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Few of the following qualify as “beach reading;” they all qualify as good reading. In graduate school, I was informed that there was no...

When I dip into life’s memory bank for moments of unalloyed joy, the afternoon of October 9, 1966, quickly surfaces. On a brilliant...

A few days after Cardinal Matteo Zuppi’s appointment as head of a Vatican “peace mission” to “help ease tensions in the conflict in...

In a recent article on the social doctrine of John Paul II in the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, Father Fernando de la Iglesia...

President Eisenhower in 1954. (Photo: Public Domain) Three days before Christmas 1952 and a month before his inauguration as the 34th...

TRIGGER WARNING: The next few sentences will upset some of you.  There is a case to be made that the United States lost the Vietnam War —...

On March 31, the bishops of France announced that they would petition the Holy See for permission to open a beatification cause for...

Cambridge historian Richard Rex has provocatively proposed that Catholicism today is embroiled in the third great crisis of its...

On April 11, 1963, John XXIII issued the encyclical Pacem in Terris , a powerful call for a world in which there were neither victims nor...

As the estimable Larry Chapp recently put it on his blog, Gaudium et Spes 22, “the deepest, most important, most contentious, most...

Once upon a time, before the Cuisinart of advanced educational thinking reduced history, geography, and civics to the tasteless gruel of...

In the first chapter of Profiles in Courage , John F. Kennedy quoted an exasperated Congressman, John Steven McGroarty, who wrote an...

To vary Oscar Wilde, the Church’s liturgical life often imitates art by being strikingly appropriate to a particular moment. That was...

March 13 ought to have been a happy day in Rome. But the mood in and around Vatican City before, during and after the 10th anniversary of...

In its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church ( Lumen Gentium ), the Second Vatican Council firmly applied the brakes to “ultramontanism” —...

The Healing of the Cripple of Bethesda by Pieter Aertsen, c. 1575. (Photo: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons) Pope Francis’s image of the...

A procession of cardinals enters St. Peter's in Rome, opening the Second Vatican Council. Original painting by Franklin McMahon, c. 1962....

The corner of Connecticut Avenue and M Street in downtown Washington is occasionally patrolled by young men and women seeking signatures...

Back in the day, kiddie-Catholics learned that the Church had four “marks:” the Church is one, holy, catholic (as in “universal”), and...

On the night of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s funeral, Cardinal George Pell hosted a dinner in his apartment for a group of like-minded...