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

We have come to think of the Church, the gathering of God’s faithful, in primarily spiritual terms. Throughout Christian history, however, faith implied social and even political obligations, which supplied a concrete expression for the Christian life. In the history of Christendom, one political organization prominently stands out: The Holy Roman Empire. We think of the Roman Empire as ending in 476, the date of the abdication of the last emperor in the West, although it con

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...

“Let us get up then, at last, for the Scriptures rouse us,” the Rule of St. Benedict urges us. “Let us open our eyes to the light … and...

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

As our nation celebrates the day of its independence and subsequent founding as a country on July 4, a look back some...

Almost exactly 100 years ago, on the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1918, a woman, a former slave, died in Denver. This apostle of...

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

Interracial people hands with stop racism phrase, fight against discrimination (Photo: Adobe Stock) “In the absence of faith, we govern...

There are two kinds of ignorance: the things I don’t know that nobody expects me to know, and the things I don’t know, but that I ought...

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

Priest during a wedding ceremony/nuptial mass (shallow DOF; color toned image) We’ve just survived the only time in living memory without...

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

Sacred Heart detail in the stained glass of St. Augustine Catholic Church in Lebanon, KY. (Photo: Nheyob/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)...

In his Life of St. Augustine , the 5th-century bishop Possidius tells us that the greatest of the Latin Doctors of the Church, knowing...

As a father of six, I know it’s hard to balance family priorities. Attending to everyone’s needs—emotionally, spirituality, materially,...

Photo by Josh Applegate via Unsplash Deacon Rob Lanciotti is a permanent deacon at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Fort Collins and holds a...

In mid-May, Chinese leader Xi Jinping unveiled a plan to bypass Hong Kong’s legislature and impose draconian new “national security” laws...