His neighbors in 1940s Oklahoma would have found it hard to imagine the boy they knew as Stanley Francis Rother as a future martyr, and...

When they were working together some years ago at the Ukrainian Catholic University — the only Catholic institution of higher learning in...

Photo by Jimmy Conover on Unsplash Amidst the sundry aggravations of contemporary life in these United States, few have such a cringe-inducing effect on me as a ubiquitous neologism that appeared eight times in a November column in the Wall Street Journal . The article in question speculated on the future contract possibilities of the wondrous Aaron Judge, whose 2022 campaign with the Yankees may have been the greatest offensive season in baseball history. But there is offens

The Annunciation, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 1655-1660. Now, on Christmas Day, the nine months have been fulfilled. What began on the day of Annunciation is made visible to the world in the person of the newborn babe of Bethlehem, who is both Son of God and Son of Mary. History is forever changed. The “little flock” of whom Jesus will speak in Luke 12:32 (“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”) is already here: in Mary and Jos

Daniel Ibañez/CNA The Year of Our Lord 2023 will likely witness Catholic dramas we cannot predict now; that is the way of Providence. What we can know with certainty about next year is that the German crisis in the world Church will come to a head, because what’s happening in Germany will collide with the first session of the Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church in October 2023. And the resolution of the German crisis will be, if not wholly determinative, then hugely cons

Photo by Andreea Radu on Unsplash Last month’s midterm elections made it painfully clear that many pro-life advocates and politicians are at sea in the post-Roe v. Wade environment. Shawn Carney and Steve Karlen’s What to Say When: The Complete New Guide to Discussing Abortion (Kolbe & Anthony Publishing) is a good primer for all those working to rebuild a culture of life in the United States. David Hoffman’s Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and His Daring Que

Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash Memo to both newly elected members of Congress like J.D. Vance and incumbents like Josh Hawley and Kevin McCarthy: It’s time to stop sloganeering (“America First!” “No blank checks for Ukraine!”) and get serious about what is happening in eastern Europe. A good place to start would be to revisit the 1948 Genocide Convention. That treaty, to which the United States is an accessory, defined “genocide”  as “any of the following acts committed

Photo by James McNellis via Wikicommons CC BY 2.0 I’ll confess to some exasperation when, during the 2016 campaign, Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence described himself as an “evangelical Catholic.” Three years earlier, I had published a book on the Catholic future entitled Evangelical Catholicism , and what Mr. Pence meant by being an “evangelical Catholic” — a cradle Catholic who had really come to know the Lord Jesus through evangelical Protestantism — was not

Thanks to the Franco-Prussian War, the First Vatican Council was suspended in October 1870 and never reconvened. Before its unanticipated end, Vatican I did important work: it defined the universal scope of papal jurisdiction (and thus frustrated the claims of the new nationalists to authority over the Church) while spelling out the precise, limited circumstances in which the Bishop of Rome can teach infallibly on matters of faith and morals. Nonetheless, the council’s abrupt

On the morning of October 17, 1978, the newly-elected Pope John Paul II concelebrated Mass with the College of Cardinals and pledged that the program of his papacy would be the full implementation of the Second Vatican Council. That was his “definitive duty,” for the Council had been “an event of utmost importance” in the two millennia of Christian history. As I explain in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), the next 26-and-a-half years saw Jo

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr | CC BY-SA 2.0) No one who has worked in Washington for more than four decades, as I have, can possibly imagine Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., as one of the sharper knives in the drawer. Even in the retrospect of 31 years, his attempt to instruct future-Justice Clarence Thomas in natural law theory during Thomas’s confirmation hearings is still cringe-inducing. He self-destructed in several presidential campaigns because of verbal gaffes (and p

Writing my new book, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books), afforded me the welcome opportunity to dig into the Council’s 16 texts and the many fine commentaries on them. It also made me ponder why the Council was necessary. That question is often raised today by young Catholics who, unsettled by the excessive ecclesiastical air turbulence over the past decade and generally ill-informed about the pre-conciliar Church, imagine that everything in

Sixty years after its solemn opening on October 11, 1962, is there anything new to be said about the Second Vatican Council? I think there is. And I hope to have said it in To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II , which has just been published by Basic Books. Reading a great historical event is a matter of perspective as much as a matter of facts. Some churchmen today “read” the Council as having effected a “paradigm shift” in Catholic self-understanding, altho

Americans have many reasons to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth II, one of the few truly noble figures on the contemporary world stage. We were deeply touched by her decision to have the band play our national anthem at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace the day after 9/11. We were tickled by her puckish sense of humor: while visiting USS Constitution in Boston Harbor during the Bicentennial, the royal eye noticed that some of Old Ironsides’ ancient guns bore t

Photo by Yandry Fernández Perdomo via Cathopic At the “information meeting” of the College of Cardinals this past Aug. 29-30, there was considerable agreement that evangelization is Catholicism’s prime imperative for the 21st century — a consensus understandably gratifying to the author of a 2013 book with the then-provocative title, Evangelical Catholicism . Within that consensus, however, serious questions remain to be resolved. Surveying the world Catholic scene today, and

Photo by Matías Medina via Cathopic There was considerable excitement in some quarters this summer when Pope Francis appointed three women as members of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Bishops, which makes recommendations to the pope for episcopal appointments in much of Latin-rite Catholicism. Whether this innovation will make any significant difference at the final stage of a long, complex process remains to be seen; given the byzantine ways of the Roman Curia (and its boys clu

Earlier this year, I had the honor and pleasure of being introduced to Hatfield House, ancestral home of the Marquesses of Salisbury, by the seventh marquess, Robert Michael James Gascoyne-Cecil, and his wife, Hannah. After Hannah, the daughter of a distinguished Scottish Catholic family, showed Father Alexander Sherbrooke and me around Hatfield’s magnificent gardens, a fine lunch was followed by the Salisburys giving us an extended tour of the house, which came into the Ceci

Photo: CNA\Private Archive CRACOW. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have passed through this ancient cultural capital of Poland since Vladimir Putin’s poorly equipped, miserably led, and brutish army invaded Ukraine on February 24 on the spurious pretext that a “Nazi”-led Ukraine posed an existential threat to Russia’s security. The bloodlands of eastern Europe, between here and the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, are no stranger to totalitarian cruelty and its e

One of the more irritating tropes of this age in which sloganeering has replaced argumentation is the alleged distinction between “wars of choice” and “wars of necessity.” That distorted and distorting antinomy was first deployed on the political left, with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq. It has now migrated to the starboard side of our politics, especially among soi-disant “national conservatives,” some of whom apply it to the war in Ukraine, now entering its seventh month.

Photo by Tim Wildsmith | Unsplash Barring a startling lurch to starboard in the Empire State, Kathy Hochul, who as lieutenant governor succeeded the unlamented Andrew Cuomo on his political demise, will be chosen governor of New York in November — the first woman elected to the office once held by such worthies as John Jay, William H. Seward, Samuel J. Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Students used to know that three of these