontificate of St. John Paul II may recall a tall, handsome layman with well combed, iron-grey hair, dressed in a black business suit, white shirt, and black tie, following the […]
There’s a steak house on East 50th Street in midtown Manhattan, to which Cardinal Timothy Dolan and I would sometimes walk for dinner after a pre-prandial or two in his sitting room. The restaurant was less […]
P.D. James’ detective novels, featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, are every bit as gripping as those penned by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edith Pargeter (who wrote as “Ellis Peters” when creating […]
Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American journals, writers were driven to distraction by the fanatical fact-checking characteristic of the magazine’s gimlet-eyed editors. But the old New Yorker ain’t […]
In a 1974 address to a group of lay Catholics, Pope Paul VI noted that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because […]
Having recently lamented in this space that book reading is on life support in these United States, I find myself in the awkward position of recommending a made-for-television series as good preparation for the nation’s […]
The Roman Missal provides four distinct Mass texts for the celebration of the Nativity of the Lord: the “Vigil Mass,” the “Mass During the Night,” the “Mass at Dawn,” and the “Mass During the Day.” […]
When it was first published in 1993, Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical on the reform of Catholic moral theology, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), dealt a severe blow to the pride of many German […]
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 […]
Surveys indicate that reading books is dropping precipitously across all age groups. This is a tragedy in itself; it’s also a social disaster, as a post-literate society risks becoming a post-rational society. All the more […]
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