Photo by Aron Visuals | Unsplash In one of his Blackford Oakes novels, William F. Buckley, Jr. had a character crack a Wagnerian joke along these lines: What is Siegfried ? Siegfried is the opera that begins at 7 p.m. and when you wake up three hours later, you’re shocked to find out that it’s only 7:30. That was certainly my experience when, in solidarity with my late father-in-law, a wonderful man and devout Wagner fan, I attended the third installment of Wagner’s Ring Cyc

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0 The subject-line on the email was, shall we say, striking: “Crone swoops with talons toward younger women with babies.” The predatory beldame in question was Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and my cyber-correspondent was drawing my attention to this Tweet from @SenWarren: “With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care.

About two-thirds of the way through that fine 1992 film, A League of Their Own , star catcher Dottie Hinson has had enough of the grind and is ready to quit. “It just got too hard,” she tells Jimmy Dugan, a former major league home run leader now relegated to managing the Rockford Peaches in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. “It’s supposed to be hard,” Dugan spits back. “If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard … is what makes it great.” Some years

Photo by Lothar Wolleh/ Wikicommons While I’ve never been able to remember the details of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), I’ve riffed on those monikers to denominate a major struggle over the meaning of the Second Vatican Council: the “War of the Conciliar Succession.” As I explained in my book, The Irony of Modern Catholic History , the War of the Conciliar Succession was not a brawl between stereotypical Cath

A Ukrainian serviceman walks amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana/manhhai via flickr) CRACOW. Four and a half months after Russia invaded Ukraine on the Orwellian pretext of displacing a “Nazi” regime — a regime that enjoys a democratic legitimacy absent from Russia for two decades — what have we learned about, and from, the Russian way of war? We have learned that the Russian way of war is i

Photo: March For Life Prior to June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important civil rights decision was handed down on May 17, 1954. Then, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , the Court declared racially segregated public facilities unconstitutional, effectively reversing its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld state-mandated segregation laws. Now, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court has effectively buried the gross errors o

Photo by James Baca In December 2021 and May 2022, I had the pleasure of teaching a mini-course in Rome, exploring the life and thought of St. John Paul II. My students came from a cross-section of world Catholicism and offered a range of insights from different local Churches in our discussions. They were, however, uniformly surprised and disturbed by something I brought to their attention. Vatican II, I explained, had rightly called for a renewal of Catholic moral theology.

The College of Cardinals celebrated a "Pro eligendo Pontifice" Mass, or the Mass for the election of a new pope, in St. Peter's Basilica on March 12, 2013 before entering the Sistine Chapel for the papal conclave. (Photo by Jeffrey Bruno/CNA) Pope Francis’s recent announcement that he will create 21 new cardinals on August 27, 16 of whom would vote in a conclave held after that date, set off the usual flurry of speculations about the shape of the next papal election. Much of

Given the rubbish about Ukraine spewed out by Russian propaganda trolls and regurgitated by foolish or ideologically besotted Americans, this year’s annual Summer Reading List will focus on serious books that explain the background, including the religious dimension, of a conflict that will shape Europe’s future — and ours. Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation , by Serhii Plokhy, tracks the imperialist chromosomes in Russia’s national genom

With a gracious assist from former Kansas governor Sam Brownback, I had the privilege of a personal tour of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Museum in Abilene this past March. And I couldn’t have had a better guide: Mary Jean Eisenhower, the 34th president’s charming granddaughter, with whom I shared lunch in a roadside restaurant evidently much favored by the locals — the parking lot was jam-packed before noon. After a getting-to-know-you hour over heartland victuals, M

Photo by Bohumil Petrik | Catholic News Agency Tertullian, the first major Christian theologian to write in Latin, is thought to have coined the maxim Semen est sanguis Christianorum , typically (and rather freely) translated as “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Martyrs, we usually think, are those who shed their blood “in hatred of the faith”: the definition of martyrdom used by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. But an ancient Christian tra

ALEXANDRE MEN - PRETRE ORTHODOXE RUSSE - ASSASSINE EN 1990 NE: DECEDE: 1990 I’ve been thinking recently about Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” and its relationship to a deceased Russian Orthodox priest. As the Soviet Union was crumbling in 1990, two roads metaphorically diverged in a Russian wood. One was the path of national renewal facilitated by an evangelically vibrant, intellectually open and ecumenically engaged Russian Orthodoxy; the other was the more famili

Credit: © L'Osservatore Romano Pope Francis is undoubtedly grieved by the carnage in Ukraine. And when the Catholic Church’s chief ecumenical officer, Cardinal Kurt Koch, tells journalists he shares the papal conviction that religious justifications of aggression are “blasphemy” — a wicked use of the things of God — we may be sure that this, too, is Francis’s view of things. Why, then, should Pope Francis meet with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’, as some personalitie

Photo by Daniel Ibañez | Catholic News Agency In the golden age of the Catholic episcopate — the days of great Church Fathers like Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo in the early and mid-first millennium — bishops were not infrequently in contact with each other, encouraging, consulting, and, when necessary, correcting. The practice of episcopal fraternal correction has withered over time, not least in the decades since the Second Vatican Council. And that’s strange.

In both the Roman and Byzantine liturgical calendars, Lent 2022 has coincided with a brutal war in Ukraine. That war was launched by Russia’s Vladimir Putin for an ignoble, imperial cause. It has been conducted by the Russian military in a manner that recalls the barbarism of the Romans who crucified 6,000 slaves along the Appian Way after the Spartacus revolt. It’s an old story. Tyrants cannot tolerate the truth about their tyranny; they terrorize in order to break the spiri

Photo by SalemPuritan via Wikicommons On May 13, 1982, Pope John Paul II flew to Portugal on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving for his life having been spared the year before. At the airport welcoming ceremony, the Pope, reflecting that he’d been shot on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, mused that, “In the designs of Providence, there are no mere coincidences.” What we think of as coincidental is rather a facet of the divine plan for our lives that we’ve not fit into the proper fr

Every war is a defeat for humanity, because men and women endowed with reason should be able to resolve their differences without mass violence. Reason, however, can be corrupted by ignorance, passion, ideology, pride, and innumerable other vices. And the distortion of reason can make the slaughter of others, including innocents, seem not only permissible, but even imperative. Thus within his own warped frame of reference, Vladimir Putin’s barbaric assault on Ukraine makes se

Photo from premier.gov.ru In the early 1990s, I met Kirill, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, when the man christened Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev was chief ecumenical officer of the Russian Orthodox Church. The occasion was a dinner hosted at the Library of Congress by the late, great James H. Billington, whose history of Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe , remains the classic work on the subject. Metropolitan Kirill, as he was then styled, struck me as a sophisti

Photo by Lawrence OP via Flickr If you’ve not been in the Vatican basilica on February 22, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, by all means put that on your bucket list. Not only is February 22 the day when the statue of the Prince of the Apostles, with its famously worn-down bronze foot, is clothed in a splendid cope and crowned with a papal tiara, it’s also the only day on which the Altar of the Chair, the massive sculptural composition in the basilica’s apse, is ablaze wi

Photo by Rostislav Artov on Unsplash For months now, the world press has described Russian troop deployments along Ukraine’s borders as spearheads of a possible invasion. The truth, however, is that Russia invaded Ukraine seven years ago, when it annexed Crimea and Russian “little green men” ignited a war in eastern Ukraine that has taken over 14,000 lives and displaced over a million people. Whatever the current military developments, a Russian invasion of Ukraine has not be