I trust it won’t cause heartburn among the editors of Commonweal if I confess to having cheered at a recent article they posted, “Quit...

“Holiness is the most attractive face of the Church,” Pope Francis says in his new apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate . How true...

Maybe it’s just me, but I have this total love/hate relationship with social media. I’ll have a week where I spend far too much time on...

The defense of the indefensible often leads to a kind of derangement in otherwise rational people. That was the case with the defenders...

(Photo: Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr) So the Pope has a friend — a rather colorful friend — with whom he likes to...

On Easter Sunday, one of the possible Gospel readings described how Peter and John found the empty tomb. It also described the first...

The annals of sycophancy are, alas, replete with examples of churchmen toadying to political power. Here in the United States, we’ve seen...

Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus gave the apostles a mandate: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to...

The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1562. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons) If there’s anything Catholics...

The second volume of my biography of St. John Paul II, The End and the Beginning , benefited immensely from the resources of Poland’s...

Genocide is a serious accusation. Many people have spoken of an ongoing persecution of Christians in the Middle East as genocide, a claim...

Next week, we will be celebrating the three holiest days of the liturgical year – the Sacred Triduum. As we prepare for these days, we...

The headline on the March 3 story at the CRUX website was certainly arresting — “Cardinal on charges of rigged synods: ‘There was no...

Seventy-five years ago last month, Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friend Christian Probst were executed by guillotine at Munich’s...

My last review focused on Pope St. John Paul II—not only a great saint, but also a hero in the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe....

(Photo: Devin Justesen / Unsplash) As a young man, you are embarking on a great adventure, to find your place in the world....

(Photo: Unsplash) I belong to a prayer group on Facebook. People post their intentions, and the other members pray. It’s a great use of...

On Friday, March 2, something happened at the Colorado state capitol that hasn’t happened in over 100 years. Lawmakers in the state House...

About five years ago, a friend took her son with her when she went to a beauty shop to get her hair cut. The hairdresser was snipping...

In his June 1908 apostolic constitution, Sapienti Consilio , Pope Pius X decreed that, as of November 3 that year, the Catholic Church in...