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Robert Louis Wilken. (Photo: Fair Use) Robert Louis Wilken — radical Christian disciple, devoted husband and father, distinguished patristics scholar, elegant writer, serious baseball guy — died on June 6, a few months short of age 90. Curiously enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this longtime friend and colleague is a pop-quiz Q&A I heard years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Robert was an adornment of Mr. Jefferson’s university for many years

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States on September 17, 1787, by Howard Chandler Christy, c. 1940. (Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons) As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?” To which

The United States Supreme Court is currently made up of nine justices. Front row: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito and Elena Kagan. Back row: Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Photo: Fred Schilling, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons) Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court, is the shortest of the three articles th

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St. Pius X, in 1981. (Photo: Antonisse, Marcel / Anefo, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 nl) The Holy See has declared that, if the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) proceeds with the ordination of bishops in July without a papal mandate, those involved in these illicit ordinations are automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated — that is, excommunicated by their own acts. One may, indeed one should, hope that it does not

Jimmy Lai in 2019. (Photo: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons) At his May summit in Beijing, President Trump made an effort to convince Chinese leader Xi Jinping to release Jimmy Lai from his imprisonment in Hong Kong. Jimmy, whom I am honored to call a friend, is a 78-year-old diabetic who has been in solitary confinement some seven hundred days longer than the United States was engaged in World War II, and is now serving a twenty-year sentence for threatening Chinese natio

Pope St. John Paul II speaks during World Youth Day 1993 in Denver. (Photo by James Baca/Denver Catholic Register) When he was elected Bishop of Rome on October 16, 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła had a rather limited experience of the Catholic Church in the United States. He had met American churchmen at the Second Vatican Council, and a few of them visited Poland in the ensuing years. The Cracovian cardinal had made two visits to the United States, one during the national bice

With the help of the Holy Spirit, traditionally depicted in the form of a dove (also a symbol of peace), we can create meaningful peace that will last. (Photo: Unsplash) Repetition, it’s said, can be the mother of learning. So, in light of recent Catholic debates about the pursuit of peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, permit me to reprise, with slight adjustments, parts of a column from twenty-four years ago. The points I made then seem to me as salient today as when I f

The defeat of an "assisted dying" bill in the United Kingdom is a welcome win for the culture of life. (Photo: Unsplash) Good news not being thick on the ground these days, I’m delighted to note some very good news from the mother country: on April 24, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill failed to gain passage in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, thus ending, for now, the efforts to legalize assisted suicide in England and Wales. A month earlier, the Scottish Parl

Pope St. John Paul II speaks at a gathering during World Youth Day 1993 in Denver. (Photo by James Baca/Denver Catholic Register) Thirty-five years ago, Pope John Paul II issued his most developed social encyclical, Centesimus Annus; its title signaled the author’s intention to honor the centenary of Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which launched the modern papal social magisterium. Yet Centesimus Annus, while paying due homage to Leo XIII’s enduring insights, was

Sts. Philip and James Church in Baltimore, MD, where George Weigel was baptized 75 years ago. (Photo by Father Lawrence Lew, OP, Creative Commons via Flickr) Three-quarters of a century ago, on April 29, 1951, I was baptized by Father Thomas Love, SJ, in Baltimore’s Church of Saints Philip and James. Old Scratch must have thoroughly sunken his claws into my infant self; according to family tradition, I sent up such a howl when he was ousted by water and the Holy Spirit that m

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich in November 2018. (Photo by Olivier LPB via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0). Your Eminence: In an article recently published by a major German Catholic website, you suggested that the question of whether the Church can ordain women has not been definitively settled: “I cannot imagine how a Church can continue to exist in the long run if half of God’s people suffer because they have no access to ordained ministry.” Putting aside for a moment t

Pope Leo XIV greets visitors and pilgrims from the popemobile while riding around St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican before his weekly general audience March 18, 2026. (CNS photo/Lola Gomez) On March 21, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy profile of the Pope as its “Saturday Essay.” The subtitle — “Pope Leo XIV pushes back against President Trump. Can the pontiff from Chicago make a difference in an era of power politics?” — gave the game away from the git-go: the Pop

A Hermit at Prayer by Bartholomeus Maton, c. 1641. (Photo: Public Domain via Artvee) The entire purpose of Lent, now past the halfway mark, is to prepare us for the glory of Easter and its revelation of the destiny that God first intended for humanity “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1): the destiny that Christ made possible after the Fall through the Paschal Mystery of his Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. As the Church continues its Lenten journey, perhaps we might

John Allen with Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. (Photo: Thomas S. Major via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0) Early Sunday morning, July 28, 2002, things were looking grim for the closing papal Mass of World Youth Day in Toronto. The previous four days had been a tremendous success, symbolized by hundreds of thousands of young people making the Way of the Cross up Toronto’s great north-south boulevard, University Avenue: an act of Christian witness the likes of which had never been

Pope John Paul II during a visit to the Baltimore Basilica in the 1990s. Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo: Carol M. Highsmith via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain) Forty-seven years ago, Pope John Paul II issued his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man). The first letter in the centuries-old encyclical tradition devoted to the Christian idea of the human person, Redemptor Hominis was also what Cardinal James Hickey once called the “program notes” for John Paul

Pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit to Poland. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0 PL) Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Vatican Secretary of State from 1979 to 1990 — and before that, the architect and chief diplomatic agent of the Ostpolitik of Pope Paul VI — initially played hard-to-get when I tried to interview him for the first volume of my John Paul II biography, Witness to Hope . The cardinal was not a fan of my 1992 book, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church a

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Fair Use) Those who remember the epic pontificate of St. John Paul II may recall a tall, handsome layman with well combed, iron-grey hair, dressed in a black business suit, white shirt, and black tie, following the clerical members of the papal household into St. Peter’s Square on many great occasions, or carrying an umbrella over the Pope’s head when it rained. That same man is at center stage in photos of the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981

(Photo: Pexels) The “ Melian Dialogue ,” from Thucydides’ classic History of the Peloponnesian War , is the foundational text of the Realist school of international relations theory. It’s 416 B.C., and the island-statelet of Melos has remained neutral in the war between the local superpowers, Athens and Sparta. A diplomatic delegation from Athens goes to Melos and demands that the Melians join Team Athens. The Melians decline, first citing principles of justice. The Athenians

Timothy Cardinal Dolan processes into Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan in 2021. (Photo courtesy of Cardinal Dolan's Facebook page) There’s a steak house on East 50 th Street in midtown Manhattan, to which Cardinal Timothy Dolan and I would sometimes walk for dinner after a pre-prandial or two in his sitting room. The restaurant was less than a block away from the residence of the archbishops of New York, and the walk would ordinarily take two or three minutes. Wi

(Photo: Unsplash) P.D. James’ detective novels, featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard, are every bit as gripping as those penned by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edith Pargeter (who wrote as “Ellis Peters” when creating the Cadfael Chronicles ), and Ann Cleeves. Yet my favorite work by the woman who was honored with a life peerage and died in 2014 as Baroness James of Holland Park is her dystopian look into a world of global infertility, The Children o