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: Jonathan Sanchez / Unsplash) So, you say you are pro-choice. But you also say that you are appalled to hear that several states,...

People make a human chain as they pay tribute to the victims around a makeshift memorial in front of the Uvalde County Courthouse in Uvalde, Texas, May 26, 2022. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) Deacon Ernie Martinez is a deacon at Notre Dame Parish in Denver and a Denver police officer. My heart is heavy with memories from being one of many police officers who responded to Columbine High School on an April day in 1999. The evil which transpired in Uvalde, Texas, where the liv

Photo by Devon Divine via Unsplash For those in our pews who think it is impossible to accept and live by the Church’s teachings related...

Photo by K Mitch Hodge on Unsplash We are not used to thinking about owing anything to God. In many ways, religion has become focused on “me,” going to Church therapeutically to feel good about oneself. In reality, we owe God everything. Religion, traditionally understood, sought to render to God the worship, homage and thanksgiving that was due to him as God, the one who made us, cares for us and saves us. In Catholic theology, this was understood as an expression of justice

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

There are striking parallels between the Russian disinformation campaign that continues to foul the global communications space in the...

Photo from Fr. Walter J. Ciszek Facebook Page The evils of the 20th century hold a strange fascination. We cannot help but read and reread accounts of totalitarian oppression, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night , Anne Frank’s Diary, Viktor Frankl’s profound Man’s Search for Meaning , and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago . Something about these experiences, primarily relating to the horrors of Naziism and Communism, speaks deeply to the resiliency of the human spirit that c

ROME. As of May 15, Catholic journalists around the world will be able to count one of their number among the saints, as Titus Brandsma,...

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

(Photo: Adobe Stock, edited) There are disadvantages to writing a monthly column in a 24 hour news cycle world. By the time my time rolls...

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

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

It sounds like a paradox, but Jesus taught us with his life that the key to conquering death is surrendering to the Father in trust. The...

Photo by Nheyob via Wikicommons “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.” Our Lady of Fatima offered hope in the Second Secret she revealed in 1917 that despite the horrific onslaught hitting the world, including “war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father,” her heart would still conquer all. While Russia would spread her errors throughout the world, she called on Catholics to counter its socialist ideology with intensified prayer and sacrifice.

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 by André Escaleira, Jr.) Having worked across the street from two major abortion facilities in my life, I have watched many women...

Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, Raphael, 1509-10. Theology gets a bad rap, often seen as a bunch of eggheads asking questions that no one really cares about. In the Middle Ages, it revolved around how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, or so the legend goes. Today it focuses on doctrinal subtleties and commandments that most people would rather do away with. Theology matters, however, because truth matters. God is Truth and he has revealed himself to us so that

For years, the two leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church with whom Pope Francis met by videoconference on March 16 — Kirill, Patriarch...