Let us stipulate that the terms “international community” and “rules-based international order” have often been reduced to meaningless...

For months, the clergy and faithful of the archdiocese have been discussing and praying about how we are called to live out our faith in...

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

In the summer of 2020, the world watched the collective eruption of violence, anger, division and hatred in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. As tragic and unjust as the murder of Mr. Floyd was, what unfolded in its wake seemed to be something more. As that summer went on it became a violent expression of so many divisive forces in society. The polar nature of our time was on full display: COVID, lockdowns, government powers and mask mandates were just a few of the issu

Due its divisiveness, it can be tempting to avoid the topic of politics altogether within the Church and instead focus on the seemingly less controversial issues of faith and spirituality. To avoid politics, however, would not be Christian. This is not because the Kingdom of God seeks to set itself up as a political regime, as this would vastly diminish its eternal power. Rather, Christians cannot avoid politics because faith cannot be restrained within any confines, politica

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

His Eminence, Mario Cardinal Grech General Secretary Synod of Bishops 00120 Vatican City Your Eminence: The “National Synthesis of the...

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

Vittore Carpaccio, Saint Augustine in His Study, 1507. On the 28th of August, we celebrated the feast day of the great St. Augustine, the anniversary of the day he died in the year 430 A.D. His name providentially points to his august status in the Church as one of the greatest theologians in her history. We love him for another reason, however. More than any other figure in history, we can follow Augustine’s inner life, tracing the steps of his conversion, thinking through h

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: Chris Liverani / Unsplash) Have you ever prayed and wondered if God actually hears you? Have you ever felt like you aren’t...

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

“If we achieve great things outside of ourselves, and the achieving of them does not effect any change or development in ourselves, we have done nothing. Life’s purpose is to purify us, not gratify us .” So says Father Edward Leen reflecting on “the triumph of failure,” the way in which God’s work in the soul, and correspondingly in the world, cannot be judged on the surface (see his book In the Likeness of Christ ). Judged rightly, Leen tells us that “there is nothing so sad

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

When I reflect on my experience of the Archdiocesan Synod, Jesus is active in healing his people and empowering us for mission. He calls...

Photo by Richard Stracke | CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Faith does not depend upon our own reasonings and feelings. It responds to the revelation of God, which exceeds all of our own capacities. On our own, we could not know God and could have no certainty of supernatural realities. This includes our happiness, which is not found in the realization of any earthly good; it is found in God himself, transcending every finite thing, including our own selves. Faith draws us to salvation by ope

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 Gera Juarez | Cathopic When I was a kid, my parents had a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus prominently displayed on their...

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