Catholic Church
Cardinal Sarah and the Crisis in Bioethics
Cardinal Robert Sarah’s address this summer to the European Parliament identifies a foundational problem in contemporary bioethical discourse: the widening gap between language and reality. Words that once conveyed stable meanings –…
The Greatness of the First St. Gregory
Today the Church marks the feast of St. Gregory the Great, pope and doctor of the Church. He was born around 540, just a few years before the death of another great European saint (and co-patron of Europe) Benedict of Nursia. The lives of these…
The English Martyrs and Tyburn’s Hidden Waters
In London, on the corner near the Marble Arch, there’s a noteworthy medallion on a traffic island commemorating Tyburn Tree. When English Catholics think of Tyburn, they think of the martyrs who died there – dragged through the streets after…
The Church in Dialogue: What Approach? And With Whom?
The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes says that the Church has the duty of responding to “the perennial questions which men ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to…
Fulton Sheen: Casting Fire on the Earth
In 1945, Louis Budenz – a Communist activist and managing editor of the party’s newspaper The Daily Worker – was received back into the Catholic Church by Fulton Sheen. The two men had met earlier because Sheen had been publishing devastating…
Relaxing With the Bible Alone
At times it’s enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to…
Relaxing With the Bible Alone
At times it’s enjoyable to kick your feet up with the Ignatius Bible on your lap and spend a couple of hours reading the Gospels or some of those stirring Old Testament stories. The experience may be so absorbing that we might find it easy to…
Is Religious Faith Foolishness – or Wisdom?
Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is that something such that it has the remarkable capacity to evolve into the complex yet orderly universe we behold, so orderly that predictability and science are possible? Why do even the…
A Blindspot in Catholic Social Teaching: Generational Theft
Search the Catechism, the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, indeed the entire Vatican website – search all you want – for teaching about what we call the “national debt.” You will not find it. You can find teaching about the debt that…
Some Thoughts on Stoner Alley
One of my favorite, if cynical, figures from Reformation history and Europe’s Wars of Religion is Henri de Bourbon. Raised as a committed (Calvinist) Huguenot, he succeeded to the French throne as Henri IV. But in a dominantly Catholic nation,…