Catholicism
The Lives of Christian Moms
When I taught CCD, I used to tell my kids, ‘If everybody else is doing it, it’s probably wrong.’ The Christian life is difficult. The truth is difficult.” So said Kelley (as we may call her) when I interviewed her, in January 1999, a few…
The New Iconoclasm: What We’ve Forgotten
A few years ago, I attended a conference given by a wise Benedictine abbot, who recounted an experience he had during a trip to the Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos. What he described was an episode directly related to the veneration of…
Looking for Lost Heads – The Catholic Thing
In P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster, Lady Glossip, mother of an eligible daughter, asks Bertie Wooster how he would support a wife. His answer: “Well, I suppose it depends on whose wife it was. A little gentle pressure beneath the elbow…
The Incarnation: Logos Becomes Man
It’s been thirty years since I entered the Church, but I am still learning more about what the birth of Christ (Christmas) really means, including that the Christmas Season only ended yesterday officially. Reading the Gospel of John, I find…
Accepting the Gospel and Preaching It, Too
Pope Saint John Paul II begins his encyclical letter on the missions (Redemptoris missio, 1990) by citing Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians. The Apostle to the Gentiles writes there: “Woe to me if I do not preach the .” (1…
How They Died: Martyrdom of the Apostles
In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that Christ invited St. Peter “to the supreme followship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied. . .thereby forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship…
Comedies, Earthly and Divine – The Catholic Thing
A good friend and long-time prominent Catholic commentator called me this week to ask my perspective on current American foreign policy. Not for the first time, I had nothing coherent to offer. This has been the situation for some 15 years now.…
Freedom in the Ties That Bind
We Americans have a thing about freedom. We didn’t invent freedom – even in the limited sense of political freedom – though we sometimes like to think (and occasionally act) as though we have an unbreakable monopoly on it. Land of the free, and…
Eternal Precepts for Navigating Newfangled Things
What hysteria-creating, Wall Street-swirling, media-obsessing New Thing awaits us in 2026? It was COVID in 2020, ChatGPT in 2022, Generative AI in 2023, DOGE in 2025. The next New Thing is anyone’s guess, but if it is like its predecessors, it…
A Consistory to Revitalize the College of Cardinals
During a decade of service at the Vatican Secretariat of State, I was constantly perplexed by the Holy See’s unwillingness or inability to utilize already existing ecclesial structures for effective governance. As the Cardinals meet in Rome over…