In a 1974 address to a group of lay Catholics, Pope Paul VI noted that “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” — an acute observation he later reiterated in his spiritual testament, the 1975 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii nuntiandi” (“Announcing the Gospel”).

Having recently lamented in this space that book reading is on life support in these United States, I find myself in the awkward position of recommending a made-for-television series as good preparation for the nation’s 250th birthday.

Unless and until a critical mass of Europeans recognizes that woke secularism cannot provide a firm cultural foundation for either self-governing countries or the European Union, Europe will continue to flail about seeking a viable future.

On Oct. 30, the German bishops’ conference announced the publication of a text by the bishops’ Commission on Schools and Education.

Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore, who confirmed my father, was a pugnacious Irishman with a taste for shocking people via undiplomatic language.

Here are 11 suggestions of books to consider gifting that entertain, inform, and open new horizons of understanding.

That new configuration of religious and moral witness in Ukraine has shown its strength during more than three years of a brutal war.

On Dec. 7, 1965, Pope Paul solemnly promulgated the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, known by its Latin incipit (opening words) as “Dignitatis humanae.” The council thereby turbocharged the Catholic Church’s transformation into the world’s premier institutional defender of basic human rights.

The deterioration of our games is part and parcel of the deterioration of our culture. And as politics is downstream from culture, end-zone ridiculousness and similar self-aggrandizing debaucheries in other forms of entertainment have inevitably leaked into politics like a poison.

The All Saints’ Day proclamation of St. John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church was entirely welcome, if not without a certain irony.