The Pandemic of 2020 has been hard on every Catholic. Eucharistic fasting for this length of time may remind us what 20th century heroes of the faith in underground Churches endured, and what 21st century confessors in China and elsewhere endure today; and that is no bad thing. Still, it is very, very hard to be the Catholic Church without being a vibrantly eucharistic Church. That’s true for everyone. The people of the Church should realize that it’s especially true for pri

Sixty years ago, Father John Courtney Murray, SJ, published what I regard as the finest Catholic analysis of American democracy ever...

CINCINNATI, OH - OCTOBER 12: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden waves after delivering remarks during a voter-mobilization event at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal October 12, 2020 in Cincinnati, Ohio. With 21 days until the election, Biden is campaigning in Toledo and Cincinnati. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The image of the pre-conciliar Catholic Church in the United States as catechetically effective and politically potent can be hard to s

Earlier this fall, I was happy to be one of the initial signatories of “Liberty and Justice for All,” a call for national renewal drafted by scholars concerned about the dangerous deterioration of American public life. The temper of the statement can be discerned from its opening paragraphs and its conclusion: We stand at the crossroads. Over the next several years, the noble sentiments and ideas that gave birth to the United States will either be repudiated or reaffirmed. T

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 25: Abortion opponents and supporters hold signs in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on June 25, 2018 in Washington, DC. The high court is expected to issue decisions in six remaining cases, including the travel ban, public sector unions and redistricting, ahead of their end-of-June deadline this week. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images) Great Britain’s parliamentary democracy has no constitutional text, but rather a “constitution” composed of centuries o

Three U.S. Navy officers look out at me from a small, black-and-white snapshot, taken in Sasebo, Japan, on September 26, 1945: three and a half weeks after the Japanese Empire’s formal surrender aboard USS Missouri . These young Americans, assigned to an amphibious flotilla of landing craft, had spent the previous months on Okinawa, preparing to invade Dai Nippon. Given the carnage they had just witnessed on Okinawa, which was expected to be far worse when they led the seabor

Evelyn Waugh’s Catholic traditionalism was so deep, broad, and intense that self-identified “traditional Catholics” today might seem, in comparison, like the editorial staff of the National Catholic Reporter . Yet the greatest of 20th century English prose stylists held what some Catholic traditionalists (notably the “new integralists”) would regard as unsound views on the demise of the Papal States: a lengthy historical drama on which the curtain rang down 150 years ago this

The First Amendment of the US Constitution, torn in half. Civil rights concept Father Richard John Neuhaus put two Big Ideas into play in American public life. The first was that the pro-life movement (of which Neuhaus was an intellectual leader) was the natural heir to the moral convictions that had animated the classic civil rights movement (in which Neuhaus was also deeply involved). The second was that the First Amendment to the Constitution did not contain two “religions

Conversations with Father Robert Imbelli have been a great blessing in recent years. I have rarely met a more even-tempered and gracious man: a true churchman who, in retirement after years of teaching theology at Boston College, tries diligently to keep the often-fratricidal subtribes of American Catholicism in some sort of conversation (if only through his e-mail account!). We’ve visited in Rome during several Synods and I remember with pleasure the tour he gave me of the C

By early March 1865, more than a million Americans had killed or wounded each other in civil war; the killing, wounding, and maiming continued for another month or so. Yet amidst that unprecedented carnage, Abraham Lincoln, at his second inauguration as president, called the American Republic to recompose itself in unity by means of magnanimity: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to…bind u

In his 2003 encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (The Church from the Eucharist), Pope St. John Paul II invited Catholics to regain a sense of “Eucharistic amazement.” Being “amazed” by the Eucharist is probably not all that common these days. But Holy Mass should be all amazement, all the time. For in the celebration of the Eucharist, John Paul wrote, our time is linked to the time of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, because the Eucharist has a “truly enormous ‘capa

Thinking out loud about a return to “Sunday normal,” a veteran pastor recently told me that he thought it would take one year for each month of lockdown/quarantine/ shelter-at-home for Mass attendance to return to where it was in February 2020. I said I hoped that people’s hunger for the Eucharist would bring them back more quickly, once they concluded that it was reasonably safe, for themselves and others, to do so. But whether “Sunday normal” returns this year or next year,

Last November 11, on the centenary of its relocation to a 93-acre campus in suburban Washington, D.C., Georgetown Preparatory School...

In February 1968, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła wrote Father Henri de Lubac, SJ, about a project in which the cardinal was engaged: a philosophical explanation of the uniqueness and nobility of the human person. The idea of the human, Wojtyla suggested, was being degraded, even pulverized, by ideologies that denied the deep truths built into us. The response could not be “sterile polemics.” Rather, the Church should counter-propose a higher, more compelling view of “the inviolable m

During a short papal flight from Boston to New York on October 2, 1979, Father Jan Schotte (later a cardinal but then a low-ranking curial official) discovered that Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, had done some serious editing of the speech Pope John Paul II would give at the United Nations later that day. Schotte, who had helped develop the text, found to his dismay that Cardinal Casaroli had cut just about everything the Soviet Union and its co

In this panoramic view, bishops of the world line the nave of St. Peter's Basilica during the opening session of the Second Vatican...

In The Shoes of the Fisherman , crusty old Cardinal Leone, canvassing votes for a surprise candidate just before the election of a new...

These past few months, I expect many folks have found themselves resorting to the page and the lamp more often; may that literary trend...

US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, holds her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on June...

A brief dip into Latin helps us understand how preconceptions can lead to biased judgments that falsify history — as they did when an...